Preserving us breath by breath

I am reading in Mosiah right now when King Benjamin addresses his people. He speaks with forthrightness about the reality of our situation in mortality.

He says: "if you should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another--I say if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants..." Mosiah 2:21

I personally have struggled with this debt that cannot be repaid. We see debt as a burden something that would weigh heavily on us or place us in bondage. However, the tension between our obedience and the Savior's Atonement actually liberates us. We are bound to Him and His glory and the glory of the Father when we are obedient to the commandments He has given us. I think that sometimes we see obedience as a chain carrying us toward heaven. I have come to see obedience as a supreme blessing. One that makes me feel a level of happiness I didn't understand when I was younger.

President Joseph Fielding Smith said:

“We will never be able to pay the debt. The gratitude of our hearts should be filled to overflowing in love and obedience for his great and tender mercy. For what he has done, we should never fail him. He bought us with a price, the price of his great suffering and the spilling

of his blood in sacrifice on the cross. Now, he has asked us to keep his commandments.

He says they are not grievous, and there are so many of us who are not willing to do it. I am speaking now generally of the people of the earth. We are not willing

to do it. That certainly is ingratitude. We are ungrateful."

I hope I demonstrate through my obedience my gratitude for the Savior. No matter how much the world may deny the debt, it exists. You can wish it away. You can forget it through your will but your will is given to you through that Atonement. There is no escape from it. We can either embrace it and be grateful or we can not. I hope I live my life the way King Benjamin did so that I can show my gratitude.