This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Morning Session of the October 1995 Conference.
Man, there was a lot of powerful doctrine taught in this conference! I don't even know which talk to choose. I loved Sister Beckham's talk, Elder Scott's talk, and President Packer's talk, but I guess I'll just highlight a couple quotes from the first two because they're about things I've been studying.
First, Sister Beckham had so many interesting things to say about power. She talked about bullies and fear and power in elementary school, and then told about how when her handicapped brother was born, she discovered a new kind of power:
A force that was just the opposite of my outside world started to be felt inside. There seemed to develop a new dimension of love, tenderness, compassion. I watched my mother and dad make adjustments in lifestyle to lovingly care for a child who in his five-and-one-half years never learned to sit or speak but who warmed an entire room with his smile. The whole town seemed more gentle, interested, concerned. My outside fears were diminished. I felt securely attached because my mother and brother were there. My parents were home at night. Our home seemed more warm, full. There was a different power. It seemed to grow from the inside. It felt more permanent, unlike the temporary power I felt with my friends. It was calm and peaceful—the power of goodness, the power of love.
Then she relates the story of a girl whose mother had multiple sclerosis and was bedridden. The girl told of the blessings of having her mother close by and available, even though the mother couldn't do many of the usual household tasks. After the mother died, the daughter said,
“One of the hardest moments in my young life was the day I returned home from school to an empty house and walked down that long hallway to her bedroom. My built-in counselor and confidante was no longer there, but she had given me those eternal, intangible gifts of love, wisdom, and acceptance. I will be forever grateful for her goodness.”
Then Sister Beckham explains:
This strong woman, though physically helpless, had the power to love, to motivate, to inspire, to perpetuate righteousness, to do good.
I'm so interested in the ways we can gain true power through righteousness and through the priesthood and our temple covenants. I've pondered those words from Doctrine and Covenants 121 a million times—"without compulsory means." It becomes clearer to me every day that "compulsory means" will never work to bind my children to Jesus Christ. Obviously only their own choices can do that—and yet where is my role? What can I do? What power or influence can I summon when their own choices are hasty or foolish or ill-informed? I want so much that power Sister Beckham describes—to love, motivate, inspire, perpetuate righteousness. Elder Eyring has talked about it recently (and me too)—how a righteous mother can "mold living clay to the shape of her hopes." I pray every day for that kind of influence, and though I'm always afraid I'm not righteous enough to truly call such power down, I have to remember that Jesus Christ, from whom the power comes, IS good enough.
That goes along with the part I liked from Elder Scott's talk on trusting the Lord. I've talked before how trusting the Lord involves some component of trusting ourselves—in that we trust Him to work through our imperfections. But I like how Elder Scott phrases it here, that trusting God means almost forgetting about our own feelings in some ways:
This life is an experience in profound trust—trust in Jesus Christ, trust in His teachings, trust in our capacity as led by the Holy Spirit to obey those teachings for happiness now and for a purposeful, supremely happy eternal existence. To trust means to obey willingly without knowing the end from the beginning. To produce fruit, your trust in the Lord must be more powerful and enduring than your confidence in your own personal feelings and experience.
In other words, it doesn't matter if I think I'm not good enough/strong enough/patient enough to have the influence I want to on my children. I have to say to myself, "I trust the Lord MORE THAN I trust my feelings that I'm not going to succeed at this. He has said that He will help parents trying to teach their children. So even though my personal experience and feelings tell me Your children won't listen to a single word you say (ha ha, but I mean it—sometimes I really think that)—or You've tried and tried to teach this and nothing makes any difference—I have to trust God who sets forth the contrary view: they will listen, it will make a difference.
Elder Scott continues:
To exercise faith is to trust that the Lord knows what He is doing with you and that He can accomplish it for your eternal good even though you cannot understand how He can possibly do it. We are like infants in our understanding of eternal matters and their impact on us here in mortality. Yet at times we act as if we knew it all. When you pass through trials for His purposes, as you trust Him, exercise faith in Him, He will help you. That support will generally come step by step, a portion at a time. While you are passing through each phase, the pain and difficulty that comes from being enlarged will continue. If all matters were immediately resolved at your first petition, you could not grow.
I don't need to see HOW on earth someone like me can possibly have enough power to help change people, hearts, and minds. I don't even need to see continual proof that it is happening! I just have to be patient and trust that God knows what He's doing, and that He put me where I am precisely because I can have an influence there. It seems incomprehensible, but that's what God has promised! Then Elder Scott says this, which I love so much:
Your Father in Heaven and His Beloved Son love you perfectly. They would not require you to experience a moment more of difficulty than is absolutely needed for your personal benefit or for that of those you love.
Trusting God, I think, means I internalize this truth—feel it—hold onto it when things feel hard. Priesthood power is real. It's real in that Jesus has the power to save ME and bring me through hard times. And it's real in that He also lends His power to me, through covenants—granting me a real and literal ability to draw those in my circles, those I love, back toward Heavenly Father. Trust in Him, not my own merits, unlocks the power only He can give.
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