Like a Missing Eye

From Eric, in the Anti Nephi Lehi post

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I’m reminded of a story President Eyring told in conference about a man who had once been a district missionary companion of his. The man had a pretty rough past that included a bitter divorce and losing his children, along with losing an eye in an accident, before coming back to the Church when he discovered a copy of the Book of Mormon in the bottom of a trunk. Brother Eyring described one time when he and the man were teaching together:

I asked the people we were teaching, as I testified of the power of the Savior’s Atonement, to look at him. He had been washed clean and given a new heart, and I knew they would see that in his face. I told the people that what they saw was evidence that the Atonement of Jesus Christ could wash away all the corrosive effects of sin.

That was the only time he ever rebuked me. He told me in the darkness outside the trailer where we had been teaching that I should have told the people that while God was able to give him a new heart, He had not been able to give him back his wife and his children and what he might have done for them. But he had not looked back in sorrow and regret for what might have been. He moved forward, lifted by faith, to what yet might be.

One day he told me that in a dream the night before, the sight in his blind eye was restored. He realized that the dream was a glimpse of a future day, walking among loving people in the light of a glorious resurrection. Tears of joy ran down the deeply lined face of that towering, raw-boned man. He spoke to me quietly, with a radiant smile. I don’t remember what he said he saw, but I remember that his face shone with happy anticipation as he described the view. With the Lord’s help and the miracle of that book in the bottom of a trunk, it had not for him been too late nor the way too hard.

While repentance and accepting the atonement set us in the right direction, we shouldn’t be surprised when some things, like a missing eye, aren’t set right until the resurrection.