None Were With Him

   Especially at this Easter Season, I turn my heart and my thoughts towards the Savior Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice in my behalf. Jesus' life was not full of glamor and fame. He did not do the things He did for recognition and for worldly glory. In fact, Jesus' life was a very lonely path. The reason He walked alone is so that we as mankind do not have to. I quote Elder Holland and say, "I speak of those final moments for which Jesus must have been prepared intellectually and physically but which He may not have fully anticipated emotionally and spiritually—that concluding descent into the paralyzing despair of divine withdrawal when He cries in ultimate loneliness, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” ^"

  Trumpeted from the summit of Calvary is the truth that we will never be left alone nor unaided, even if sometimes we may feel that we are.

   I believe that that our Heavenly Father was probably closer to His Son in that moment than He ever had been. Heavenly Father did not forsake His Son in that moment of need. But Jesus had to accomplish this sacrifice completely on His own. Therefore, the Father momentarily withdrew from Jesus the comfort of His Spirit. I testify that Jesus accomplished all that His father had asked of Him. Elder Holland says, "It was required, indeed it was central to the significance of the Atonement, that this perfect Son who had never spoken ill nor done wrong nor touched an unclean thing had to know how the rest of humankind—us, all of us—would feel when we did commit such sins. For His Atonement to be infinite and eternal, He had to feel what it was like to die not only physically but spiritually, to sense what it was like to have the divine Spirit withdraw, leaving one feeling totally, abjectly, hopelessly alone."

  As we approach Easter, "may we stand by Jesus Christ “at all times and in all things, and in all places that [we] may be in, even until death,”  for surely that is how He stood by us when it was unto death and when He had to stand entirely and utterly alone."