Lately, I have been reflecting on learning and making mistakes. In so many of my classes, the emphasis seems to be on not making mistakes, but as much as I hate making mistakes and even though I get frustrated with myself for making mistakes and for not doing everything right the first time, I have found that mistakes are often a chance for my own growth and development. When I make mistakes, I am given the opportunity to reflect on what went wrong and to figure out how I can improve and do even better the next time and I often will learn far more from my mistakes than I do from the times when I have had success.

I am not suggesting that always making mistakes is good and certainly this is not the case with sin, especially the more serious sin. However, I am suggesting that rather than letting our mistakes become a road block to us, we can allow them to be opportunities for growth and for us to become closer to our Heavenly Father and our Savior, Jesus Christ. I know that it may sound strange, but I am grateful that through Christ, we are allowed to make mistakes and we are also allowed the glorious opportunity to learn from our mistakes and use Christ's atonement to repent of our sins and to become more like Christ. We are allowed the chance to choose for ourselves whom we will follow and what we will do. Satan's plan did not allow for this. His plan was to force us to all follow him. We would all be saved, but we would have remained in the same state that we were in before we came to Earth. We would not be any different than we were before, because we would not be allowed the opportunity to learn and to grow for ourselves. I am so grateful that God loved us enough to allow us to learn and to choose for ourselves righteousness or wickedness. I am also grateful that He gave His only Begotten Son to the world, so that our sins and our mistakes would not lead us to eternal damnation and death. The scripture of 2 Nephi 2: 25 has taken on new meaning to me. "Adam fell that men might be and men are that they might have joy." This life is for us, for our learning, for our growth, and for our opportunity to become more like Heavenly Father. That is truly something we should all be joyous about.