Joy and Peace in Christ

I have been taking an institute class on Elder Anderson's book The Divine Gift if Forgiveness. I did a project for the class, and wanted to share it here too.   This drawing is titled “A Change of Heart”. I imagine that the hard, dark, broken heart is mine and it lives in the blackness of a sorrowing, lost soul. But, I have invited in the soft, light, whole heart of Christ. His heart replaces mine, and His light fills the darkness. As I was contemplating this project and what to draw, I was inspired by three passages. The first is the quote by CS Lewis in chapter 10 of The Divine Gift of Forgiveness. “Christ says 'Give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work. I want You...No half measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down...Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I ...

 I was reading in Elder Neil L Anderson's book, The Divine Gift of Forgiveness, and in chapter 15 he says something very interesting.  "This earth life would not be a time of absolute perfection, but a time of choosing good over evil, of learning by experience and the power of our spirits to put our trust in God, follow Him, and build out faith in Him. It would be a probationary state where we would make mistakes." Normally I think about probation as a time of proving your perfection. If a person in on probation at their job, or from jail, they are proving whether they can and will do what they said. And if they make a mistake, they could lose their job or go back to jail. It's not a time where mistakes are allowed. What I found interesting is that he defines a probationary state differently. He says mistakes are allowed; in fact they are expected. "...we would make mistakes" sounds like a pretty clear statement of fact to me. So I looked up "probation...