I was asked to speak at a Relief Society weekday meeting the first week of January. The theme was "A Twelve Week Walk with Christ" and included a handout the Relief Society presidency had put together with stories, poems, scriptures, etc., for each month of the new year, to help guide our thoughts and hearts to Jesus Christ and to keep his Spirit with us not just at Christmas time but all year long. I'm including my talk below, not necessarily for anyone else to read, but because I want to save it for me (you know when you prepare talks, lessons, etc., you're the one who really learns, benefits, and is blessed by it).
We have so
many opportunities and resources to study the life of the Savior, it can
actually be overwhelming. Since being asked to speak tonight, I’ve been looking
at all kinds of outlines and options:
First and
foremost, we have the Scriptures, themselves, available to us in print or on
any number of devices we can access, highlight, cross-reference, etc. The
Topical Guide, with 19 pages of references to Jesus Christ.
Lds.org,
with all its lesson manuals, books, articles, essays, etc.
The internet,
where we can sign-up for daily emails or social media posts with scriptures,
inspirational quotes, reading assignments, etc.
Countless other
books, conference talks, and Church magazine articles, Pinterest, sugardoodle,
the idea door, I’m not even current on this, whatever else is on the Internet now
– It is pretty mind-boggling all the resources that are available to us, and
it’s out there for anybody and everybody to use. And yet what we do with all of
this is very personal.
This 12 Month
Walk with Christ that Sister Cope put together is a wonderful and valuable
resource that will serve us well if we use it. The person that it has really served
well so far is Sister Cope. I’m sure she has learned so much and been blessed
and inspired as she has read and considered and pondered these things. She has
felt closer to the Savior and come to love him more and feel his love for her
to a greater degree. She also has increased in love for all of you, because she
put this together as a service to you, and as she studied and reviewed the
scriptures, stories, articles, and poems, she’s been asking herself, is this
what the Relief Society sisters in the Yokota Ward need, will this bless them,
will this help them to love Jesus Christ more and serve him better and feel his
love for them. Now, she maybe wouldn’t have done all this if it hadn’t been for
her calling and her responsibility to prepare something for this meeting. But
she did do it and has been blessed and her love for and faith in Jesus Christ have
deepened and increased.
I remember
years ago having a conversation with my sister about chore charts. We both had
young children at the time and we were discussing this or that or the other
cute and clever idea for helping organize our kids into willing, happy, and
effective little helpers in the home. There were lots of ideas floating around
and a few books – and this was way before the internet or Pinterest, or we’d
probably still be having that conversation! But what we finally concluded was
that all of these ideas work – they all work – all the gimmicks and reward
systems and organization charts and positive reinforcement plans. They all work
– if we do. The same could be said for weight loss plans or home management
systems or any number of self-improvement programs – there’s a lot of them out
there and they all work if we do, if we put in the work.
Some of you
may be familiar with Elder Bruce R. McConkie, a member of the Quorum of the
Twelve Apostles from the early 1970s until his death in 1985. He was known in
the Church as a great gospel scholar. He wrote the six volume Messiah series (The
Promised Messiah, The Mortal Messiah, The Millenniel Messiah), he
wrote a three volume Doctrinal Commentary on the New Testament,
he wrote the chapter headings in the Book of Mormon and other scriptures, and
he contributed a lot to the Bible Dictionary. His daughter once asked him how he learned the
gospel. When he was a young man, he said, about eighteen or nineteen, he went
through the Book of Mormon verse by verse, studying and cross-referencing, and
rewriting each verse in his own words. He covered the entire Book of Mormon in
this way and had a stack of papers over a foot high when he was through. “I
asked him what he did with those papers, and he said he threw them away—it
wasn’t the stack of papers or what he wrote that was important, but the
discipline and understanding it gave him. This is the way he taught himself.”
Now, if you were to have access to Elder McConkie’s stack of papers and read through
them all, would you have the same understanding that he gained? Not without
doing the work.
The Bible
dictionary says that prayer is a form of work. This may well have been written
by Elder McConkie, and it says this: “Blessings require some work or effort on
our part before we can obtain them. Prayer is a form a work and is an appointed
means for obtaining the highest of all blessings.”
Scripture
study, gospel study, like prayer, is a form of work. I believe that being
spiritually sensitive is an art, and like any art or skill, we get better at it
as we practice. And as we practice, as
we do the work, our efforts are blessed and we are enhanced and magnified,
because the Lord can do so much more with us than we can ever do alone. He is trying to do great things with us right
now, as we have all these resources and opportunities to learn of Him and
follow him more faithfully.
I want to
share with you a very moving and sobering true story that will hopefully help
us see how very blessed we are to have what we have.
This story
is told by James E. Ray, an American prisoner in Vietnam in 1966. He had been
shot down while he was flying a mission in May 1966 and captured, interrogated,
and tortured repeatedly. He was imprisoned alone in a tiny cell with only a
damp pallet for a bed. He would not be released for five long, terrible years,
years of inadequate food, physical suffering, inadequate clothing, no contact
with the outside world. Where would you turn for strength?
One
particular day, when he was wishing he’d gone down with the plane, he heard a
whisper. He writes:
I heard it again. An unmistakable,
“Hey, buddy?”
I scrambled flat on the floor and
peered through the crack under the door. I could see I was in one of many cells
facing a narrow, walled courtyard. The whisper had come from the next cell. I
whispered back. . . . . We waited as the guard passed and then began to
converse.
Soon all the prisoners on that yard
were whispering. We started by learning about one another, where we were from,
our families. One day I asked Bob what church he went to.
“Catholic,” he said. “And you?”
“Baptist.”
Bob was quiet for a moment, as if my
mention of church evoked deep memories. Then he asked, “Do you know any Bible
verses?”
“Well, I know the Lord’s Prayer,” I
answered.
“Everyone knows that.”
“How about the Twenty-third Psalm?”
. . . I began whispering it. He
repeated each line after me. A little later he whispered back the entire psalm.
Other prisoners joined in, sharing
verses they knew . . .
As the number of prisoners grew, two
of us shared a cell. My first cellmate was Larry Chelsey, a Mormon from Idaho.
Though we had a few differences of belief, our common denominators were the
Bible and Jesus Christ, and we were able to share and write down a great deal
of scripture. It became vital to our daily existence. Often racked with
dysentery, weakened by the diet of rice, thin cabbage, and pumpkin soup, our
physical lives had shrunk within the prison walls. We spent 20 hours a day
locked in our cells. And those Bible verses became rays of light, constant
assurances of God’s love and care.
We made ink from brick dust and
water or precious drops of medicine. We wrote verses on bits of toilet paper
and slipped them to others, dropping them behind a loose brick at the toilets.
It was dangerous to do that . . . A
man unlucky enough to be caught passing a note would be forced to stand with
his arms up against a wall for several days, without sleep.
. . . . . One night I lay with my
ear pressed against the rough wooden wall of my cell to hear thump . . . thumpety thump as somewhere, cells away, a
fellow POW tapped out in Morse code: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
from whence cometh my help.” (Psalm 121:1)
He . . . . passed on the seven other
verses in that psalm, which I scratched on the concrete floor with a piece of
broken tile. “My help cometh from the Lord,” the psalm assured us, and with
that assurance came his presence, soothing us, telling us not to fear.
By 1968, more of us were squeezed
together and for two years four of us lived in an eight-by-eight foot cell. . .
. . Only by following Christ’s teachings
about constant forgiveness, patience, and understanding were we able to get
along together.
Two and a half years went by before
I could write Dad and Mother. A year later I was allowed to receive my first
letter. In the meantime we subsisted on letters written nearly 2000 years
before.
By the early
1970s, most of these American POWs were moved to Hanoi, where some 50 of them
lived, ate, and slept in one large room. They were surprised to find how many
of them knew scriptures, learned from the verses passed along in whispers, on
toilet paper, and through wall thumpings. They immediately made plans to have
their own Christmas worship service, which they did, with scripture readings
and Christmas carols. The guards would knock on the door and order them not to
sing, but the prisoners persisted and the guards finally gave up. Later that
night, the commander actually brought them a Bible (the prisoners had been
asking for one for months) and allowed them to keep it for one hour.
After that,
the guards allowed one prisoner out of his cell to go and copy from the Bible
for one hour each week. Then the next week they had to return the previous
week’s copy work. Mr. Ray said the guards “seemed afraid for us to keep the
scriptures, as if they sensed the spiritual help kept us from breaking.”
From that we learned a most
important lesson: Bible verses on paper aren’t one iota as useful as scriptures
burned into your mind, where you can draw on them for guidance and comfort.
After five weeks we didn’t see the
Bible again. But that had been enough time for us to memorize collectively the
Sermon on the Mount, Romans 12, First Corinthians 13, and many of the psalms.
Now we had our own “living Bible” walking around the room. By this time we had
Sunday worship services and Sunday School classes . . . . .
Two years passed this way . . . . years
of continuing degradation, sickness, hunger, and never knowing whether we would
see home again. But instead of going mad or becoming animal-like, we continued
to grow as a community, sustaining one another in compassion and understanding.
For as one of the verses I heard
thumped out on the wall one night said: “Man doth not live by bread only, but
by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.” (Deut. 8:3)
Two things
that I wanted to share with you tonight, and that was one – how incredibly blessed
we are to have the scriptures that we have, and all of these aids that help us
study them more effectively, how much we need to treasure them, study and feast
upon these words. We should be the best educated, most insightful, most
articulate generation the Church has ever seen – or maybe you should be,
maybe I’m off the hook on that one, I don’t know….
Secondly,
just a testimony of the love of the Savior and an injunction and a plea that we
will learn of him, study his life and his teachings, and follow his example. And
I want to share this video that I hope will speak to you as it did me.
Video: The Wise Men Seek Jesus
As I watch
this, I love the idea that the gifts the wise men brought, which I used to
think wouldn’t have been of much use to Mary and Joseph, may very well have
provided this very poor little family with the means to leave Bethlehem and
travel to Egypt. If that was the case, then the wise men quite literally saved
Jesus’s life from Herod’s soldiers. We do know that they at least delayed
Herod’s terrible decision as they didn’t go back to tell him where the baby
was, and instead “departed into their own country another way”, giving Mary and
Joseph time to get their baby safely to Egypt.
I love the
thought, at Christmas time and always, that wise men still seek him. And wise
women, too, of course, although it loses a little with that adjustment – but we
know it really means that anyone and everyone who is wise seeks Jesus, the
Savior, the Atoning One, the Son of God. The wise men here are sometimes
traveling through beautiful landscapes, sometimes through bleak desserts.
Sometimes the air around them is calm, sometimes they experience wind and
weather. Sometimes there’s beautiful background music and sometimes there’s
silence – and I don’t mean to be facetious as I make that point, thinking about
the soundtracks of our lives. We seek Jesus through all of these experiences.
There are as
many ways to seek Jesus as there are people, but there’s at least one thing we
will all have in common: it will take a piece of our time. I like that the wise
men depicted in this video don’t seem to be in a hurry. They are just moving
forward, taking the time that it takes. Now, we are busy, we are involved in a
lot of good and important things. But this seeking, this searching, which will
include prayer and pondering, just needs to be given the time that it takes.
The Lord does not apologize for asking this of us, for, in fact, commanding us
to read and study and learn of his life and teachings. We each need to decide for
ourselves when and how and what approach and for how long each day or week or
month – and that changes as we grow and change and our circumstances change,
it’s always a work in progress.
Then in addition
to setting aside the time for formal study, we can invite the Savior into every
aspect of our lives, all the time, the hassled and harried times, the chaos,
the great and glorious and the mundane.
We lived for
a number of years in Olympia, Washington, where it rains pretty much nine
months out of the year. This was where I first heard of light deprivation. You
know that some people who live above a certain latitude and experience long
winter nights and gray winter days can become depressed and even suicidal,
because something in their bodies requires whole-spectrum light for a certain
number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is as real and as
deep as our physical need for light, maybe even more so. Jesus is the light of
the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we don’t need
to walk in that darkness, because we have access to a light that dispels it. We
live in an imperfect world with built-in adversities. But it’s the world that
was created for us, and we love it. Our Father in Heaven’s plan calls us to
this world, this is where we are schooled, where we work out our
salvation. The temple is the ultimate
retreat from the world, but the celestial room is a place to reach and linger
only for a few moments. It’s not a place where we can take up residence. We’re
invited and counseled to come to the temple often, but nobody has ever said
that we should try to stay there.
So the
Savior doesn’t ask us to abandon the world; he invites us to come unto him so that
he can heal us from worldly cares and frailties and make us whole. And I don’t
think he can do that unless we are open with him about our brokenness, about
the parts of us that need healing. So when the Savior comes to our house, let’s
not just show him to the perfectly clean, beautifully decorated guest room and
then close the door and expect him to stay there where things are nice. Invite him instead into the kitchen where
you’re making dinner and serving it on paper plates, or take him to work,
especially when you’re running late, or to run errands or drive kids around. Let
him help in the middle of the night when you’re up with a sick child, or with your
own pain. He knows a lot about all of those things and much, much more.
He’s not waiting
for us to be perfect. Perfect people don’t need a Savior. He came to save us in
our imperfections. He’s not embarrassed by us, or angry, or shocked. He wants
us in our brokenness because he knows how to heal us.
So can we
open our minds to Jesus Christ by studying and feasting upon his life and
teachings? And can we open our hearts to him by letting him into ours, such as
they are? We covenanted at baptism to take his name, and to witness of him at
all times, and in all things, and in all places. As we learn of his teachings
and experience his love, we can become more like him. President Russell M.
Nelson said, “Your most sincere sign of adoration of Jesus is your emulation of
Him.”
I referred
earlier to Elder Bruce R. McConkie and his gospel scholarship. Elder McConkie
had been battling cancer for over a year as General Conference in April 1985
was approaching. He literally got up from his sickbed to go and give his
conference talk, which was titled: “The Purifying Power of Gethsemane”. He opened the talk with this statement: “I feel, and the Spirit seems to accord, that
the most important doctrine I can declare, and the most powerful testimony I
can bear, is of the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Elder
McConkie passed away on April 19th, less than two weeks after giving
this talk. I want to share with you his final testimony.
Video: “The Purifying Power of
Gethsemane”, start at 14:00.
It’s my
prayer that we will learn of Jesus Christ and that we will follow him, that we
will love him more fully and feel his love for us more deeply. As we embark on
this 12 Month Walk with Christ, I pray that we will make it a 365 Day Walk with
Christ, or a 52 Week 24/7 Walk with Christ. That we will always remember him and
keep his commandments as we have covenanted to do, that we may always have his
Spirit to be with us. I express my love for him and my gratitude for all that
he has done for me and for you.
Sources:
James E.
Ray, “The Secret of Our Survival,” Guideposts, January 1996, 10-13 – shared by
Chieko N. Okazaki in Stars: Reflections
on Christmas
lds.org
Media Library: The Wise Men Seek Jesus
Lighten Up! Finding Real Joy in Life by Chieko N. Okazaki, Chapter 14:
Seeking the Light of Christ
Ensign, June
1985, “Elder Bruce R. McConkie: Preacher of Righteousness
Ensign,
April 1985, “The Purifying Power of Gethsemane” by Elder Bruce R. McConkie
