I recently had an awful experience which gives me insight into the atonement that I wanted to share here.

To make the story short, We put 95% of everything we owned into a storage unit. The unit manager was to automatically pull money out of our account which worked for a while then stopped.

They never called either of our working phone numbers on our account. We visited the unit and found our gate codes didn't work. They told us everything was fine and sent someone out to open the gate for us and gave us a new working code. Then, unknown to us they auctioned off the unit for lack of payment. We didn't find out until we were reviewing our bank statements over the weekend and realized that there was no payment pulled from our storage unit.

When we called them on the following Monday, and was told that everything in our unit has been sold at auction.

We had 95% of everything we owned in the unit and lost everything including the irreplaceable but most valuable items such as journals (important dates, blessings, development milestones etc. for us and our children, my mission, love letters to each other, our history, and details about how we met/fell in love), ALL wedding photos, wedding albums and videos, (ALL infant videos up to age 2) Wife's Wedding dress, Honey moon pictures, family and child pictures, baby pictures, home movies, our spiritual writings and records of various special personal events, family heirlooms and antiques, sentimental gifts and memorable items, antique out of print books we spent years trying to find, Personal blessing records, etc. etc. We have also remembered over $40k replaceable items.

We were able to contact the buyer who told us that everything that could be sold was and everything else, (our most valuable possessions), were thrown away.

The hard part to deal with is that our phone logs detail all calls to and from our cell phones which show that we never received a call from that area code except for when we were unable to use our old gate codes. If they had called us during that time or refused to let us into our unit, we could have quickly rectified any outstanding balance and resolved any issues. They were either incompetent or intentionally preventing us from correcting the issue.

We have been devastated beyond comprehension. I could not have comprehended the feeling of loss if I have not experienced it myself. I couldn't work for 3 days all of which my wife and I spent bawling until I was so horse I could hardly talk.

Even if we sued them and could recover a million dollars in damages they could not give us back our journals, pictures and most valuable items. There is nothing they could do to fix or correct the most harmful and irreparable damage they caused to us.

It also occurs to me that if they repented and tried to get Christ to "pay for their sins for them" or "cover their debt" as is the common belief regarding how the atonement works, there is no way that Christ could repair the damages they caused to us.

No amount of suffering on their part or by Christ will give us or our posterity those valuable items back. Christ has no power to repay their debt or repair the damage they caused us without restoring those items to us in mortality while they are still of us to us.

Their only hope is that they make every effort to correct the damage they caused us and that we forgive the remainder based on the power of the atonement an impact of Christ's teachings and love in our own lives. If we don't forgive them then we will continue to stand as witnesses against them until they come to know for themselves the pain and suffering they caused us and ask for our forgiveness.