# The Chain of Grace

Explore how inherited gifts—from ancient oxygen to DNA—reveal a chain of grace that gives suffering its deepest purpose and meaning.

*This talk was given in sacrament meeting on November 8, 2026*

When I was asked to speak today, I was invited to base my remarks on Sister Tamara Runia’s address from our most recent general conference, “The Sculpting of Our Souls.”[^1] Sister Runia spoke with remarkable candor about the sudden death of her oldest son, and about her gradual realization, as someone accustomed to fixing things, of how little she could do to fix this. She reminded us of Joseph Smith pleading with God from a jail cell for some relief from his circumstances, only to be told, “all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good” (D&C 122:7). One statement from her talk seems especially important to me: “Our suffering means something. It’s not a detour from the path; it gives purpose to our path.”

What is that purpose? I’d like to explore one possible answer today, and to begin in an unlikely place, with an inventory of the things we’ve been given.

Consider how much each of us had already received before doing anything at all to deserve it. The oxygen in the air of this chapel was first released into the atmosphere over two billion years ago by microscopic organisms, and has been replenished ever since by plants and algae. The soil in which our food is grown consists largely of the remains of innumerable generations of living things. The DNA in every cell of our bodies was formed by billions of years of struggle and adaptation on the part of our ancestors, human and otherwise, and our growing awareness of how it works is currently enabling new cures for cancer.

Our more recent inheritance is no less impressive. Eons ago, the first people to speak to one another, to tell stories around a fire, to sing and dance, set in motion practices that every society since has depended on. The first communities to cook their food, to sew garments, and to plant seeds on purpose and wait for the harvest changed what it meant to be human, and they did so with little notion of what they had started. Later came the first people to trade one thing for another, to accept a token in place of the thing itself, to write their laws down so that they would outlast the people who made them, to send messengers instead of armies, and to let the governed decide who would govern them. We don’t know the names of any of these people. Each of these practices was worked out over hundreds or thousands of years by communities that were only trying to solve the problems in front of them, while today we benefit from all these developments with little thought for how they came to us.

The languages we speak today, with all of their expressive power, are the accumulated work of billions of speakers over millennia, nearly all of them anonymous. The valleys of Utah were settled by hardscrabble pioneers, and the roads and sidewalks that brought us here today were built by others whom most of us will never meet. We are protected by laws and institutions for which people fought and sometimes died, healed by medicines discovered through lifetimes of patient research, and sustained by a degree of material abundance unimaginable to most of our ancestors. A few people who are still alive today were born at a time when even wealthy families often lost children in infancy, and when crippling childhood diseases such as polio, which vaccines have since all but eradicated, were a constant source of dread. Most of us have never had to think about these things.

Closer to home, most of us were raised by parents who lost a great deal of sleep on our behalf, as the young parents in the congregation are presently being reminded. We didn’t earn any of these things, and yet none of them came free of charge. Each was paid for by someone, or something, other than ourselves.

This unearned inheritance is, I believe, a helpful way of thinking about grace. When we speak of grace at church, we usually mean the help and forgiveness that God offers us through Jesus Christ, which none of us could manage without. I don’t want to take anything away from that meaning, but I’ve come to think that we often define the word too narrowly. Grace is everything we have inherited and did not earn: the sum total of the toil and suffering of those who preceded us, by which a space was cleared for us to live, act, and make choices of our own. Part of the great mystery of our existence is that the growth required for our exaltation does not come to us directly from heaven, but through our interactions with one another. President Spencer W. Kimball put it simply: “God does notice us, and he watches over us. But it is usually through another person that he meets our needs.”[^2] The same could be said of nearly everything in the inventory I’ve just given. God’s hand was in all of it, but it reached us by way of other hands.

It may seem strange to mention air and soil in the same breath as the atonement of Christ, but the scriptures describe the atonement in strikingly similar terms. According to Alma, the plan of redemption ensured that “there was a space granted unto man in which he might repent,” so that this life became “a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God” (Alma 12:24). In other words, what the atonement provides is space in which to learn and grow, and all of these gifts I mentioned are a part of it. Each of them had a cost and increased the space afforded for the rest of us to act within. There is a reason the gift has to take this form. The word atonement, which William Tyndale coined for his English Bible, describes a condition of being “at one” with God and with each other, and the only way for us to arrive at that condition is to choose it, by voluntarily taking Christ’s name upon us and following his example. Forced salvation can’t really save, because love can’t come by force. The grace we have inherited does not make our choices for us. It gives us room to make them.

This brings me to one of the most surprising statements in the writings of the apostle Paul. In his epistle to the saints at Colossae, composed during one of his imprisonments, Paul writes, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24, NRSV). Paul appears to be saying, in all seriousness, that something is still lacking in the afflictions of Christ, and that he is helping to supply it.

Paul was certainly not suggesting any deficiency in Christ’s offering. Rather, he seems to have understood that the work of reconciliation inaugurated by Christ is still underway, and that Christ shares this work with all those who take his name upon themselves. We are plainly not yet at one with God or with each other, so the work is not finished.

The reason for this becomes clearer when we consider what God is trying to accomplish. “For behold, this is my work and my glory,” the Lord told Moses, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). Eternal life is the kind of life God lives, a life of perfect love, freely given. Our theology goes further than most in describing what that means. The complete salvation of a human being, which we call exaltation, is to become like God, and a god is a being who is fully capable of acting independently, who knows how to bring about good and not merely how to receive it. This kind of life can’t just be conferred; it has to be chosen, practiced, and learned over eons of time.

Once, when Brigham Young was asked what heaven is like, he said: “Allow me to inform you that you are in the midst of it all now, that you are in just as good a kingdom as you will ever attain to, from now to all eternity, unless you make it yourselves by the grace of God … If you and I do not by this means make that better kingdom which we anticipate, we shall never enjoy it. We can only enjoy the kingdom we have labored to make.”[^3] The immortality and eternal life of humanity therefore cannot be brought to pass without humanity’s voluntary participation. Sister Runia made a similar observation about the individual soul, noting that the Savior “waits for an invitation before He can really go to work.” The same principle applies outwardly. God waits for volunteers before he can go to work through us, and the blessings of the atonement, including comfort, forgiveness, patience, and the assurance of our own worth, are nearly always delivered by human hands.

Not just our blessings but also some of our greatest trials often come through our experiences with other people. Alma taught that Christ took upon himself the infirmities of his people “that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:12). If even the Son of God had to learn how to succor us by suffering as we suffer, we should hardly be surprised at having to learn it the same way. Paul likewise praised God as the one “who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2 Corinthians 1:4).

I should add that I don’t believe that God is directly responsible for every trial we experience, and I’m wary of anyone who presumes to tell a suffering person what their suffering is for. But our most difficult experiences can teach us things about compassion that could probably not be learned in any other way.

Joseph Smith articulated a principle that ties all of this together. In an 1842 letter to the saints, he warned that “the earth will be smitten with a curse unless there is a welding link of some kind or other between the [parents] and the children,” explaining, “For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect” (D&C 128:18). This theme ran through the whole of Joseph’s ministry. When the angel Moroni first appeared to him in 1823, he quoted the prophecy of Malachi that Elijah would “plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the [parents], and the hearts of the children shall turn to their [parents],” and warned that otherwise “the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming” (D&C 2:2–3). Joseph returned to that prophecy again and again over the next two decades, and by the time he wrote his letter in 1842 he had come to understand the turning of hearts as something much larger than the ordinances of the temple. It was about the necessity of human reconciliation. The [parents] and the children, the living and the dead, and the saints of every dispensation all had to be joined together in “a whole and complete and perfect union” (D&C 128:18), or none of them could be made perfect.

This principle operates in both directions through time. We cannot be made perfect without our predecessors, because everything we possess was built upon their labor and sacrifice. They cannot be made perfect without us, because their sacrifices bear fruit only to the extent that we receive them with gratitude and pass them on. And our descendants cannot be made perfect without the burdens we are willing to bear for their sake. All of us are joined together in one long chain of reconciliation, with Christ at its center, and every link in that chain is a volunteer. It could hardly be otherwise. From the very jail in which Joseph was promised that his afflictions would be for his good, the Lord also revealed that no power or influence can or ought to be maintained except “by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned” (D&C 121:41). Our understanding of how thoroughly our salvation depends on one another is still incomplete; we won’t fully come to know it until, in the fulness of time, all hidden things are revealed, and we come to know even as we also are known (see Ephesians 1:10; D&C 101:32–34; 1 Corinthians 13:12). Until then we act amid uncertainty, and we have enough of a vision of how far we’ve come that we have learned to trust the process.

Sister Runia testified that “God is shaping us into something only He knows we can become.” I don’t know everything that this means, but I’m confident it includes becoming people who are more aware of what we’ve been given and more willing to share it. I’m grateful for a Savior who gave everything he had for us, and for the many people who have followed his example for my benefit, most of whom I’ll never be able to thank. I pray that we can do the same for those who come after us.

Syndicated from [From the Depths](https://blog.youngbloods.org/2026-11-08-the-chain-of-grace).