Our trip on the river of life. Part 1: The Dangers of the river Part 1

While on our trip of life there are many dangers we must be aware of. We have things such as tree/logs jams, shallow sand beds, whirlpools and dams. All of these dangers can be avoided and when we look at them in the right way can be of a benefit and growth to us. The first danger that I listed was tree/logs jams.
When we put this in the terms of the gospel tree/logs jams can be looked at as trials in our lives. As we float along the river we see the trees around us. They give shade and make the river trip more beautiful. But every once and a while one of the trees will fall down. When these trees create a hazard and then will made a tree/logs jam. These jams may be looked at as unforeseen trials. Since being on my mission a couple of these tree/logs jams has happened to me such as my grandma passing away and my uncle getting cancer. These have just been a few of the big trials for me. But how we react to these things is going to be the thing that makes or break us. Are we the type of people that will let those tree/logs jams stop us or do we get some help (from God our Heavenly Father, and Jesus Christ our savior and redeemer) to get them out of the way? As we use the Atonement (the action that Christ did for us when he paid for our sins in the garden of Gethsemane) Christ is able to get the crane to pull them out, something that we could not do on our own. We see in the book of Mormon, in the book of Ether, Chapter 12, verse 6 why we must go thought trials. As we continue down the river we are happy that we missed that tree/log jams. But as we are floating down we all at once stop! We begin to look around and we see that we had hit a shallow sand bed.
In my life I have hit those sand beds. Those sand beds can be related to something that someone tells us or something that we hear that gives us doubts. As we see our testimony needs to be deeper and for if we are deeper then we don’t run into those snags. So we can either sit on that sand bed and wait for someone to come by or we can get out and get us off the snag. When we wait around for someone to come down the river and help us we are just wasting time. That is like in our lives when he won’t fix a problem and we wait for our family or friends to find the problem and wait for us. Now I ran into a snag about 5-6 years ago and I waited for my family and friends try and find out what is wrong with me and fix it. But then one day I decided to get out of my boat and fix if. When I finally decide to act in stead of being acted upon (2 Nephi 2:14) I felt free and It was and is the best feeling ever. We will always have questions. I still have questions. But in the words of a LDS speaker John Bytheway, I use to have doubts but now I just have questions. But as we grow and strengthen out testimony through prayer, scripture study and church attendance we will be able to over come those snags of the Sand beds.