Sisters in Scriptures Podcast

About Sisters in Scriptures Podcast

A Scripture Class in the SL Olympus Stake

Publisher

Sisters in Scriptures

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 Jan 2020

Latest episode

21 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

109 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   21 Oct 2026

   Oct 20 2026 2 Nephi 4:13-8 by Anita Leimbach

   SIS 10_20_26 final 12Oct pdf (https://scriptureclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SIS-10_20_26-final-12Oct-pdf.pdf)Download (https://scriptureclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SIS-10_20_26-final-12Oct-pdf.pdf) Transcript of the audio recording (approx. 44–45 minutes) Let me just second what she said about Judy, and I know your mother is so proud of all those lessons and all the practicing you did to be able to play so beautifully for us today. So welcome to this beautiful fall morning. I have to tell you, I’m a little bit surprised at how much I enjoyed preparing this lesson this week. I wasn’t counting on that, and I’m hopeful that you can feel some of that excitement that I felt also. Today we’re talking about Second Nephi chapters, halfway through chapter 4 through chapters 8. And during these chapters, it’s been thirty years since they left Jerusalem. Okay. We know that because Nephi talks about it; he says it’s been thirty years, and he is going back and he’s writing about all the stuff that we’ve already learned about in First Nephi, okay? He’s telling these stories. And later on in this chapter, he also talks about it being forty years, so thirty to forty years after they’ve left, he’s writing this, writing these books, and I thought, well, I’m looking out at this group, I bet most of you can remember stuff that happened thirty or forty years ago to you, you know? And because I can, and when I think back thirty or forty years, I’m thinking, oh, I was in the midst of raising teenagers, and aren’t I so glad I’m still standing here to talk to you, so this is great. So I have a much different perspective of my life thirty years ago than I did when I was in the trenches, you know, doing it. And I feel this is the same way with Nephi. He’s got a better perspective of what has happened these last years. And now he’s writing these plates. And upon these, I write the things of my soul, and many of the scriptures which are engraven upon the plates of brass. For my soul delighteth in the scriptures, and my heart pondereth them, and writeth them for the learning and the profit of my children. So here’s his purpose, and Laurie talked about this last week, about how his purpose for writing. We should have a purpose for reading. He had a purpose for writing this. Now, we start off with a very different kind of writing in this chapter than we’ve seen so far, and I’m almost not being the scholar and not being to the end of the Book of Mormon, I think this is a unique chapter in the Book of Mormon, and it is what we call the Psalm of Nephi. Okay? This isn’t him talking about his history or the brothers or all the miracles that have happened, you know, that have got them to this point in the promised land. It’s very, it’s just a different interlude. This is personal. This is, he’s looking back at his life and both lamenting his weaknesses and praising God. And I’m going to read the whole thing. It’s quite a long psalm, but I would ask you to follow along because I’ll have it up here, but you can read it wherever, but I just think it’s an important part, and we’re going to spend quite a little bit of time on this. This is the setup that he’s taught before he starts his song. Behold, my soul delighteth in the things of the Lord, and my heart pondereth continually upon the things which I have seen and heard. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the great goodness of the Lord, in showing me his great and marvelous works, my heart exclaimeth, O wretched man that I am, yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh, my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities, I am encompassed about because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me, and when I desire to rejoice, my heart groaneth because of my sins. Nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted. This is kind of the setup for it. And it reminds us that Nephi was a prophet, but he was also a man who suffered and temptations and didn’t live the way he always wanted to live, maybe a little bit like us. And then we start with the Psalm of Nephi. My God hath been my support. He hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness, and he hath preserved me upon the waters of the great deep. He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh. He hath confounded mine enemies, unto the causing of them to quake before me. Behold, he hath heard me, heard my cry by day, and he hath given me knowledge by visions in the nighttime. We know some of these stories that he’s talking about. And by day have I waxed bold in mighty prayer before him. Yea, my voice have I sent upon high, and angels came down and ministered unto me. And upon the wings of his spirit hath my body been carried away upon exceedingly high mountains, and mine eyes have beheld great things, yea, even too great for man. Therefore I was bidden that I should not write them. O then, if I have seen so great things, if the Lord in his condescension unto the children of men hath visited men in so much mercy, why should my heart weep and my soul linger in the valley of sorrow, and my flesh waste away and my strength slacken because of mine afflictions? And why should I yield to sin because of my flesh? Yea, why should I give way to temptations that the evil one may have place in my heart to destroy my peace and afflict my soul? Why art thou angry because of mine enemy? Awake my soul, no longer droop in sin. Rejoice, O my heart, and give place no more for the enemy of my soul. Do not anger again because of mine enemies. Do not slacken my strength because of mine afflictions. Rejoice, O my heart, and cry unto the Lord, and say, O Lord, I will praise thee forever. Yea, my soul will rejoice in thee, my God, and the rock of my salvation. O Lord, wilt thou redeem my soul? Wilt thou deliver me out of the hands of mine enemies? Wilt thou make me that I may shake at the appearance of sin? May the gates of hell be shut continually before me, because that my heart is broken, and my spirit is contrite. O Lord, wilt thou not shut the gates of thy righteousness before me, that I may walk in the path of the low valley, that I may be stripped in the plain road? O Lord, wilt thou encircle me around in the robe of thy righteousness? O Lord, wilt thou make a way for mine escape before mine enemies? Wilt thou make my path straight before me? Wilt thou not place a stumbling block in my way, but that thou wouldst clear my way before me, and hedge not up my way but the ways of my enemy? He’s just pleading with the Lord here. O Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust in the arm of the flesh, for I know that cursed is he that putteth his trust in the arm of the flesh. Yea, cursed is he that putteth his trust in man, or maketh flesh his arm. Yea, I know that God will give liberally to him that asketh. Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss, therefore I will lift up my voice unto thee. Yea, I will cry unto thee, my God, the rock of my righteousness. Behold, my voice shall forever ascend up unto thee, my rock and mine everlasting God. Amen. Now, this is called the Psalm of Nephi, and I know you all know this, but a psalm is a song, right? So I thought, certainly someone has made a song out of the Psalm of Nephi, and I was not wrong. The BYU men’s chorus put Nephi’s psalm to music. Finlandia, so some familiar music to you. But they took literary license with the words, making them rhyme while keeping the spirit of the psalm. I’m going to show you the video, and the video has the words up there. You’ll see that the words don’t exactly match this whole long psalm of Nephi, but they certainly match the spirit and the meaning that he gives, and I think they got it right. So let’s go. [Song plays; approximate lyrics from the performance:] Upon his word I ponder day and night. He stirred my drive, brought visions to my sleep, and kept me safe for desert’s and the deep. He filled my heart with his consuming love. And bore me hard on means of his grace. Yes, as I grow, O wretched man am I, my flesh is weak, and I become the spot of sin, O world of sin, which holds me in its thrall. If I give in and choose temptation’s call, then straight through slack I waste in sorrow’s day. My peace is strong, my enemy is free. Awake my soul, no longer droop in sin. Rejoice my heart, and let me praise again, let me praise the Lord my God, who is my rock and stay, to keep me straight upon His praise, plain way. O let me shake at the first sight of Thee, and thus escape my foes with. I love the Lord. In him my soul is. Okay, let’s try to do this right. I think they did a great job on that. So now, how can we liken that to ourselves? I have a big shout out to the Eighth Ward Blue Society book group. We read a bunch of books, and a couple of years ago, we read this book, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools. And it is—I, the opinions you hear are not necessarily those of anybody above me, but I think this is the best book on prayer I’ve ever read. And he talks about this, not LDS, he talks in this book about how we can make our prayers more meaningful. And I’m just gonna read from one particular chapter called “How to Pray Differently.” And he says, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he gave the Lord’s Prayer. And, okay, this is the participation part of the program. All of you can repeat the first sentence of the Lord’s Prayer with me, if you would do that. Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Okay, that’s the first—let’s do it again. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That’s the first line, and he says, What do we learn from this first line? He says he learns three things. We are to remember who God is. He is our Father. He is in heaven, and He is hallowed or sacred. The second thing we learn is remember who we are. I’m a child of God. And the third thing, and this might be the most hard, everybody else is also a child of God, okay? To learn those three things from that, okay? Because everybody else is our siblings. Now, he talks about this, I want you to—this is to remember exactly what he said, and how one way to pray differently, but then he says we need to remember who we’re talking to when we’re speaking to the Lord. And I found a couple of quotes, Robert Millet said, Jesus Christ is not a cosmic errand boy. Do my prayers sometimes become that, where I give a list of things that I would like done in my life? And then Neil Maxwell said, we need to talk about the difference between showing up and worship. And sometimes I think I’m showing up more than I’m worshiping. He said, but to worship is to intentionally praise and adore our God in a way that transforms us. So, Tyler Staton here gives us three ways to pray differently. And I’m not saying you should do this all the time, but once in a while, it wouldn’t hurt. He says there are three things to do, and let’s see. The hymnal of ancient Israel is found right in the middle of the Bible. Here we find the 150 psalms, prayers that have given language to generations of our spiritual ancestors. Read a psalm slowly. I prefer to read aloud, even when I’m alone. When you reach a line that resonates, allow it to be a springboard for your own prayers. Let a single verse or phrase from an ancient prayer become a foundation for praising God as creator, redeemer, savior, or friend. So, pray a psalm. So what psalm should you pray? I thought you’d never ask. How about you could do Nephi’s psalm, which is a little long. You could pray something from Isaiah. You could do a psalm from Psalms, like the Lord is my shepherd. But how about we liken the scriptures to ourselves? And hear me out here, write your own psalm. Okay, I can feel the eyes rolling from here, okay? But I want, we’re going to give this a try. A couple of years ago, Sister Susan Gong, and yes, she’s the wife of Elder Gerrit Gong, was quoted, gave a talk, and there was an article in the Meridian magazine called “Writing a Psalm of Your Own to Strengthen Your Relationship with the Lord.” And Susan Gong gave an example of how you write your own psalm. And I’m gonna give you one example of a sister who heard this talk, and she is not named because they didn’t name her in the thing, and this is the psalm she wrote. Praise ye the Lord, my Redeemer and friend, for he hath sustained me through heavy trials, and given me hope for eternal glory. The Lord, he is my light, my constant companion, and my joy, and I will lean on him and bring his pure love and truth to others. She followed these five things. Begin your psalm with “praise ye the Lord.” Next sentence or phrase, “for he hath,” add an “and,” next sentence begin with “the Lord he is my,” and close your psalm with “and I will.” These are sentence starters that we use. Now, if you were ever to take notes in this presentation, this is what I would recommend. You take, we’ll, we’re gonna go through this slowly, but you put a number one, begin your psalm with praise the Lord, and then skip down, and then put the second and third, and we’re gonna do a psalm here, and we’re gonna look at Nephi’s psalm, and see how he works with this. So she says, begin your psalm with “praise the Lord.” Praise ye the Lord. And I’m gonna give you some samples. Praise ye the Lord, my Redeemer and friend. That’s from one of the sisters’ psalms. If you take just a second and think to yourself, I’ll give you twenty seconds here to think, what could you start your psalm with? Praise ye the Lord. Okay, let’s go to number two. The next sentence or phrase begin with, “for he hath,” and I’ve got an example right from Nephi’s psalm. He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh. That’s an example from Nephi’s psalm, and here’s one from a sister. Praise ye the Lord, for he hath come to me when I was alone, and no one was there for me, not even myself. The third. Add “and.” Second Nephi 4:25. And upon the wings of his spirit hath my body been carried away upon exceedingly high mountains. And a sister. And he hath sent angels to rescue me, and his spirit to comfort me. Number four. Next sentence begins with, “the Lord, he is my.” Second Nephi 4:20, my God hath been my support. He hath led me through my afflictions in the wilderness. And a sister, he is my light, my constant companion, and my joy. Close your psalm with, “and I will.” And I think this might be the most important part. What will I do? Nephi says, I will cry unto thee, my God, the rock of my righteousness. Behold, my voice shall forever ascend up unto thee, my rock and my everlasting God. Amen. And the sister, and I will lean on him and bring his pure love and truth to others. I was really touched by these, and I so, and I’m really glad that Sister Melissa puts all these up on the scripture class so you can look at all of these. But I’m calling this Psalms of the Sisters, and I don’t have names because they didn’t give names. They were people who gave permission but did not give their names. Here’s a psalm. Praise ye the Lord, for he hath come to me when I was alone, and no one was there for me, not even myself. And he hath sent angels to rescue me, and his spirit to comfort me. The Lord, he is my light, he is the love for me that I have not had for myself. And I will not let go of this hand, no matter how dark and terrible the path, and he will save me now and until the end. Number two, praise ye the Lord, for he hath protected my children and guided me out of sorrow. The Lord, he is my salvation and solace. In his name I will comfort those in need of comfort and mourn with those who mourn. Psalms of the Sisters, number three, praise ye the Lord, for he hath given me beautiful people to love, for he hath blessed me with a full life, surrounded by so much love. He is my redeemer, my greatest friend, my perfect example, and I will gladly recognize his hand in all things. And number four, praise ye the Lord, for he hath rescued me from a secular life without an ultimate purpose, and led me with the Spirit to his gospel and his church. The Lord, he is my very patient leader and example, and I will try harder to follow his example. I thought these were beautiful psalms, and I will tell you, I did write my own psalm. I’m not sharing it here because it’s not as good as these, but it is personal to me. I think it’s a worthy thing to try to give a prayer or a psalm of worship to God. That a single verse or phrase from an ancient prayer or your own soul become a foundation for praising God as creator, redeemer, savior, and friend. Nephi has done it. Psalms in the Old Testament. I think it’s a lovely little interlude in our history of the Nephites and Lamanites. And after this lovely interlude, we are back to what is happening in the promised land. The promised land has not healed the rift between the brothers. It has finally escalated to the point of no return, and now Nephi has to once again go into the wilderness. So we’re in Second Nephi chapter five. And it came to pass that the Lord did warn me that I, Nephi, should depart from them and flee into the wilderness, and all those who would go with me. Wherefore it came to pass that I, Nephi, did take my family, and also Zoram and his family, and Sam, my elder brother, and his family, and Jacob and Joseph, my younger brethren, and also my sisters, and all those who would go with me. And all those who would go with me were those who believed in the warnings and the revelations of God. Wherefore they did hearken unto my words. And we did take our tents, and whatsoever things were possible for us, and to journey in the wilderness for the space of many days. And after we had journeyed for the space of many days, we did pitch our tents. I’m so sad about this. They spent thirty years previously, they go into the wilderness to go to the promised land, and they no sooner get to the promised land, than Nephi’s leaving and going back into the wilderness again. And then this, the scripture, I found some sad scriptures in here. And I, Nephi, did take the sword of Laban. Remember this, come back. And after the manner of it did make many swords, lest by any means the people who were now called Lamanites should come upon us and destroy us. For I knew their hatred towards me and my children and those who were called my people. Think about this. This is, I’m sure many of us have had rifts in our family. And here we are in the promised land and we can’t keep it together. So I’ve been thinking about this, and here’s how I imagined. I tried to think of a way to portray this, and I thought, okay, we’ve got Lehi’s family, and we’ve got the promised land, and for all these times, you know, they’re wandering around in the wilderness, coming, and they build the ship, and they come, and to get to the promised land. And so we’ve got these two, like, circles from a non-existent Venn diagram that’s not matching, and what I had hoped for was that it would look like this. Here’s all Lehi’s family, and here’s the promised land, and they’re all together and living in peace, and we’ve gone through all of these hardships together, and here we are. And instead, it doesn’t look like this. It looks more like this. We’ve got Lehi’s people, and we’ve got the chosen land, the promised land, and chosen people, and some are living out, and there’s a whole bunch. It’s a mess. And I started thinking, what makes a chosen people or a promised land? And in Second Nephi chapter five verse ten, here’s one of the things that Nephi is saying that his people are doing. And we did observe to keep the judgments and the statutes and the commandments of the Lord in all things according to the law of Moses. And verse eleven, and the Lord was with us, and we did prosper exceedingly, for we did sow seed, and we did reap again in abundance, and we began to raise flocks and herds and animals of every kind. And they’re not technically in the promised land, because I think the Lamanites are still there, right? They went out into the wilderness. It is a little ironic that the promised land, the Nephites, the Lamanites stayed there. And the Nephites leave. And the Nephites even build a temple, which means maybe we make our own promised land. And it came to pass that we began to prosper exceedingly and to multiply in the land, and it came to pass that we lived after the manner of happiness. So we’ve got the Nephites living in, after the manner of happiness, and how do we get there? Wherefore, oh, and what’s happened to the Lamanites? Wherefore the word of the Lord was fulfilled, which he spake unto me, saying that, Inasmuch as they will not hearken unto thy words, they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And behold, they were cut off from his presence. So the Lamanites are living their own kind of life in the promised land, but they’re not living with the covenants. So I think, can we choose to be chosen? Elder Bednar said this, many are called, but few are chosen. That’s from Doctrine and Covenants 121:34–35. God does not have a list of favorites to which we must hope our names will someday be added. He does not limit the chosen to a restricted few. Rather, you and I ultimately can choose to be chosen through the righteous exercise of our moral agency. So it seems to me that the Nephites chose to be chosen even if they’re back in the wilderness. And maybe we can choose to be chosen, whether we live in Zion or in Manitoba or in Senegal or anywhere in the world, we can choose to be chosen and find our own promised land wherever we are. Okay, that’s my little, gotta try on that. Then we come to Isaiah, and it’s sort of why Isaiah. Jacob has been set apart. One, the Nephites go into their own land here. They start to organize, and Nephi starts setting up things. And I think it’s also he’s setting up for a changing of the guard, because Nephi’s I don’t know, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, I don’t know how old he is, but he can look back thirty and forty years, so he, so he’s that old. And can I say, I think it’s been hard living in the wilderness. It hasn’t been cushy, cushy times. And he’s setting up, Jacob has been set apart, and he’s decided, Nephi has asked him to read Isaiah to the people. And this is sort of interesting. I have from this book called Second Nephi by Terryl Givens. It says, Nephi concludes this brief account of community building by definitively replacing the focus on a promised place with an aspiration to become a promised people. So he says, okay, well, we’re not in the promised land. Let’s become a promised people. And then he sets Jacob up to read, and why Isaiah? Well, it’s because Isaiah is prophesying about their brethren in Israel, okay? He says, and Jacob says this, behold, my beloved brethren, I, Jacob, having been called of God, and ordained after the manner of this holy order, and having been consecrated by my brother Nephi, unto whom ye look as a king or a protector, and on whom ye depend for safety, behold, ye know that I have spoken unto you exceedingly many things. Nevertheless, I speak unto you again, for I am desirous for the welfare of your souls. Yea, mine anxiety is great for you, and ye yourselves know that it has ever been. For I have exhorted you with diligence, and I have taught you the words of my Father, and I have spoken unto you concerning all things which are written from the creation of the world. And now, behold, I would speak unto you concerning things which are, and which are to come. Wherefore, I read you the words of Isaiah, and where do they get the words of Isaiah? The brass plates. When Nephi left, he took the sword of Laban, he took the brass plates, and he took the Liahona. Those are directly mentioned. But he’s got the brass plates, and they are the words which my brother has desired that I should speak unto you, and I speak unto you for your sakes, that ye may learn and glorify the name of God. And now the words which I shall read are they which Isaiah spoke concerning all the house of Israel, wherefore they may be likened unto you, for ye are the house of Israel. And there are many things which have been spoken by Isaiah which may be likened unto you, because ye are the house of Israel. Anybody here from the house of Israel? I should ask for a show of hands, but I’ll raise my hand right around for the house of Israel. So why are they interested in the house of Israel? Well, these are their brethren. I have a grandfather who would sometimes speak a few Swedish phrases because he still remembered what he didn’t personally remember. He was a little blacked out sometimes. But his father came from Sweden, and we talked about interested in what’s going on in Sweden, okay? So they’re still interested in what’s happening in Israel. I’m hoping that they’re happy that they avoided the destruction of Jerusalem, but they’re doing that. And so in Nephi 6, oh, let’s see, did I want to read? Okay. Yeah, yes, I did want to read this. What do they learn from Isaiah? First, they learn that God can make any land a land of promise, a holy land. They have lived this principle, and their descendants will continue to experience its reality. Second, they learned that very real prophetic promises tied to their place in God’s designs for the human family are still intact despite their separation from their lands and kindred of their original roots in Israel. It is to these promises and assurances from Isaiah that Nephi devotes so much of his attention in the rest of the second book, because they are still entitled to the promises of the house of Israel. So in Second Nephi six, and now, verse eight, and now I, Jacob, would speak somewhat concerning these words, for behold, the Lord has shown me that those who were at Jerusalem from whence we came had been slain and carried away captive. Nevertheless, the Lord has shown unto me that they should return again, and he also has shown unto me that the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, should manifest himself unto them in the flesh. And after he should manifest himself, they should scourge him and crucify him according to the words of the angel who spake it unto me. So Jacob is receiving his own revelation, and now he’s receiving revelation of Christ’s coming. And I was always really excited when I found all of these references in Second Nephi to Christ, when I was, when my purpose for reading was looking for Christ. Here’s some of the places that I found it. And in Second Nephi chapter eight, now he’s talking about the second coming and the benefits of keeping the commandments. And because this is in the future, this is really speaking to us today because it’s in our future. For the Lord shall comfort Zion, he will comfort all her waste places, and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody. My righteousness is near, my salvation is gone forth, and mine arm shall judge the people. The isles shall wait upon me, and on mine arm shall they trust. Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath. For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner, but my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished. Hearken unto me, ye that know righteousness, the people in whose heart I have written my law. Fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be afraid of their revilings. For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool. But my righteousness shall be forever, and my salvation from generation to generation. I believe I thought this stuff was so important that he had, that he spends a lot of time in his books writing about what Isaiah had to say. So, what have we learned? And once again, an assignment, a challenge, or an invitation. What are you getting out of reading the Book of Mormon? Are you finding those things for that purpose that you set? Or are you finding different things? It doesn’t matter as long as you’re finding some purpose. Choose to become chosen people in your own promised land. You can be chosen, you can be living in the promised land on Shirley Lane, okay? Or Morningside Drive, or Camille, or wherever. Choose to be, because you, by living the commandments, you can make any place a promised land, and you can write your own psalm and pray it. And I hope you do. I’ve found this a meaningful part of my prayer life, and I hope you do too. Thank you for your attention, and I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

2. 

   13 Oct 2026

   Oct 13 2026 1 Nephi 1-4:12 by Lori Radman

   Oct 13 SIS (https://scriptureclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Oct-13-SIS.pdf)Download (https://scriptureclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Oct-13-SIS.pdf) Transcript Thank you so much for that prayer. I was just holding in—I feel like I’m kind of prayer needy. If you’ve even glanced at me sideways, I’ve asked for your prayers. There’s been a lot of thought and prayer that went into the decision of whether or not I could accept this calling to teach. I asked my family for some feedback, and I was met with some hesitation, surprisingly. So I asked what the hesitation might be, and I was told that when I’m preparing for lessons, I’m just not that much fun. So that’s definitely something that I’ve added to my prayers—that I can continue to do this and still be fun. But I have received comfort and assurance from the Lord that He will help me. But in addition to praying for me, I have been praying for each of you—each of you that come with whatever it is that you might be carrying at this time. I recognize that you all come for different reasons and different hopes of what you want to gain from this hour of being here. And for this reason, I am so grateful for the Book of Mormon. For what it has to offer, because I know that it is the Book of Mormon that can bring whatever it is that you might be in need of—whatever hope or peace or healing or assurance is found in the Book of Mormon, because it is the Book of Mormon that points us to that true source of hope and healing, which is our Savior, Jesus Christ. I was so inspired by Anita’s first class that she gave when she talked about finding a purpose and a focus in reading and in her scripture study. She commented about how we’re familiar with the stories in the scriptures, it’s something that we know that are comforting to us, but she wanted to challenge herself to read it with a central focus, and I believe she said she read it once focusing on the words of Christ and has since had other focuses and purposes. And when she said this, I knew that was something that I needed and that I wanted to do. I’m also curious if it motivated any of you, and if you have found a central focus or purpose this year in reading. But after deciding that and looking for what my focus might be this year, I was especially intrigued when I heard Jared Halverson talking about Nephi’s purpose in writing the Book of Mormon. In 1 Nephi chapter 6, verse 4, Nephi says, “For the fulness of mine intent is that I may persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved.” So with this, we know that everything that Nephi writes is going to point us towards Jesus Christ. And then Jared Halverson pointed out what he said is Nephi’s thesis statement. This is the first chapter of the Book of Mormon, the very last verse in the first chapter where Nephi says, “But behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.” That was it. That’s my purpose. That’s my focus—to focus on reading and searching these scriptures with the intent of seeing the tender mercies of the Lord. So this week’s assignment was 2 Nephi chapters 1 through 4, and right out of the gate, guess what we find? The tender mercies of the Lord. We have Father Lehi has gathered his children together. He’s getting old. He has some words that he wants to share with his children, and this is what he says: “And now it came to pass that after I, Nephi, had made an end of teaching my brethren, our father, Lehi, also spake many things unto them, and rehearsed unto them, how great things the Lord had done for them in bringing them out of the land of Jerusalem. And he spake unto them concerning their rebellions upon the waters, and the mercies of God in sparing their lives, that they were not swallowed up in the sea. And he also spake unto them concerning the land of promise, which they had obtained—how merciful the Lord had been in warning us that we should flee out of the land of Jerusalem. Why? Because if we had stayed, we would have perished. How merciful is the Lord.” Don’t you think that Lehi is just saying, do you want to see the evidence of God’s love? Do you really want to see how he has never forgotten us, how he’s been with us from the beginning? Look around. Look where you are. We’re here. We are in this land of promise. We are here safely. I get the feeling that Lehi, this father, doesn’t feel as though Laman and Lemuel are focusing on the Lord’s mercies. And it’s hard to blame them. Life hasn’t been easy for them. They’ve experienced every type of physical depravity. It looks nothing like what they had hoped. Do you ever get caught in this cycle of focusing on what’s not going right? Is there any chance that we can relate a little bit? I think that occasionally we start to ruminate on what’s not going right, on a prayer that wasn’t answered in the way that we’d hoped, in the way that our life looks, in the way that we might have been wronged. I don’t think that Lehi’s trying to invalidate all of the hard, but I think he knows that ruminating on the dark keeps us from seeing the light. But what if it’s our nature? What if it’s our nature just to be a little bit skewed towards our lack? Is that something that we can change? Can we change our nature? Neuroscientists tell us that the more we repeat a behavior, the deeper a neural pathway in our brain becomes. This is called Hebb’s law. It’s neurons that fire together, wire together. It’s basically what you think about becomes your reality. So one of the greatest gifts of God is that he has created us and created our brains to be able to change. We can change our very nature. This means that you can create new neural pathways. It’s just that your brain wants to go to that path of least resistance. So it will continue down the path that is well-worn. So if you want to create a new neural pathway, you have to repeat a behavior over and over again. So if I want to bypass the very deeply worn neural pathway that is created by picking up my phone, which is just an impulse now, I have to focus on instead picking up my scriptures. And the more I pick up my scriptures and not my phone, the deeper this neural pathway becomes. The easier it is for my brain to go to this neural pathway. What we choose to think about is deeply influenced by our image and knowledge of God, which is what I think that Lehi is desperately wanting his children to know. He wants them to know God, he wants them to know his nature, and he wants his sons to respond to the greatness of God by openly loving and honoring him. He knows that when we understand—when they understand God’s greatness—we want more and more of him. I personally really want my children and grandchildren to focus on the goodness of God, on the goodness that’s in their lives. My son mentioned to me recently that he spent a lot of time and effort creating what he’d hoped would be this really fun weekend for his three kids, who are ages ten and seven and four. He said he felt like the weekend went really well, everyone had a great time, and then when their grandparents had met up with them later and asked them what they did that weekend, they all shrugged their shoulders and said they couldn’t remember. My son said he just felt so defeated. How could they not remember? I feel like Lehi has a little bit of this similar feeling. How do you not remember? How can you ignore the goodness of God? How can you ignore what we just did this weekend? And then he kind of gives us a little insight as to how we remember, in that he continues to bring it up. He continues to talk to them about it. He continues to remind them about all of the ways that the Lord has shown up in their lives. And that is why in the scriptures we hear over and over again, remember, remember, remember. So when we remember, it changes our very focus, which changes our very nature. So Lehi’s come to the end of his life, and he’s gathered his family together for some counsel. He’s going to teach them, he’s going to bless them, and he’s going to bear his testimony to them. What message do I want to leave my loved ones? I have a new daughter-in-law, Ellie. We had a conversation recently about fathers and counsel. Ellie told me that she remembers many conversations with her own father growing up in Mexico. When Ellie was born, her father applied for a green card for his daughter, knowing that if and when that application was accepted, she would need to leave his care and his protection and move to the US. He knew very well that that time could come before either of them felt ready. What would you say to your children if you knew that you had limited time while they were in your care and protection? Ellie said her father took every opportunity to fill her with his wisdom and love and counsel. She said many of their conversations centered around situations that had moral implications, and that they would go something like this. He would say, listen, if X happens, you have a choice. You can choose to follow the crowd, you can choose to follow the world and where those natural man tendencies lead you. But pick up that thread, see where that choice leads. Could that choice lead to this, but might then lead to this, and it could then lead you to a place that you don’t want to be? Make the choice, he said, that is going to protect you and protect our family name. Ellie’s father was trying to teach her to think celestial, and she felt his love. Well, when throughout all of those conversations, at seventeen, that application was finally accepted, and she left her father’s physical presence. But his words stayed with her and have been a beacon and a protection to her to this day. In this last conference session, Elder Christofferson had his landmark talk, “O Be Wise.” He said, at different times, President Nelson has reminded us that as we make current decisions, we should always be asking, where will this lead? What is the effect on our future of the decisions we make in the present? And then this one by Amy Wright, if we become casual in our discipleship of Jesus Christ, it could be catastrophic for our children. Did you just really feel this from Lehi? Turn to 2 Nephi 1:21. He says, “And now that my soul might have joy in you, and that I might leave this world with gladness because of you.” And then in verse 28, we learn that Lehi really would love to give his sons, the oldest sons, the birthright blessing. He says, “And now, my son, Laman, and also Lemuel and Sam, and also my sons who are the sons of Ishmael, behold, if ye will hearken unto the voice of Nephi ye shall not perish. And if ye will hearken unto him I leave unto you a blessing, yea, even my first blessing.” I mean, after all of this dissent and murmuring and mocking, this father has not given up. He is still pleading for them to choose the greater portion. With this, I think Lehi is mirroring our own Father in Heaven, who never gives up on his children, who continues to desire a covenant relationship with them, so that he might more fully bless them, empower them, and protect them. Verse 13, Lehi pleads, “O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound, which are the chains which bind the children of men, that they are carried away captive down to the eternal gulf of misery and woe.” Wake up, he’s saying. Wake up from the sleep of ignorance and apathy, and from the sleep of complacency, from the sleep of self-indulgence. Wake up to your own part that you’re playing in your own misery and discontent. Lili Anderson said that she sees this as a call to wake up from our natural man’s desires to cover and deny our sins. She says this has application to every one of us. We’re all bound by something. We have great privileges through our covenants that we live beneath because we are human. And when we undertake to cover our sins and lie to ourselves, when we are selfish with our husband, when we hide resentment toward a parent for past mistakes, when we yell at our kids and justify it, it is excusing ourselves. It is dumbing down the principles of the gospel to match up with our behavior. We justify and rationalize, I was under stress, I was hungry, I was in a bad place. And you know what? I pay my tithing. I go to the temple. I serve. I’m good enough. We pretend that we’re living in better harmony with our covenants than we are, and behold, the heavens withdraw themselves. All about power, all about light and truth, intelligence, blessing, protection, withdraws. This is how we fall into a deep sleep. Three times he implores his sons to arise from the dust, which is a way to say, I want you to arise from your low station, from the dust of the natural world, from the natural man. I want you to fully trust in the Lord and stay true to the covenants that you’ve made with him. Verse 23, he implores them to awake, put on the armor of righteousness, shake off the chains which they’re bound, and come forth out of obscurity, and arise from the dust. This is similar language to Isaiah 52, with the themes of waking up, rising from the dust, putting on sacred clothing, and removing chains. There have been multiple things written about this, about this imagery of being taken from the dust. Apparently in the ancient Near Eastern world, being taken from the dust was indicative of a covenant with deity. It was part of a coronation ceremony. It was to arise, put on sacred clothing, remove chains, and be accepted as a covenant partner. This has been so incredibly fascinating to me. All of a sudden, as I’m reading, I am seeing references to dust and rising and it rising everywhere. We have Lehi speaking to his sons about rising from the dust while he’s preparing to go down into the dust. Adam and Eve were formed from the dust. Jesus took his finger and wrote in the dust, and then washed the dust from the disciples’ feet. So if dust is the earth, and perhaps symbolic of our fallen world, of our flesh, of our natural man, then we’re being asked to choose the things that are of the spirit and not of the flesh. And if we’re to arise, that means that we’ve fallen. We live in a fallen world. Adam fell, that men might be. And as mortal men and women, we will fall over and over and over again. When Alma the Younger was visited by an angel of the Lord in the midst of his rebellion, he was so astonished that he fell to the earth. He couldn’t get up. And you know what the angel said to him? Alma, arise, arise. Arise and stand. Suddenly I had this image of Alma, the angel reaching out his hand, pulling Alma up from the ground, from the dust, kind of patting the dust off of him, saying, this is the dust of the world. This is the dust of your misconceptions. What is our dust? What of this fallen world and of our natural man tendencies are clinging to us? What do we need help in brushing off? Lehi takes it one step further in verse 21. He says, “Arise from the dust, my sons, and be men, and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity.” With so much of what is being talked about in the media lately about men, this one really stood out to me. What does it mean to be a man today? Men are under attack. But let’s be honest, we’re all under attack. These are the last days, and Satan has pulled out all the stops, and he has redoubled his efforts on men. Dr. Leonard Sax, who is a physician and a psychologist, and has done extensive research on national trends that are affecting our children, namely boys, wrote a book called Boys Adrift. In the book, Dr. Sax explores what he saw as a growing problem. Our boys are losing motivation in school. They’re disengaging from achievement, and they’re struggling to find direction. He argues that there are six major contributors to this trend. I’m not going to go over all six, but one of them, he said, was changes in education. He said, if you want to know if a school is a good school for your boys, check the honor roll. He said, traditionally, the honor roll had some equilibrium. It was pretty equal girls and boys on the honor roll. He said, maybe skewed a little towards boys. You check the honor roll in schools now, they’re girls. Very few boys on the honor roll. He said, if you want to know if it’s a good school, see if there’s a little more equilibrium with boys and girls. And then I had a friend point out this recent article from the Deseret News. Do you see this? The headline says, America has thirty million single young men. Even Utah is feeling it. Their researchers are pointing to three major factors: gambling, gaming, and pornography. In Elder Christofferson’s talk, “Let Us Be Men,” he said, in large measure, manhood is defined in our relationship with women, and I would say in how women treat men. Godly womanhood and godly manhood can be reflected in how we interact and how we treat each other. In verse 21 of chapter 1, Lehi alludes to this when he says, “Be determined in one heart and one mind and united in all things.” Again, Lili Anderson, who’s a clinical psychologist, she suggests that we put this question to our teens. What would it look like for your mom and dad to be united? She said she hopes that their response would look something like, it would be that they would come together on something, not necessarily agreeing on it, not necessarily coming at a decision the same way or the same direction, but being able to work together and come together and be united in that purpose. She said, then ask your teen, what would it look like for you to be united with your parents? Would it look like you being willing to submit to their will, to their goals, to their focus and their desires? Do you have enough trust in them? I think we can ask ourselves this same question about our own heavenly parents. What does it look like for us to be united with them? Do we have enough trust in them to submit our wills? Elder Christofferson said this about men. I think this is a very comprehensive list that I think is incredible. He said, real men are one heart and one mind. They unite with others to build Zion. They don’t feel the need to do everything on their own. They’re not contentious, and they are peacemakers. They don’t put others down. They’re anxiously engaged in a good cause. They wear something—robes of righteousness or the armor of God. They are warriors of a different kind of battle. They fight for truth and righteousness. They can be great leaders, but also great followers. They are team players and humble enough to recognize the experience, goodwill, and counsel from other people. They don’t rebel. They move the work of God forward, and they don’t seek power and authority over others. A real man is not afraid to confront what needs to be confronted. He has the courage to speak the truth and stand up for it. As leaders of righteousness, they are sometimes required to speak with sharpness, endowed with the power of God. They follow the promptings of the Spirit. I saw a clip recently from a podcast interview with Matthew McConaughey. He was asked what he thought the difference was between a nice guy and a good man. And not that I’m holding up Matthew McConaughey as the gold standard of manhood, but I thought that he had some good points. He said, a nice guy gets along. He doesn’t necessarily have discernment or judgment, and is not quite sure what he stands for or stands against, but people like him. Conversely, a good man knows what he stands for, and when that is tested, he may not be perceived as a nice guy. He said, this is much harder, because it will mean that you’re not always the most popular or the most affable. Gone are the days when it was enough just to teach our children to be nice. We are all going to be asked to stand, to stand up for, to stand up to our beliefs and our God. What do I stand for, and will I stand for it when I’m confronted with meanness and hostility, when I know that it could cause me to lose friendships or be mocked? What do our children see us standing for or standing against? Do they, or our coworkers, or our extended family, our social media followers, do they know without a doubt what we stand for? I hate conflict. I just want everyone to get along, which is why it really pulled at my mama heartstrings when I read a part from Catherine Arviset Starr’s Ali’s Mission email a couple weeks ago. In it, Ali writes, it’s been a discouraging week, and we were feeling the burden of missionary work. We had a lot of negative interactions with people this week. And we were often treated unkindly. We got sworn at a few times before we could even open our mouths and had some scary encounters with people. In the face of persecution and conflict, Ali is learning to stand for convictions, to suffer for Christ’s sake. One of the sons that Lehi is not telling to awake and arise and shake off the dust and the chains that he speaks to is his son Jacob. Where in chapter 2, he tells Jacob that he knows that he has been subject to much trauma and abuse. And it is clear that Lehi is not concerned with Jacob’s eternal destiny as much as he is with his psychological well-being. Instead of spending any time admonishing him, Lehi is able to teach. In 2 Nephi chapter 2, verse 1, it says, “And now, Jacob, I speak unto you: Thou art my firstborn in the days of my tribulation in the wilderness. And behold, in thy childhood thou hast suffered afflictions and much sorrow, because of the rudeness of thy brethren. Nevertheless, Jacob, my firstborn in the wilderness, thou knowest the greatness of God; and he shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain.” So you mean that there is purpose? There is purpose in affliction? All of that affliction can be for our good. How do we do this? That’s all chapter 2 tells us. It is through this, it is through God’s great plan of happiness, the great plan of salvation. Scholars have said that chapter 2 of 2 Nephi is so doctrinally rich that if all Joseph Smith gave us was this chapter, it would be enough to prove that he was a prophet of God. Because where did he, Joseph, get the deep and expansive doctrine taught in the Book of Mormon, much of which was contrary to the religious beliefs of his time? For example, contemporary Christianity taught that the fall was what? It was negative. But we view it, and because of this verse, as a positive step forward. He teaches us about the fall. He teaches about the purpose of affliction, of opposition, which is because of agency and culminates with the role of the Holy Messiah, the Anointed One. Freedom, eternally and earthly, comes from the right use of agency. You will never gain freedom until you make a right choice. Captivity and suffering come from the wrong use of that agency. We have the power to choose, which is made possible by opposition. Some choices are right, some are wrong, and the way we know the difference is by the law. The law tells us that there must be an enticement. Verse 5, “And men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil.” In verse 17, Lehi tells that an angel of God fell from heaven, became a devil, sought that which was evil before God, and then sought the misery of all mankind. I think Lehi is saying, let’s be very clear. Evil exists. There is good, and there is good’s direct opposite, which is evil. Satan chose evil. He became evil. His works are evil. I’m going to share a very unpopular opinion. I didn’t love the classic novel by John Steinbeck, East of Eden. The portrayal of the antagonist, Cathy Ames, as pure evil made me so uncomfortable. She’s introduced in the book with this phrase, “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.” And then this line, “She was born with a malformed soul.” Apparently, in a letter to a family friend, Steinbeck wrote that Cathy was supposed to be representative of Satan. One review of the book said that there is no logical explanation for Cathy’s misdeeds. She is evil simply because she wants to be. And I know what you’re gonna say. This is the point. The book is written as a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel in the Garden of Eden, the battle between good and evil. The article continues, the novel’s most famous chapter introduces us to the Hebrew term timshel, or “thou mayest,” which summarizes East of Eden’s moving thesis: no matter who you are or where you come from, you have the power to choose good over evil. And that’s exactly how we know that Cathy’s misdeeds are not the result of trauma or suffering, but the consequence of personal choice. Cathy chooses evil because she wants to be evil. So back to my discomfort, now I’m uncomfortable with my being uncomfortable, and apparently so is Hollywood, and as a reflection, the rest of the world. This is our moral relativism. There’s a new screen adaptation of East of Eden out right now. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t offer my opinion on it. But apparently, the creators were also uncomfortable with Cathy being evil for the sake of being evil, because instead they want you to, quote, fall in love with Cathy. One reviewer writes, the writer of this screen adaptation, Zoe Kazan, defended her choice to make Cathy Ames into a sympathetic character in the following terms, quote, “I’m just really curious about, like, well, what if we think of Cathy not as the embodiment of evil, but as a person who does really bad things? And I think we learn more about ourselves if we don’t think about evil people as being that different from us,” end quote. The review continues. We have created a culture that no longer believes in morality. As a result, when evil does dare to exist in our art, it is always either downplayed or tempered by some heart-wrenching backstory. East of Eden’s creators want you to fall in love with Cathy because as a society, we have stopped believing in personal agency. A key word in Lehi’s description is “from”—to know good from evil. We don’t need to experience good and evil if we can know good from evil. President Oaks tells this story when he was younger, and he’s with his dad, and he asks his dad if he’s ever had alcohol, and his dad says, no, I haven’t, and he says, well, I wanna try it. And his dad says, well, why do you wanna try it? And he says, well, I just wanna know what it, you know, what it’s like. I just wanna know what it tastes like. I wanna know what it’s like. And his dad says, well, you know, it’s not good. He said, well, how do you know it’s not good? You’ve never tried it. And so his dad pulls over right next to a cow patty and says, why don’t you go out there and grab that cow patty and take a big bite? And he said, I’m not gonna do that. Why aren’t you gonna do that? ’Cause it’s not good. How do you know it’s not good? You’ve never tried it. His point being, you don’t need to try it to know good from evil. Agency was a necessary part of God’s plan, in that it allowed us the opportunity to grow and to change and to become. And Lehi doesn’t throw Eve under the bus. In verse 22, he says, “And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.” Verse 23, “And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.” Some think that if they had not partaken of the fruit, they would have stayed in the garden, and life would have been peaceful and wonderful and blissful, but that reality is wrong. The fall was part of the plan because they were not happy in Eden. They were in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery, doing no good, for they knew no sin. Adam never woke up and said, what a beautiful day, compared to what? He had no other frame of reference. Satan’s plan leaves no room for growth. It would be as though Adam and Eve came to the earth and then returned the same. I thought about this in relationship to other events in our lives, other things that we might return and leave. What if we left for a mission and returned the same? Unchanged. What if we experienced motherhood or any other relationship throughout our lives, and there was no growth, there was no change? What if we went through this really difficult challenge or trial? No change. It would all be for naught. How grateful are we for a plan that provides an opportunity for us to grow, to learn, to change? Agency requires choice and opposition and law and enticement, and the fall makes all of this possible. I think the great question that many ask throughout time has been, why is there so much suffering? Why am I in this messed up world? I have a hard time seeing the love of God in a world where there is so much pain. Remember this talk from Kristen Yee, “The Joy of Our Redemption.” She said, in C.S. Lewis’s writings, Aslan poses three words to a man who has entangled himself in his own devices: “Oh, humankind, how cleverly you defend yourself from all that might do you good.” Where might you and I be defending ourselves from those things that might do us good? Let us not defend ourselves from the good that God desires to bless us with, from the love and mercy that he desires us to feel, from the light and knowledge he desires to bestow upon us, from the healing that he knows we so readily need, from the deeper covenant relationship he intends for all his sons and daughters. Like all of you, I have known seasons of and experiences of immense struggle and pain. I have felt complete despair over the choices of loved ones and regrets over my own. I’ve been in a life flight helicopter with the most absolute grip and fear that I might lose a two-year-old child to drowning. I have felt anger and fear and uncertainty around my own physical health and the challenges that that has created, coupled with the insecurities around the impact that those had on my own appearance. But I’ve also been blessed with angels, some here, some on the other side of the veil. And I felt gratitude so deep that it’s made it hard to breathe. I wish I could say that I have faced each challenge in my life with complete faith and trust in the Lord, that I’ve allowed him to stretch me and grow me and embrace me each time with his love, but that hasn’t always been the case. But I’m learning, I’m learning to offer myself grace for those times that I wasn’t able to receive what God had for me in those moments. Because I know that the more I come to know about my Savior and my Father in Heaven, the more I come to understand that all of this—this whole human, this whole life experience—has been motivated by pure love, and I’m learning to trust him. I think one of the things that these scriptures help us to know is that we chose this, all of it. And I don’t think we were hesitant in our decision. I think we were standing at that gate and maybe even shaking it a little bit. I think we were saying, I want to be like you, Lord. I want to see what you can do. I think I’ll be valiant. Give me a chance to know what a physical body really feels like. I want to know what it’s like to be in relationships. I want to find out what hunger is and to know what it is to be tired. I want to know how to love people in all those circumstances. I think we said, I want the whole experience. I love this. Henri Nouwen said, “We tend to stay away from mourning and dancing, too afraid to cry, too shy to dance. We become narrow-minded complainers, avoiding pain, and also true human joy. While we live in a world subject to the evil one, we belong to God. Let us mourn and let us dance.” Neal Maxwell said, “Sorrow enlarges the heart, creating a wider expanse for joy.” I feel this. I really do feel as though I have a greater capacity for joy. Although some days I wonder if it’s this greater capacity for joy or if it’s just grandkids. But I don’t know, I feel more joy. Lehi’s great message is, “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” Just want to close with a couple of thoughts. This one is going to be hard. You can do hard with Jesus, or you can do hard alone. When you do hard with Jesus, the hard becomes holy. And then finally, this thought from Elder Neil L. Andersen’s talk, “The Atoning Love of Jesus Christ,” he says, “As you continue to place your trust in Him, your clouds of darkness and anguish dissolving in the night will be transformed into cascading tears of joy and peace in the morning’s light. Your sorrows shall be turned into joy, and your joy no one taketh from you. That moment will come. I testify it will come.” I just want to add my witness to that and say it in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

3. 

   13 Oct 2026

   Combined YW and RS Conference with Sister Shima Baughman – Oct 7

   Transcript – Shima Baughman So I have to call her Ms. Howells because she was my daughter’s teacher, so I feel like, thank you, Ms. Howells. You can’t say no to anything your teacher, your kid’s teacher asks, right? It’s like, you come speak at my conference. Yes, I will. When is it? I will be there. Waltmans, thank you so much for that. Katie, Ashley, Lois, that was so beautiful beyond. I wish, I was trying to clap, but then I’m like, clap, no clap. Okay, we’re not clapping, but I would be, I was clapping in my heart. That was beyond beautiful, and yes, that made it worth all of our while to be here, even if everything goes wrong after that. But it’s so great to see you all here. I want to start to tell you about my high school graduation. I was seventeen years old. I was wearing white, a white dress, cap and gown, a brand new pair of white Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals. They were brand new. And they had a little bit of a heel. And I thought I looked very beautiful and grown up. I felt grown up. So we have this large ceremony where I grew up. It’s at a track. And there’s over a thousand people in this audience and families there, your friends are there, teachers, strangers. And I had been told right before that started that I was going to receive an award. So that meant I had to go up to the stage twice. Once for the award and once later for my diploma. So when my name was called for this award, I stood up, I smoothed my dress, I walked to the stage, shook the principal’s hand, I took the award, I smiled, and then I turned around to walk back to my seat, down this metal ramp with this hollow metallic sound that my shoes made as I walked on it, in front of a thousand people who are now all watching me walk. About halfway down that ramp in my new white Dr. Scholl’s shoes, I lost my balance and slipped and fell. I went down hard. I cut my knee open on the metal of the ramp. I scrambled up, cause, you know, what do you do? And I finished walking back to my seat with blood running down my leg, and I was trying to pretend that I hadn’t been deeply humiliated and embarrassed in front of every single person I’ve ever met. But the ceremony wasn’t over at that point, right? I still had to walk up and down that ramp again in these shoes I clearly didn’t know how to walk in for my diploma. So my name’s called the second time. I walk up the ramp, I shake the hand, I take the diploma, and then I have to walk down this ramp again past the thousand people that I just embarrassed myself in front of, and I was terrified. I didn’t want to fall again. I didn’t want to bleed again. So I made a decision. I would walk so carefully down that ramp that I couldn’t possibly fall. I would tiptoe. I would inch. I would crawl down the ramp if I had to. So I did. I tiptoed down the ramp, one tiny step at a time, so slowly that I think the principal had to call three more names before I reached the bottom. And as I’m tiptoeing, already humiliated, my knee bleeding through my dress, the audience began to laugh. They were roaring, actually. A thousand people couldn’t help themselves. Ha, ha, ha, the girl with the white shoes who fell down the first time is now sneaking down the ramp like a cartoon mouse. I want to tell you what I was thinking on that ramp, because I think every woman in this room has been there. Maybe not at a metal ramp, at a graduation maybe, but sometime. Sometime where you fell once and you didn’t want to fall again. And so instead of walking normally, you inched. You shrank yourself. You tried to manage how you appeared so that you ended up looking more strange, not less. I wasn’t trusting my steps anymore after that fall, and the truth is I didn’t start tiptoeing on that ramp. I was tiptoeing for a long time. I had been afraid to be myself for years before I even put on my white shoes. To understand why, I have to take you back further than that graduation to where I was born. I was born in Iran, and my family was Muslim growing up. We were Persian, my parents were both educated and very politically engaged, my mother especially. My mother’s a very brave woman, much braver than she even thinks she is, but she fought for freedom and democracy in Iran. And at the time, and even now, fighting for those things came at a very heavy cost, and she paid that cost. My mother was imprisoned as a political prisoner in Iran for her work for the cause of religious freedom, freedom of speech, and democracy. I want you to imagine that for a moment, a young woman, and at this point a mother, she has my sister and me as little kids, ends up being sentenced to a political prison just because she dared that human beings should be free. The conditions that she was held, and I won’t really describe in detail, but there was a time she describes where she was held in a prison called Evin, it’s infamous, and recently came in the news as the Iran protests happened again, where her captors would randomly execute a certain number of prisoners every night. And she said you could hear a pin drop as they were executing because all the people that were in the cell being held wanted to hear exactly how many of their friends were being killed at random. What do you think she did in that prison? Well, I’ll tell you. She prayed. She had learned to pray from her mother. She didn’t have the gospel of Jesus Christ, didn’t know anything about it, but she knew there was a God, and from her cell she prayed. She prayed for her daughters, for her family that she couldn’t see. And during this time, she had a dream that she was in America. And this confused her because she had eight more years in prison. At this point, she had already served two. She dreamed she was flying above some of the most beautiful fall colors on a plane, and she was over a place that she’d never been before and never even dreamed of in America. And at the same time, outside of this prison, my dad was a neurosurgeon. And during this period, a very high-ranking religious leader from Iran needed a very difficult medical procedure. My father was blessed enough to perform it, and by skill or grace, we’ll never know, probably prepared by the hand of God, though, the procedure was successful. And because of that, this leader asked my dad, what can I do for you? And it turned out his wife and sister were both being held in political prison, and so they were able to be released six months later. And through miracles, my family was given the opportunity to leave Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and to immigrate to America, to start over. I was seven years old when we arrived in America, and I knew exactly two English words that my mom taught me the day we were leaving, yes and no. And I used both incorrectly. Yes was really hard, so I’d say no a lot because it sounds like nah, nah, no, that’s the same word in Farsi. So, but yes, I did not remember, and so I would get in trouble quite a lot at school. So this is where our story turns from miracle into miracle. Within six months of arriving in America, my father, who was now working in this hospital setting, met a nurse, and she happened to be a Latter-day Saint, a convert, and she was from Iran. And so she didn’t see my father as a, you know, foreign physician with a heavy accent or a complicated past. She looked at him and she felt this prompting from the Holy Ghost, invite his family over for family home evening. And she felt it, but she didn’t act on it. She thought, they’re new here. they don’t know me. This is strange. I, I won’t do it. Then she said she felt the prompting a second time, invite them to family home evening. And again, she hesitated. This time she thought, no, because they’re here for one year. If I invite them and they come to my house and learn about Jesus, they have to go back to Iran and they might get killed. But then she says, she describes her third time getting this prompting. She said, she’s at a, my dad’s at a water fountain pausing to get a drink. And then she gets the prompting again. This time she finally obeys and walks up to my father. She invites him and we came. And that from that one family home evening, this nurse that was prompted three times and finally listened, my family was able to learn about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and we were baptized into the church. I just marvel at that, and I, you know, so happy to be able to share this with you because I think about my mother praying in a prison cell in Iran, my father having the opportunity to perform a procedure on a religious leader, grant, getting granted passage to America, and within a few months being introduced to the church by this incredible nurse in the hospital. And here I am today in Holladay, Utah, more than thirty years later, with five kids of my own, a marriage in the temple, serving in the church, working at BYU, having a covenant family, just because this nurse followed a prompting to invite us over. This is the wisdom that my family first learned is that walking with Christ means trusting promptings that we don’t fully understand. I think of the scripture in Isaiah, and it shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer, and while they are yet speaking, I will hear. Before my mother had even finished praying in her cell, God was already arranging a nurse on the other side of the world, and before my father had finished his procedure, God was already preparing our visa. Before any of us knew there was a thing called Latter-day Saints, the Holy Ghost was already nudging a nurse to invite us to her home. God was answering my mother’s prayers in a language none of us yet spoke. So you would think that a girl who came from these miraculous circumstances, who had been delivered out of a prison cell from Iran by the hand of God, would walk into American life confident and grateful and sure of who she was. I did not. I want to tell you what I tried to be, because I think this part’s more universal than the prison cell story. the prison cell story is my background, but the next part, I think, is something that a lot of us might be able to relate to. When I started elementary school in America, I wanted to, more than anything in the world, to be a girl named Kimberly. And I don’t mean a specific Kimberly. I would have been okay being Jennifer. The blonde-haired Kimberly with freckles who carried an L.L. Bean backpack and wore Gap jeans, who walked into the classroom seeming to belong there without any effort. And I was none of those things. I was a small Persian girl with thick, dark hair and an accent and a family that ate food that no one else’s family ate. And I looked at the Kimberleys and I was convinced that the key to belonging was to become one of them, preferably one named Kimberley, preferably taller, blonde, with freckles. Now, it didn’t occur to me at seven or eight years old that maybe the Kimberleys might also be struggling with something. And it didn’t occur to me that the freckled girl might be wishing that she might have tan skin. we were both miserable maybe for something that the other wished they had. This is my first version of what I would call a wisdom deficit. I didn’t yet know what wisdom was. I thought wisdom might be figuring out how to be more like the girls who seemed to be doing it right. I thought wisdom meant changing myself, editing myself, and learning, and my sister and I would actually impart wisdom to each other every night as we tutored each other, and we’d get home from school and teach each other the things we learned about being American, how to be more like Kimberly. One of the things, you don’t wear the same clothes every day to school, right? There’s a lot of things we taught each other and tried to, to do to fit in. Now fast forward a decade. By the time I was a college student at BYU, I had not entirely outgrown this impulse to be someone else. I had only changed the someone. So as a BYU student, I had a, a chance to do an internship in South Africa. I was so excited, but I thought, I really want to belong here, and so I wanted to be embraced by this community, so I decided the best way I could fit in in South Africa is to grow dreadlocks. Yep. Now, here’s the problem. My hair doesn’t quite easily form dreadlocks. I have Persian hair, and it behaves differently than hair that dreads, but to make it dread, I learned you have to have some damage to it. So I went to a local store in South Africa, and I bought some dye. And I first tried to dye it brown, and that didn’t quite make it dread properly. So after seven of attempts, I ended up with a color of hair I can only describe accurately as lion mane. So there I was, a Persian girl at BYU, doing an internship in South Africa with damaged hair the color of a lion’s mane, trying to grow dreadlocks. Now, I want you to know in that moment, finally and ironically, I achieved my childhood dream that I’d given up on years earlier. I had become a blonde. And to, to be honest, that story is funny now, but it wasn’t funny then, because underneath the lion mane hair was the same Persian girl who wanted to be Kimberly, the same instinct. I was trying to be something other than what God had made, still tiptoeing down the ramp, afraid to fail. I just chosen a different costume. And that’s obviously the opposite of wisdom. It was a long, exhausting, decades-spanning project of trying to be enough by trying to be somebody else. And the only thing that pulled me out of that project, the only thing that’s ever stopped me from tiptoeing has been Jesus Christ. And he, he’s never made me prettier or thinner or blonder or changed my name to Jennifer, but he showed me what wisdom actually was. When we use the wisdom, the word wisdom today, We sometimes think of it associated with something like intelligence, strategy, right? The ability to figure out the right answer in a difficult situation, being smart in a way that’s impenetrable. In the world’s vocabulary, wisdom sounds performative, something that means oppressive, learned through mistakes or hard-earned life experience. But that is not wisdom in scripture. In scripture, wisdom is a gift that you ask for. James taught it. He said, if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. That’s the verse that sent a boy named Joseph into a grove of trees, and it’s a verse that still sends us to our knees. Wisdom is asked for, and it’s given. When I have asked, the wisdom he’s given me has come to two simple things. Wisdom is accepting who God made you to be and trusting that you don’t need to be anyone else. And wisdom is walking with Christ, especially in his holy house. Everything else I want to share with you today highlights one of those two truths. The wisdom of Jesus Christ is something completely different. It doesn’t come from old age or cleverness or even being right. It’s steady work of walking with someone in a way that lets them to be seen. It’s taking a longer road, asking a question when you already know the answer, or being patient enough with a person’s disappointment to let it speak before you reply. I want to take you to a place in scripture where Jesus does this beautifully. It’s a moment that defines to me what wisdom in Christ looks like. On the day of the resurrection, on the very day that Mary Magdalene found the empty tomb, two disciples were walking from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles away. One of them’s named Cleopas, but we don’t know what the other one’s name was. But they were walking and grieving. They had spent the last three years of their life following a man who they came to believe as a Messiah, and three days earlier they had watched him die. The scripture says, and they talked together of all these things which had happened. That’s what grief looks like. Two people walking down a road, trying to make sense of this tragedy that they just witnessed. And while they’re walking, Jesus came up beside them. But this is the part of the story that’s remarkable. They didn’t recognize him. The scripture said, but their eyes were holden that they should not know him. The resurrected Christ is walking beside them, and they had no idea. So I want to ask you something. If, if you were Jesus and you had just been resurrected, having defeated death, and you found two of your grieving disciples on the road, what would you do? I, it’s clear to me what I would do. I would reveal myself immediately. I’d say, Cleopas, my friend, it’s me. Look at me, I’m alive. Look at my hands. I would shortcut the whole thing. I would skip to the punchline. I wouldn’t waste a single second. But as we know, that’s not what Jesus does, right? Instead, he comes up alongside them and asks them a question. In the King James Version, it reads, what manner of communications are these that you have with one another as you walk and are sad? So in modern English, right, what does he say? He says, why are you sad? And, and what are you guys talking about? He asks them a question. He invites them to tell him what’s wrong. And Jesus, the resurrected Christ, the Son of God, who already knows every answer to every question they could possibly ask, doesn’t grab them by the shoulders. He doesn’t say, you’re getting this wrong. You should actually be happy. Let me, let me tell you why. He walks beside them. He asks them a question, and then he lets them talk. And they did talk. And they tell him about Jesus of Nazareth, and they tell him about the crucifixion. And then they say the line that I think must be one of the most quietly devastating sentences in the entire New Testament. They say, but we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel. We trusted, past tense, we don’t anymore. They told the resurrected Christ, who’s walking right beside them, that they had lost their faith in him. And he listened to every word. He let them say it. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t correct them. He didn’t say, stop, I’m right here. Look at me. He let them tell their disappointment all the way to the end. And then only did he, then after they get done speaking, then does he open his scriptures to them, beginning in Moses and talking about the prophets, he expounds to them all the scriptures of things about himself. He walks the long road with them and he talks to them as they walk. And when they reach Emmaus, he made as though he could have gone further, but he doesn’t impose himself. He waits to be invited and then they invite him. They said, come with us in the evening. It’s a day far spent. He comes in, he sits down, he took the bread, broke it, blessed it, gave it to them. And then at last the scripture says, their eyes were opened and they knew him. And then he vanishes out of their sight. And then comes this line that’s most instructive. The two disciples look at each other and said, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? Did not our hearts burn within us? Their hearts were burning the entire time, the whole seven mile walk. They hadn’t known it. They hadn’t known it was him, but something inside them was already responding to him before their eyes could see him. The wisdom that they were receiving was already changing them before they understood what they were receiving. That is what wisdom from Christ looks like. It’s a slow walk, a long question, the willingness to listen all the way to we trusted before you offer a single reply. It’s the choice not to shortcut what someone’s feeling. And breaking your bread at the end of the road, not even knowing who you were walking with. This is for us. I think of all of us. Next time one of our children or the people we love comes to us upset, and you can already see the three points that you want to teach them, right? I would love us all to remember Emmaus, to walk beside them, to ask the question. Tell, let them say we trusted. Their hearts will burn before they understand why. That is a godly pattern. Christ often walks alongside us in our disappointment before we recognize him. In the hardest seasons of our lives, the ones we said we used to trust, we hoped this would be different, he has been there with us, asking questions, listening, waiting to be invited in. My mother, in that prison cell in Iran, didn’t know the name of Jesus Christ, but he was walking with her along her road. Her heart, even within then, was burning, and her dream in prison gave her her vision of her future life, living in New York, where she would see the most beautiful fall colors imaginable, in the Hudson Valley, where I grew up. I want to tell you a story now for my own marriage. Because wisdom is not just something we admire in Jesus, it’s something that he wants to grow in us through the hardest parts of our lives. Years ago, after a painful first marriage and divorce, I went through a season of questioning my faith, even though my family had received it through such miracles. I had grown up as a Latter-day Saint, but as an adult, after most of my family had found their own spiritual paths, and after a divorce, I wasn’t sure anymore. I still believed in God, I still believed in Jesus Christ, but I had anger over my marriage and wondered, do I need a church? Do I need to get married in the temple? Could I have faith on my own? So I ran my own little experiment. I told my bishop that I’m stepping back from my callings in my ward for a time. I read scriptures with my young boys sometimes on Sunday mornings. We made sandwiches for the homeless. I prayed. I tried to serve my neighbors quietly and tried to worship God on my own terms. But I was missing something, and I couldn’t name it, but I was missing something that I couldn’t manufacture on my own, how, no matter how sincerely I tried. At the lowest point in that season, I knelt down and prayed and, and with tears asked God a direct question. I said, what is your spiritual path for me? Do you want me to be a member of the church? I have real questions, and I laid them out honestly, and then I waited. And two days later, I met my husband, Ryan. Now, I want you to understand what that means for someone in my position. I had been through one painful temple marriage. The last thing I was looking for was another temple marriage. I had told myself, and anyone that asked, that I was done with that chapter. My heart was closed to it. I wanted to marry a good person, but not somebody that was a member of the church. At this point, I barely knew Ryan, but of course I noticed immediately he was quite handsome. That was clear. But that wasn’t it. Something more profound happened. In the space of two days after this most honest prayer, something happened that I can’t explain in any other way. My heart softened. Not to Ryan exactly, though of course I was excited about this prospect, but my heart softened miraculously to the possibility of another temple marriage, of trusting again, of knowing without a doubt that I needed to fully engage in God’s church on the earth, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That softening wasn’t analytical, it was godly wisdom, the wisdom of an honest, fervent question answered by a powerfully kind God, the wisdom of being willing to ask a real question and accept the answer. And, you know, I’d love to tell you that that marriage to Ryan and what followed after was happily ever after. We actually met in April and got married in August. It was quite quick, even by LDS standards. But That happily ever after didn’t quite happen for us at first. being two people in their thirties together, one with two small children, another one who had been dating everybody, it seemed like, for eighteen years. Literally, we, we couldn’t go anywhere without meeting somebody that he dated. it’s probably there’s some in this room, some of your daughters, anyway. Yeah. So you, you see the struggles. It meant working through some hard moments for us, right? Ryan and I fought in our early marriage. We just didn’t see things the same way. I was a single mother. He was, you know, a single man, a really good single man, but, but still. So at one point we’re having a real, real bad fight, and Ryan has this inspired thought. He says, what if we go to the temple every week together? The best advice we applied in our marriage was to be in the house of the Lord as often as we could. This, I can’t say this with enough emphasis, this healed our marriage. It healed my past. The Draper Temple, the, the Taylorsville Temple, the Bountiful Temple, and my favorite, the Jordan River Temple, most efficient temple in the world, are all within thirty minutes of this space here. It’s my favorite place to pray, pray on earth, the house of the Lord, and I just have had all of the, the, some of the questions that I put on hold when I came back to church about women and the priesthood and our role there, it, the more time I spend in the house of the Lord, I feel very confident in my priesthood power, and all of those questions have just really gone away. I just know that in our future, we have this magnificent Power and this future that as women, and we’re integral to it. So I, I just, all of those issues in my past just went away. the Lord has told us what kind of place his house is, a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, house of learning, a house of God. When my own house feels disordered, which is a lot of times, I like to go to his. And I want to tell you specifically of what happens when I do. Just a little while ago, not too long ago, I was struggling with something with my two oldest sons. I have five kids, the, the two oldest are, are boys. They’re really good boys, but there was this particular issue that I’d been worried about for weeks, and I had a thought about it, and I prayed about it, I talked to Ryan about it, and the night before, I was going to sit down and have a real conversation with them. I told Ryan, this is my three-prong plan, these are the three things I’m going to say to them. And I thought it through real carefully. I told Ryan I was going to say these things, and he thought it was a great idea. He said, great. My plan was very reasonable, I have to say. Then the next day we go to the temple, and so I thought, before I talk to them, I’ll go to the temple and pray about it first. So I do my ordinance, I sit in the celestial room, and I pray, and I sit in the house of the Lord with my three points written down in my head, had everything ready, I was prepared. I was going to take these three points and deliver them, but as I sat there, the spirit whispered something that I didn’t expect at all. The spirit didn’t refine my three points or give me additional ones. It didn’t give me a better version of how to say it, more clever version, no. The spirit said, don’t say any of those things. Just love them. That was it. That was a whole revelation. Don’t say any of those things. Just love them. I’d gone in expecting to leave with my points, a blessing from the Lord on them, and instead I left with no point at all. I went home, I didn’t say the things, I didn’t lay it out. I, I loved my sons, and I held them, and I listened to them, and just had conversations with them that were much different than the ones I had planned to have. It was pure love, not instruction, more listening, less talking. That is a road to Emmaus. That’s Jesus on the road, refusing to shortcut his disciples’ grief and refusing to teach them before they have a chance to feel what they feel. The only way I’ve ever been able to access this kind of wisdom, the wisdom not to teach when I want to, is, is in the temple. Sister Patricia Holland, who I love, said something near the end of her life. She said, be quiet, be still, simplify, be meek and lowly of heart and pray. And I testify that miracles will come when we slow down, calm down, and kneel down. That to me is a temple in three lines. Wisdom is discipleship in life. It’s not knowing the perfect thing to say. Wisdom is knowing where to go when you don’t have the right answer. And for me, that place is always the house of the Lord. I want to tell you about another woman who walked into my office a few years ago. Her name is Hannah, I’m just changing her identity, obviously, but she’s a law student at BYU. She had been through trauma that I will not describe in detail. She’d been abused and mistreated by several people close to her, so much so that she asked me, before classes even began, that she would never want to be called on in my class, which is criminal law. She didn’t want to be looked at, she didn’t want to be tested, she just wanted to disappear. But her ears perked up one day when I spoke of forgiveness. So one day she came to my office, and I remember praying before she came that I might have the spirit with me, because I didn’t know what to say to her. Nothing in my training as a law professor trained me to deal with the kind of trauma that she was carrying. So she came to my office with her pencil and paper, wanting to leave with, with a list, things to work on, things to read, strategies, you know, how do we fix what’s going on. And I started to tell her some things. I started to talk about forgiveness and about Jesus Christ, and she picked up her pen to write down what I was saying. And as she did, the Spirit whispered something to me unmistakably, the same kind of whisper I heard before. It said, tell her there’s no list. Just tell her to go to the temple every week. So I said it, and Hannah looked at me and said, do you mean once a month? I’m in law school. And I said, no, what if we start with once a week? And she said, I have not been to the temple in four years, but we committed to go and to send each other a picture every week to be, to hold each other accountable. In her second week, she wrote me a text. She said, I don’t want to speak too soon, but honestly, just after going once to the temple, a lot of good things have just fallen into place. I choose to believe that God is already helping me more from just even going twice, but I will keep being consistent. Hannah had been going to therapy for years. She was not seeing the results she needed until she started going to the house of the Lord. On her third week, she wrote me again. She said, I honestly feel like I’ve seen a fire hose of blessings since I’ve been going to the temple, which feels too good to be true. She says, for the last several years, my every day has been rough because I’ve had night terrors in the evening. I’ve had flashbacks and panic attacks during the day, but every day I went to the temple, my night terrors stopped. That is a miracle because this is having a serious toll on my health. This is wisdom that says sometimes the best counsel I can give you is no counsel at all. Sometimes wisdom is the courage to give counsel so simple it sounds a little embarrassing coming out of a law professor’s mouth. The spirit will not let me dress it up. Just tell her to go to the temple. Nothing you say will heal her. Send her to my house. Sometimes God’s wisdom for our lives is simpler than we want it to be. We come to him wanting a five-pronged plan. He wants to give us a habit, a weekly walk, a small faith act that we can repeat. We sometimes resist the simplicity, I know I do, because we’ve been trained to think wisdom should be complicated, but it’s not. Christ’s wisdom is simple, and what matters are a few things. As Elder Shumway said earlier this year at BYU devotional, you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. One of my favorite quotes, you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything except walking with him. King Benjamin taught the same wisdom, and see that all these things are done in wisdom and order, for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. Can we take one small faithful step at the speed where we can walk with our Savior? I want to tell you about Linda, because she shares one of the most beautiful examples of wisdom that I’ve ever encountered in a Latter-day Saint mother. There’s a man named David, he grew up in the church, and as an adult, he worked in what some might politely call as an unlicensed pharmacist, a drug dealer. The, the younger one’s got it, you know what I’m saying. He was arrested and incarcerated more times than he could count. He spent nineteen years in and out of prison on, addicted to prescription drugs, in pain, in prison cells. He caused much sorrow to his parents, especially his mother, Linda. Miraculously, after years away, David came back to church, and he bore his testimony recently about the atonement of Jesus Christ. He said, I am living proof that Jesus Christ loves us, and he loves you. I asked David, how did this happen? He told me his mother helped him, but he didn’t explain how. So I went and asked his mother, Linda. Linda told me that for years, she was at a loss for what to do for her son. She had spent much of her retirement bailing him out of jail, losing most of her income. She cried more tears than she could count. But then one day, she says, I felt a clear prompting. She was supposed to work in the temple. She didn’t say a word about the prompting to her husband. She just felt it. And that same week, the stake president called them in and asked them to serve as temple workers. Linda spent every free moment in the house of the Lord, and while she was there, she did something I find astonishing. She would close her eyes and visualize her son in whites, her drug addict son, the boy she’d bailed out of jail more times than she could count. She could see him in whites, working in the temple beside her. She would see him as a divine being, even while he was sitting in his cell. This is the wisdom of a mother who refused to see her son the way the world saw him. A mother who after hour after hour in the house of the Lord trained her eyes to see her son the way her savior Jesus Christ saw him. Her son David said late one night in his cell contemplating his situation, God came to him. And because of that experience, he decided to change. Linda said, the temple transforms us because of the power that seeps into your soul while you’re there. And then she said, if people understood the power of the temple, they would be lined up and crawling and fighting to get in. We have a temple, many temples within driving less distance. We have what Linda would have crawled to reach. That’s the kind of wisdom none of us are born with, but it’s what we can glean as a gift from the house of the Lord. Now I want to come back to the little girl who wanted to be Kimberly, to the BYU student with the lion mane hair in South Africa, to David and Hannah, to all of them who are operating on the false belief that if we could get themselves right, if we could get ourselves right, God would accept them and that we would belong. But that’s not how God works. Paul wrote, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty. The very things about ourselves we wish we could trade are often the things that God has already chosen in us. There’s a sister whose words I wish I could have comprehended at seven years old, a former member of our Holy City Presence, Chieko Okazaki, a Japanese, Hawaiian born to Buddhist parents, and she joined the church at fifteen. She definitely knew what it looked, what it felt like to not be a girl named Kimberly. And she said this about our Savior. She said, Our Savior is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He’s not embarrassed at us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and grief. Jesus Christ doesn’t need the polished version of us, not the version with no freckles, perfect hair, and zero awkwardness. Though I have to say, I recently talked to a woman in my ward who is truly my ideal childhood beauty of a Kimberly. Her name’s Laura. And she told me she hated being tall growing up, and she was teased for her freckles. So apparently even the Kimberleys didn’t want to be Kimberleys. Christ wants the real version of us, even the lion-mane version, especially the version that, that we’re trying to edit out. He wants us how he made us. And I think that self-acceptance is wisdom, and it doesn’t come from looking inward. It doesn’t come from finally fitting in or becoming someone else. It comes from walking with Christ. He’s the only one whose embrace can sustain us. But Christ’s acceptance isn’t our path to stop growing. It’s what gives us courage to keep growing without hating ourselves along the way. The gospel asks us to become new creatures, avoiding despising the creature God is making, patiently making new. There’s a difference between wanting to become more like Christ and believing we’re worthless until we get there. Michelle Craig, a former counselor in the Young Women’s General Presidency, gave a talk in 2018 called Divine Discontent, and she drew a distinction between divine discontent, the holy yearning that moves us forward in faith, and what she called Satan’s counterfeit, paralyzing discouragement. Sometimes it feels like what feels like a spiritual crisis is actually discouragement dressed up as humility. She has taught us a lot about wisdom. She’s a woman who was born and raised in Utah, and if you ask her, says that she lived a small, quiet life. She was born in Provo, Utah, married and raised a family, but by her own description, she said, I’m not even someone who made comments in Sunday school. And yet, on March 21st, 2018, while taking a nap on her couch, she was interrupted by ringing on her home phone. She looked at the caller ID. It said, Jesus Christ. And she stared at it puzzled, and then it rang a second time, and she thought, well, I ought to pick it up. And a sister on the other end asked her and her husband to meet with President Dallin H. Oaks, and as she sat across from an apostle of the Lord, overwhelmed, feeling completely inadequate, he asked her, are you worthy to receive a calling? And are you willing to accept any calling? She said yes, and yes. And she teaches, what you have to offer is more than enough, even with your human frailties and weaknesses, if you rely on the grace of God. We are more than enough, not because of who we are, but because of whose we are. Because of the grace at work in us, the very thing that we’re most embarrassed about, the heritage, the divorce, the nightmares, the fear of making comments in Sunday school, it’s often the doorway in which the miracle walks in. The very thing you wish that wasn’t part of your story is the part that Jesus Christ loves. So I want to come back to where we started, my little 17-year-old self in my white shoes, tiptoeing down the metal ramp, still bleeding from my knee. I thought wisdom meant figuring out how to be someone else, someone who could wear high heels. Though you might notice if you ever see me, I never wear high heels, even today. Let’s see my shoes. No heels. I’ve learned that safety lesson once. Patricia Holland wrote that she spent years comparing her quiet, reflective, thoughtful self to the robust, bubbly, talkative, and energetic Elder Holland. Over time, she learned that she had untold abundant sources of energy to be herself, but the moment that she tried to imitate her neighbor, she said, she felt she was fractured and fatigued. Her point was, God didn’t create us to exhaust ourselves becoming someone else. Wisdom is learning to become ourselves in Christ. What I have learned since then is that wisdom is not a smarter, more careful version of me or you. It’s not what you do when you stop worrying, what people think, what people will think about you when you fall. But it’s starting to walk with our heads held up high. Even our bodies know this truth. When we lift our gaze, something in us begins to lift too. And researchers have found looking upward is actually associated with beautiful mental effects in our, our brains that lead to healing and happiness. And so when I go to the temple, one of my practices is to lay in the celestial room, or I guess you can’t lay, but put my head back and look up. And you have this beautiful ceiling here, but to look up in the celestial room in the house of the Lord. Wisdom is a road to Emmaus, the willingness to walk the longer road than you wanted to with someone who might be listening. Wisdom is the temple, the place where you go when you need to revisit your battle plan to God’s plan. Wisdom is Hannah, who came in wanting a list and left with a covenant relationship. Linda, who closed her eyes in the temple and saw her son in white. That is the wisdom I’m here to bear testimony of today, the kind of obedience, the unshowy, three times prompted obedience that changed every generation of my family forever. Some of you today in Holladay, Utah, are quietly trying to walk towards this kind of wisdom. Some of us here are tiptoeing. Some have fallen recently and are afraid to walk normally. Some of you are bleeding under a dress that no one can see. Some of you have been the nurse in this story, filling the prompting once, twice, three times, wondering if you should obey it. Some of you have been the mother praying from her own kind of prison cell. I want to testify that we don’t have to tiptoe. Christ is walking next to us the entire time. He’s not waiting for us to be perfect. He’s not embarrassed by us. He wants us just as we are, doubts, questions, and all. He wants to know what we’re thinking about and why we’re sad. He wants… He’s okay letting us doubt. He is speaking to us from scriptures and from the words of our leaders on a longer road than we wanted to walk. And in our hearts, in the moments we maybe haven’t yet named, he’s already allowed us to burn with the spirit within us. Let’s all slow down, calm down, kneel down. Let us be with women of wisdom, with ears to hear and eyes to see what’s important, what is true, and what is right. Sister Du, the beloved, a beloved leader in our church said recently at BYU Women’s Conference, she said, tell me what you pay attention to, and I’ll tell you who you are. When we give him even some of our time, it seems like he multiplies the rest. While dividing our sorrows, our anxiety and grief. So let us spend time with the Lord in prayer, visiting his house often, and walking with him in wisdom. So when we walk down whatever ramp life asks us to walk down, we can walk with his confidence. Our beloved God does not want his daughters to tiptoe, and I say that in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Who has been a guest on Sisters in Scriptures Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Morrissa Rich
• Holly Little
• Nancy Baird

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Apple Podcasts (US)

4.7 / 5

57 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 16 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

11

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

51

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