Our power to nourish will be increased

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Sunday Afternoon Session of the October 1997 Conference.

Continuing with what is now a multi-session theme about helping new converts, President Eyring focused his talk on nourishing "those tender in the gospel." I naturally read this as a talk about how I can nourish my own young "lambs," of which I have plenty these days! My children, of course, and also the primary children under my care—all of them needing to be converted and strengthened in the gospel of Jesus Christ. President Eyring says:

All of us have tried at some time to nourish another person’s faith.…And we have had our disappointments. Someone we love may not have accepted our attempts to nourish their faith. We know from painful experience that God respects the choice of His children not to be nourished. Yet this is a time to feel renewed optimism and hope that our power to nourish will be increased.…

The place to start is with our own hearts. What we want with all our hearts will determine in large degree whether we can claim our right to the companionship of the Holy Ghost, without which there can be no spiritual nourishing. We can begin today to try to see those we are to nourish as our Heavenly Father sees them and so feel some of what He feels for them.

I like to think that the place to start is "our own hearts." Now that I'm becoming so painfully conscious of my inability to make anyone do anything, it's comforting to know that there IS an aspect of spiritual nourishment I can always control, and it's my own effort to have the Spirit with me. The Spirit can then help me see and feel the things I need understand about my struggling children.

President Eyring shows he's got a lot of personal experience with this when he says:

It is wise to fear that our own skills are inadequate to meet the charge we have to nourish the faith of others. Our own abilities, however great, will not be enough. But that realistic view of our limitations creates a humility which can lead to dependence on the Spirit and thus to power.

He goes on to describe how to get this power to nourish:

There are two great keys to inviting the Spirit to guide what words we speak as we feed others. They are the daily study of the scriptures and the prayer of faith.

The Holy Ghost will guide what we say if we study and ponder the scriptures every day. The words of the scriptures invite the Holy Spirit. The Lord said it this way: “Seek not to declare my word, but first seek to obtain my word, and then shall your tongue be loosed; then, if you desire, you shall have my Spirit and my word, yea, the power of God unto the convincing of men.” With daily study of the scriptures, we can count on this blessing even in casual conversations or in a class when we may be asked by a teacher to respond to a question. We will experience the power the Lord promised: “Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say; but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man.”

We treasure the word of God not only by reading the words of the scriptures but by studying them. We may be nourished more by pondering a few words, allowing the Holy Ghost to make them treasures to us, than to pass quickly and superficially over whole chapters of scripture.

I'm often worrying about finding the right thing to say as a parent these days. It feels like so many situations are so delicate that one wrong word will spiral everything downward into misunderstanding and defensiveness and hurt. I'll lie awake in bed at night rehearsing what I should say, and then when the moment comes, it's unexpected and different than I imagined, and all my rehearsals are useless. So this promise—that by treasuring up the scriptures I will be able to have my "tongue loosed" when it matters—is very precious to me. I am counting on it, because it's all too clear that my own wisdom and effort in this area is just not enough!

And then I liked this too:

It takes a childlike heart to feel the promptings of the Spirit, to surrender to those commands, and to obey. That is what it takes to be nourished by the good word of God.…And that is why we can be so optimistic in our charge to nourish the new members of the Church. However much or little they knew of the doctrine, they have just submitted humbly to the ordinance of baptism and received the right to the companionship of the Holy Ghost. And so the very tenderness of their faith, which leads the Savior to refer to them as lambs, comes at a time when they have proven themselves willing to do what the Savior asks of them.

It applies to children as well as to new members, and I feel like it applies even to teenagers and youth, even though I am not accustomed to thinking of them as "lambs!" They may act less childlike, but they ARE still young in the gospel, and we can have great reason to hope that Heavenly Father will send extra help as we try to nurture these lambs he loves so much—"power beyond our own," as President Eyring puts it. I need it! I need it constantly! There's nothing I want more than to truly nourish these little people I love so much, ultimately leading them to come and seek nourishment from the Savior themselves!

Other posts in this series:

The Basics—by Rozy