This is such a treat for us to be able to be with you today. All BYUs have a special place in my heart. All four of our children graduated from BYU in Provo. Quite a number of the young people who served with us in Canada Vancouver Mission are in school here in Idaho. We are very proud of them. I myself spent more than seven years at BYU-Hawaii: four years as a poor single student and three more as the wife of a poor student. Life wasn’t necessarily the easiest during those years, but looking back, those were the days when a good foundation for our future was laid. President Howard W. Hunter taught the truth when he said, "If our lives and our faith are centered upon Jesus Christ and his restored gospel, nothing can ever go permanently wrong. On the other hand, if our lives are not centered on the Savior and his teachings, no other success can ever be permanently right." [1]
Not that there is necessarily something wrong in your lives now, but there is always something we could improve on. So, my dear young friends, if you are struggling now, be patient and be faithful. Then one day, very soon, you will look back and be grateful for all the experiences and trainings you have today. You will realize you were under the care of our Lord all along the way.
As I ponder about what I should say in these few minutes I have with you that will be most helpful for all of us, I thought about the recent general conference. Do you realize that all the teachings delivered in those five meetings are the best we could have for our time, especially for the next six months of our lives?
I hope you attended all the sessions and got something out of them. However, if all you did was to sit through eight or ten hours of meetings, even without dozing off, you are still missing out immensely. I don’t think just liking those beautifully decorated quotes from the talks posted on social media will do much good either. You need to have a plan to learn the talks for yourselves and intentionally incorporate what you have learned into your life. You need to learn all you can because you are not only our future leaders, you are actually our leaders now. If you haven’t made up your mind to do better and be better yet, do it now.
Next, please allow me to share with you my general conference study plan, which is very simple. What I have been doing for a few years now is I use this month, the conference month, to quickly go over all the talks at least once. Then, during the coming five months from May to September, I will study one session per month. I do a combination of reading and listening in both Chinese and English to understand better. Whenever you have a chance, share something you learned from your study with your family or friends to reinforce your own learning. This works very well for me because this way I know I will be more ready for the next conference by studying talks from the last one.
I’m grateful for the blessings of the Christlike love our church leaders have for us. I hope we are all big fans of them and pay attention to their teachings, especially to our 15 living prophets, seers, and revelators. They are truly called of God to be our guides on our path going back to our dear Heavenly Father and His Only Begotten Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, in whose name I testify, amen.
Notes
[1] The Teachings of Howard W. Hunter, ed. Clyde J. Williams, 1997, 40.