Is It Okay to Feel Discouraged in Life?

I take a short hiatus from Cooking for College Students for a few reasons. 1) Tonight, I just had a boneless pork chop. Which is pretty uninteresting. I just seasoned it and stuck it in the oven. 2) I have something I wanted to share.

I have learned that I do have a favorite book in the Bible. It's Jeremiah. I have learned so much from Jeremiah, and it has gotten me through so much. I savor and crave the words of Jeremiah. Today, I want to talk a little bit about adversity in the context of Jeremiah.

In the LDS Church, we oftentimes speak of adversity as something that you have to endure. And it's almost as if you don't approach adversity with complete happiness and a gung-ho positive attitude, you are being evil. I would like to put adversity in the context of Jeremiah. Note: Most of this could also be applied to Joseph Smith, whose story, as my Gospel Doctrine teacher pointed out, in a lot of ways is Jeremiah Part II. Anyways, a little bit of history (that I learned from Religion Ancient Scripture 302 which is an amazing class if you ever get the chance). Jeremiah is considered a Pre-Exilic Prophet. This means that he was in the last group of prophets that tried to rescue Jerusalem before its Babylonian destruction in 587 BC. The Pre-Exilic Prophets are Jeremiah, Obadiah, Zephaniah, Habbakuk and Lehi (for those confused, yes, Ezekiel and Daniel also were both this period but were carried into Babylon during the 1st and 2nd Deportations of Jerusalem in 606 BC and 598 BC). The thing that sets Jeremiah apart from the other Pre-Exilics is that Jeremiah before the end is going to be the only one. Lehi and his family leave for the Americas and we don't know if the other three are led out or die, but we know that Jeremiah will be the very last righteous person in Jerusalem. And when we say last, we mean last. Jeremiah did not marry because the Lord told him that he would see so much evil that he would not want to subject a woman to it, so he didn't even have a righteous woman with him. That is another reason that I admire him--he did it completely by himself with no one to comfort him but God, but that's another time.

Jeremiah is tortured, ridiculed, threatened with death and just generally persecuted. And does he approach it with gung-ho happiness? Well, in the LDS church we probably think, "Well he was a prophet. He must have had faith. He must have."

You would be wrong. In fact, at one point, Jeremiah says,

"Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born unto thee; making him very glad. And let that man be as the cities which the Lord overthrew, and repented not: and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noontide; Because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?”

So, for those of us that have trouble with Biblical language, Jeremiah is basically saying, "I wish I had never even been born." So, am I saying that it's okay to be depressed all the time. Well, not exactly. Because, you see, Jeremiah had downer days, but in the end, he made the right choice. In the same chapter as him wishing he'd never been born, Jeremiah also says, "Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay." Non-Bible language? Jeremiah is so fed up with Judah that he's saying, "I am done. I don't even care anymore. They can just die for all I care. I give up." But he couldn't just give up. Jeremiah loved God too much to do that. He knew the truth and he could not keep quiet.

So, is it okay to have downer days? Well, I'd say yes. Jeremiah had a right to downer days. But, he didn't have a downer life. So, downer days are fine. But in the end, what matters is what we do after the downer days.

Conclusion: You can have a downer day. There is nothing wrong with feeling down, discouraged or inadequate. You just have to remember to pull a John Striker and "Saddle Up!"