Desert Roses

May I share a personal insight on this? My husband and I are in a second marriage after divorce. He lived in Tampa Florida for several years, and sees this as one of the big steps of his wife's life that led her to completely leave the church and become relatively anti-Mormon. Your story sounds very much like hers. They had been married about 10 years, and she was very physically uncomfortable with the heat and her garments. She began, like you, leaving it off some days, then more days, and eventually just gave it up. They later moved to Washington DC and Colorado (he was in the Air Force) but she never put the garment back on. She began finding reasons the church was a problem; she began to fight and bicker with him over his continued activity and faithfulness to his covenants. Eventually, of course, they were divorced, mostly over the issues related to that initial decision that the garment was "uncomfortable" and inconvenient. She, too, wanted to wear shorts and sleeveless tops in the heat. While I understand your physical discomfort, I have to wonder if there is yet a lack of testimony of the great gift the garment is to us. One dear sister in my ward put it well, "I should be looking for opportunities to wear the garment, not opportunities to take it off." As has been said, you can special order sizes and shapes. I personally get my bottoms specially made for a little more snug in the middle and longer in the leg than my conventional size. I also only wear cotton due to health issues, and cotton garments are not made in a variety of sizes/shapes like other fabrics, but you can order them made just for you, and they cost the same as the regular garments. I hope you are able to attend the temple often. That is the most important thing you can do to learn about the garment and it's amazing blessing. (Don't you have Air Conditioning--or maybe you are like my husband--he loves working in the yard way too much to stay indoors where the AC is keeping it comfy!)

Moroni 10:32 tells us that in order for us to be perfected, we must "come unto Christ..." and that "by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ;" I have always understood it was not the Atonement that perfected Christ, but his resurrection. Having a resurrected body, and having fulfilled His mission (not my mission), He was then perfected. According to Moroni, the only way I can be perfected is to come unto Christ, and love God with all my might, mind and strength, and accept God's power, otherwise known as the grace of God.

How sad as I've read this thread. The scripture "after all we can do" has so often been misquoted and misused by those perfectionists in the church. My dh and I talked just last night about how the Puritan ideas got mingled into the gospel by early converts and has never really gotten out of it. THE REST OF the scripture, "We are saved by grace, after all we can do." More than one scriptorian has rendered this more to be, "We are saved by grace, in spite of all we can do," since no matter what our BEST is, it is never enough. If the cost of an item is $10B, and we have only 10 cents, or even if we have $10, we aren't going to be able to come close--only Christ's unlimited resources can purchase our salvation and exaltation. I never know what my "best" is. I do know that Bruce R. McConkie said that if we are living a faithful LDS life--we do what we can to serve, we pray, we read, we want to be like Christ, and we obtain our temple blessings, that's what is required for exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom. I'm not willing to put in the effort to be the woman that a Sheri Dew is, or an athlete like the sister in my ward who runs marathons. I'm not putting in the hours and hours of practice to become a great musician. Does that mean I didn't do my best? No, it means that the Lord has shown me that my focus is supposed to be elsewhere. We are limited by time and opportunity in this life. The only thing that we are being tested on in this life is if we will follow Jesus Christ. Everything else is fluff. I'm confident that in the final judgment, I will not be judged on whether I gave 100% of my effort to every activity and agenda that I hear at church, only whether I consciously followed Jesus Christ daily. When I had a decision to make, did I do what I knew at that moment to be what Christ would have me do? When I think of this, I remember many events in my life when I failed miserably. I grew up in a home with a lot of violence and conflict, and a poor relationship with my father. One consequence of this was an inability to make judgments about men and relationships. I had difficulty with morality. When I did marry, I chose 2 abusive men in a row--I was angry and abusive myself to them, and to our children. I KNEW I wasn't doing my best--I just didn't know how to do it differently. But Christ rescued me, and taught me HOW to do differently. I was able to eventually marry in the temple, put right the relationships with my children, and even parent my youngest two children with genuine love, patience, and long-suffering. So was I condemned for not doing my "best" when I was making all those mistakes? I don't feel I was. I feel that He knew that I wanted to do better, and that He came to my rescue when I was humble enough to admit I couldn't do it, even when I tried harder. His grace, His power--that's my best.