Custodians of hope

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Morning Session of the April 1983 Conference.

I read such a depressing article this week—I won't bother with the ridiculous details, but it was suffused with hopelessness and ingratitude and ennui, and I felt awful even reading such ideas—I can't imagine how discouraging it must be to believe them! So it was a breath of fresh air to find Elder Maxwell's talk about combatting just such "existential despair."

Elder Maxwell's talks, as I think I've said before, are so much more than the collection of clever turns of phrase I used to see them as. I've always known he had great "quotability," but I've really loved the chance to follow the development of his larger ideas and themes as I've read these Conference talks through the years. "Hope" seems to be one of those themes, and I feel like no one needs hope more than our world today!

He gives it so compassionately, too (much more so than I did when I read that article I mentioned—I mostly just felt MAD that the author could be so terribly wrong!), and it was a good reminder to me that people who are WRONG don't need us to get angry and argue—they just need love and truth. But Elder Maxwell doesn't back down on the need to counter their false ideas, either!:

One need not question either the reluctance or the sincerity with which some despairing individuals have come to such wrong conclusions. In fact, one feels compassion and desires to reach out to them in genuine entreaty!… 

But such poignancy of view is no guarantee of the accuracy of the view. Moreover, in human affairs, erroneous and unchallenged assertions sometimes assume an undeserved aura of truth. While a response to this hopelessness may not create conviction in disbelievers, it can bolster believers against the silent erosion of their own convictions.

I love that! And this talk helped "bolster" my own convictions in the face of the pervasive despair I seem to encounter all over these days. Elder Maxwell says,

Afflicted with anguish, some wander to and fro upon the earth in search of truth without knowing where to find it. One such prominent wanderer was described by a colleague: “It is strange how he persists … in wandering to-and-fro. … He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

Such is the scene, therefore, of which we are a part. Many reject the scriptures, the moral memory of mankind, and then declare absolutely the absence of absolutes. Others reject the light of the gospel and then grump over the growing darkness. Still others cut themselves off from God and lament the loneliness of the universe.…

Let us, therefore, place…such lamentations beside the revelations of God. The expressions of despair beside the divine annunciations of hope. The fears of extinction alongside the reassurances of the Resurrection. The provincialism beside the universalism of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Then we shall see how myopic some mortals are, like absorbed children in a tree house pretending they are brave and alone!

Ha. I love that image of "absorbed children" who don't even realize how carefully they are being watched over! Then he talks about how we, who know Jesus Christ and His gospel, have a responsibility to SHARE our gospel hope!

…We are custodians and possessors of a gospel of bright and realistic hope. It is a hope for which many hunger more deeply than we can possibly imagine. We poorly serve the cause of the Lord, at times, with programmatic superficiality and by our lack of empathy for those who drift in despair. 

And I love the way he says we should share our hope—basically just by living our small (but faithful) lives, serving our families and our neighbors and our friends as best we can.

The need, therefore, is for devoted disciples to do as Paul said, to “shine as lights in the world” … 

The very way in which these illuminated individuals “take up [the] cross daily” is a sermon in itself. They lead lives not of quiet desperation but of quiet inspiration, constituting what Paul would call their “defence and confirmation of the gospel.” 

Theirs represents a tinier and quieter history within the larger and noisier human history, a joyful and reassuring drama within the more despairing drama being played out on this planet.

It's so simple and profound. We don't ignore the hopeless who are all around us. But we don't let their ideas stand unchallenged, either. We seek for the hope Christ offers us—and then we hold onto it—acting as "custodians of hope" in Elder Maxwell's wonderful phrase—and let it shine back out of us through our lives and our families. Elder Maxwell gave examples of people who knew who were doing this all the time. I know some of those people too, and I want to be one of them! Living out my "tiny and quiet history" with all the hope I can muster—and trusting God with the rest!

Other posts in this series:

In the Valley of Decision, by Jan Tolman


-->God is Hope by G