The Atonement in Reality

I had kind of an interesting experience last night. After I finished my post yesterday, I went onto Reddit and started reading this thread asking for people to share their craziest experiences while visiting an unfamiliar town and as you’d imagine, the content got really dark, really quick. I was hooked, I started reading and couldn’t put it down to the point where I stayed up late into the night reading about what had happened to these different people. Some of it was strange, and a lot of it had to do with nature and fog and not being able to find a place that you’d been to before, etc.

But then there were other stories about people being threatened and seeing ghosts and people that disappeared and all that kind of stuff. Also interesting is that clearly many of these people had been warned by the Spirit of danger, even though they of course didn’t call it that, just “for some reason he said ‘it’s a trap’ and we all understood what he meant and left,” but I recognized it as the Holy Ghost keeping good people safe. There were so many stories of “but somehow we made it out safely” or “I suddenly had a really bad feeling and felt like I should leave right away.”
At first it was interesting, but after a while I started to feel a little nervous and I think that it was because the content was so “spooky” which means that it leaned heavily on the “dark side” of logic. Basically, I felt like I was straying into the devil’s territory but that made me think about what we had just been talking about with the atonement. For instance, there was this one story about a couple of friends who stopped to get gas in the middle of the night and when one woman went to use the bathroom in the store as soon as she entered the hallway, she felt a sick, evil feeling that made her stop. When she stopped she saw that on the walls of the hallway were dozens of Missing People pictures, most of whom were women and children. She said that one of the creepy guys at the table by the entrance was gone in the minute that it took her to stop, notice the signs, feel the feeling and turn around and get out. She ran out and drove away but thought about the incident many times since. I don’t bring this up to tell ghost stories or make evil look interesting, but I genuinely had to think about how this related to the atonement.
Let’s stop and consider for a moment that the worst case scenario would have played out if she would have gone into the bathroom instead of running out the front door. If, in fact, one of the men had stood up from the table after she headed to the bathroom and was waiting to attack and murder her, then the feeling of evil that came to her when she entered the hallway was a warning from the Holy Ghost to get out of there. It demonstrates that promptings are not reserved only for endowed members of the Church in good standing with temple recommends.
Most of these stories had an “evil feeling” component which prompted the people to run away and obviously because they were posting on the internet yesterday, they made it out safely. The guidance of the Holy Ghost is available to all, regardless of religious affiliation. I’d venture to guess that most of the people posting these  stories are living lifestyles that are outside of gospel standards or haven’t been baptized entitling them to the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost, and I’m saying that statistically not because I actually know any of them.
This begs the question, if there were five people in that gas station, why did only one have a gut-wrenching urge to get out of there as soon as possible, while the others stayed? I, of course, don’t know for sure, but I’ll speculate that the woman who had the feeling was righteous enough in her daily life to be sensitive to the spiritual feelings around her. Maybe she’s a good person and had the Spirit a lot of the time because she deserved it even if she wasn’t given the gift of the Holy Ghost through confirmation. Maybe she didn’t usually have the Spirit with her but she was in tune enough with positive spiritual feelings that when the evil moved in she picked up on it. Maybe it was just a kick in the face from the Spirit because she wasn’t meant to be murdered in that gas station that night.
I think that many of us have been desensitized to “evil feelings” because our mortal world is so full of them, whether it be through tv, movies, or music that glorify immorality, violence, dishonesty and materialism, or our own addictions to substances or pornography, etc. So why were those four men remaining in that gas station if there was such an evil presence there in the first place? Again, I’m only speculating because the only thing I know about the incident is what I read in a couple of paragraphs on the internet. Maybe the prompting was only meant for her and there was no threat to the other men there in the store. Maybe she made the whole thing up and I’m reading too much into it.
But then again, just maybe they were immersed in an open acceptance of evil that, probably subconsciously, welcomed Satan’s influence into their lives. There are not many people who openly seek Satan out to be in their lives, but there are many who subconsciously open their lives to him because of their wickedness and the more they indulge him, the further down that rabbit hole they get. It was just an interesting commentary to me on the workings of the Spirit outside of the gospel sphere because this wasn’t the only story like this; there were many that unknowingly cited the intervention of the Holy Ghost in their behalf. It’s just something to consider as we go through our lives interacting with people we might deem “unworthy.”
The other facet to this story that I had to really consider was again the worst case. What if those men were in fact murderers and all the missing person flyers were trophies of their kills, which was what was inferred in the story? Because most of the people on the posters were women and children it was easy for me to envision myself as one of their victims. I imagine being a child taken by one of these men, away from my mother either because I was kidnapped or because she had been killed first. I imagine being terrified, fighting, crying, screaming, and then I imagined being murdered, the horror and physical pain that I feel as the end is coming. I can’t imagine an existence where someone feels so small and helpless and lost, and really they  It is at this point that I have to wonder, who greets me on the other side? Do I even go to paradise in the spirit world because Satan’s influence is what led to my demise?
One of the feelings that I got was that these people would be enveloped by evil and then just disappear into the world of the devil as like prisoners. I don’t know if that makes sense but it’s like when you hear “and they were never heard from again” and because we don’t know what happened to them, we have no closure and we wonder if it’s possible for us to just vanish into oblivion. I really had to think that we might not know what happened, but Jesus knows, but do I believe that? Do I believe that the Savior knows what happened to everyone at any time?
I guess the reason that it’s so unnerving when we don’t have closure on an event that is scary is because it just makes it feel like it could so easily happen to us, like when you’re just living your life and then find out something terrible has happened that you didn’t know anything about. Very much “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a sound?” If Satan perpetuates an evil and no one ever finds out about it, did Jesus really atone for it? And taking this example to the extreme where someone is murdered in the middle of no where and just vanishes into the void never to be heard from again isn’t a big stretch because it literally happens all the frickin time. It makes it feel like Satan has so much more power than he does because Satan can influence someone to make a terrible choice and we are susceptible to being hurt by others. And if something evil happens to us are we really eternally safe and go to the spirit world where there are different rules than there are here?
I just ran every possible scenario through my head while I was reading these stories and I had to literally ask myself, “did the victims really go to heaven?” and “did Jesus really feel the pains of this person in their darkest hour, even though no one else knew about it?” Logically I knew the answer to both of these questions was “yes, of course,” but emotionally it wasn’t so simple. I feel like I live in my own little world and there are all these pockets of crazy places where Satan holds strong influence, and I really had to push myself to understand that all the horror that can be administered by Satan in his strong holds, the Savior felt all that pain and terror of everyone affected and all the suffering caused as the perpetrators committed those crimes.
It was like standing alone at night in a big city with danger lurking around every corner and looking up to the sky at the moon and trying to decide if the moonlight can really illuminate every dark corner. In order to come to terms with my conflicting feelings, I focused on what I had already learned. I know that “the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life.” It doesn’t say that those who aren’t murdered or those who die peacefully in their sleep, it says “all men.” And I also know and love D&C 122:7-8 which says, “And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after they, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for they good. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?”
That is a pretty comprehensive statement, murders? Check. Injustice? Check. Natural disasters? Check. Conspiracy? Check. But the “very jaws of hell,” the absolute worst thing that Satan could imagine, the worst thing that he could convince anyone to do, the most horrific act of violence that has ever been perpetuated onto mankind, he did them to Jesus, and Jesus endured, he outlasted Satan. Jesus suffered and suffered until all the suffering was done, until there was no more, and it’s because of that that we can stand where we are and say, “Not today Satan.”
We live in time that is pretty crazy and it’s so easy to look at the negative and Satan’s small victories and be afraid that we will be lost in the endless expanse of existence, but it’s not possible. Even the smallest, weakest, and most vulnerable among us are counted among God’s children and are looked after by Him. And we can rest assured that whatever spooky gas station we walk in to in the middle of the night, that whatever happens, we will be ok, because we are not lost and we are not forgotten.