Satan is real!

Guess what friends, I am incredibly grateful especially after the last couple weeks. I have noticed something, the fall seems to be a low time or maybe we are just nearing the end of days, who knows? I just know that the few weeks have been very difficult and trying the last few weeks. There have been breakups, accidents, police, elections, threats of suicide, death and so much more all over the place. I feel like everywhere I turn there is something new stressing out, or bringing down a friend. It's a time of darkness and dismay. Luckily through the sorrows and the let downs there is always something beautiful, I will explain on but I need to go back to the reality of darkness for a moment.

The other day I went to institute (Bible study for college students for the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day saints.) We were discussing opposition and how we will be tested by the adversary. Then we talked about Joseph Smith and the first vision. He went to humbly ask God what church to join, and before he got an answer he was tested and Satan took him over:

15 After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was^aseized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick ^bdarkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.

 16 But, exerting all my powers to ^acall upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into ^bdespair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of ^clight exactly over my head, above the brightness of the ^dsun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.

That is just a small piece of the chapter that tells the first vision but during this experience he learned so much more than what church to join and that God was real but the LDS people often forget is that he also learned the reality of Satan.

I feel like so many around have gone through that same realization, without even knowing it. I know I have!! I always knew, but in the last few months it has truly become a realization that Satan is just as real and present in our lives. I also feel that we all go through these moment similar to Joseph where just when all hope is lost and despair is upon us the light comes to rescue us and bring comfort! Not to mention I think it's those moments of despair that bring us to a submissiveness that allows us to fully learn what we need to from the good and bad moments.

The fact of the matter is Heavenly Father is real, Jesus Christ is real and so is Satan. If we work to put our agency fully to Heavenly Father we will always be rescued from the despair! There is always opposition, not only against us but for us too! There will be an increase in evil but because of opposition there really will always be the same amount of good too, we just might have to look a little harder for it!!