Your life is your preparation

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Afternoon Session of the April 2001 Conference.

It's weird, maybe, that the talk I feel like writing about from this session is Elder Hales' talk about how the church needs more senior couple missionaries. In some ways it feels like that time will never come for Sam and me! It seems quite likely that we will be raising children in our home forever! But I don't know what it was, maybe the fact that I've started to have siblings with grandchildren, or I've realized how fast time passes, or that our Stake President has recently been pleading for more couple missionaries from our stake—anyway, it's all got me feeling like a mission for Sam and me is, if not just around the corner, at least…on the horizon. It makes me kind of excited to think about it. I never wanted to serve a mission as a young woman; it just wasn't ever my desire. But I've always wanted to go as a senior couple, and I hope we'll be able to!

The part that stuck out to me most from the talk, though, was something that applies to me right now, and is an echo of what I wrote about last week from Elder Holland's talk:

Your life is your preparation. You have valuable experience. You have raised a family and served in the Church. Just go and be yourselves. The Lord has promised that angels will go before you. You will be told by the Spirit what to say and when to say it in a very natural process as you strengthen young missionaries, testify to investigators and new members, teach leadership skills, and friendship and fellowship less-active members, helping them return to full activity. You are the testimony, and you will touch the lives of those with whom you come in contact.…Simply be yourself. Serve to the best of your ability, and the Lord will bless you.

I've been thinking lately how the "mantle" of leadership in the church, if there is such a thing, is largely just the decision to choose to accept a call and be who you need to be to fulfill it. You don't really have to be a certain special leaderish type of person. You just have to be willing to treat the call, to whatever position it is, as if it's from the Lord—which, of course, it is! And then you have to throw yourself in and do your best at it and trust God to pull you along the rest of the way. I like thinking about this not only with my call to church service but with all of my stewardships, mother and sister and aunt and neighbor and all the rest. 

It is so calming and comforting to trust that God has already given us all the experiences we need—just in the course of our regular faithful lives—to be whatever he needs us to be! And he is currently in the process of giving us experience for the next things we need to know and be! So all we have to do is…keep going, and we will be fine!