When I married into the Hopkins family, I quickly discovered that my husband and stepkids already had some wonderful family traditions. For example, when a child in our family graduates from high school, we make them a large, heavy quilt made of old jeans. Measuring and cutting hundreds of squares from jeans takes time, and when I helped my husband with the quilt of our oldest daughter, I remember lots of hand cramping. Tying the quilt together stitch by stitch also takes time; we have to use industrial-strength sewing needles to push through each thick jean square and the backing material behind it. Then we check each stich to fix all the places where the yarn didn’t get pulled through all the way. As you can imagine, it’s a long process.
Just recently, my stepdaughter Shannon graduated from high school. She worked hard to graduate early, and I wanted our family to try to get her quilt done before she started what I knew would be a very cold winter semester at BYU-Idaho. But I also knew finishing before January would be a big challenge—my husband and I both work full time, we have demanding church callings, and we have younger kids to take care of as well.
While I was trying to figure out how we would find time to work on Shannon’s blanket, I saw on Facebook Marketplace that someone was selling pre-cut jean squares for quilts. I also got in touch with a few people in my ward who love to sew. I remember one night excitedly reporting to my husband that I had solved the quilt problem. We could just buy the material, order some pre-cut jean squares, get some help from people in the ward to sew it, and voila! It would all be done before Shannon started college. My husband was quiet for a while, and then he finally turned to me and said: “I really appreciate your help, but I don’t want someone else to make the quilt. The time it takes to make it is part of the gift.“
I knew immediately that he was right. The more I considered what he said, the more I was reminded of President Thomas S. Monson’s counsel to “never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.“ [1] Because I was thinking of the quilt as a problem to be solved, I had missed the entire point of making it in the first place. It wasn’t just a graduation gift. The quilt is a symbol of our family’s love, and as Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf once taught, love is spelled T-I-M-E. [2]
Since that conversation with my husband, I’ve found myself more able to notice what I like to call “speed traps,“ and I don’t mean the kind you run into with cops in Sugar City. I mean the mental speed traps that tell us to go faster instead of farther, to take the shortcut instead of the scenic route, and to get it done now instead of getting it done right. Sometimes the speed traps even get us to assume that efficiency is the same as efficacy. But they are not the same. Doing something efficiently may mean doing it faster, but efficacy means “the power to produce a desired result.“ [3]
To achieve efficacy, we have to know two things: what our desires really are and what results matter most. The Savior taught this important principle to two sisters, Mary and Martha, when He gently reminded Martha that, though He understood that she was “troubled about many things,“ [4] the answer was not to do all those things more efficiently, it was to remember that “one thing is needful“ [5] and make that one thing the priority.
Today I’d like to share a strategy called the “10-minute miracle“ [6] that has helped me make relationships—with God, others, and even myself—my “one needful thing,“ my most “desired result.“
Relationships with Others
First, let me explain how I discovered the ten-minute miracle. In addition to my five amazing stepkids and four (almost five) grandkids, I also have a three-year-old son, and for him, sometimes life is hard. He has very little power to produce his “desired results,“ which include things like running around with no pants on, eating only dino chicken nuggets, putting toys in his sister’s fish tank, and marrying mama even though mama is already married to daddy.
As I said, when you’re three, life is hard.
Recently, one of my daughters-in-law recommended a parenting program called Big Little Feelings, [7] where two moms give advice on parenting toddlers. It was from them that I first learned about the simple yet powerful “ten-minute miracle.“
Here’s what you do. You take ten minutes, you sit down next to your toddler, and you do whatever they want to do. No distractions. No multitasking. Just ten minutes of you doing what they choose. If they want to play with cars, you play with cars. If they want to run around the kitchen 50 times while one of you pretends to be the rebels and the other pretends to be Darth Vadar, that’s what you do. If they just want to sit on the couch and get a big hug, that’s what you do.
And miraculously, this dose of attention and autonomy does wonders for my little guy. It reassures him that, even though he won’t always get his heart’s desire, I care about those desires and, more importantly, I care about him.
Since learning about the ten-minute miracle, I try to do it once a day or at least every other day. And I’ve noticed that when I do, life is so much better. I’m more patient. He’s more trusting and less likely to melt down. We’re both a lot happier.
I’ve also tried the ten-minute miracle with my students. A few years ago, all BYUI faculty were given a book called Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, and it summarizes many studies that all support the same finding: “student-faculty relationships are a primary factor in learning, belonging, and persistence.“ [8] In other words, if I have a good relationship with my students, they are much more likely to succeed and stay in college. I want students, especially new freshmen, to succeed, so in my ENG 150 class, I start the semester with a ten-minute miracle for each student. I meet with each of them one-on-one, ask a few questions, and just listen. And I’ve been amazed at how much those ten minutes affect the rest of the semester. Since I’ve begun doing this, I’ve found that ENG 150 students respond better to my teaching and my feedback on their papers.
I also think modeling the value of relationships helps prepare my students for a future where AI is competing with us for not just jobs but also time and attention. As David Brooks recently pointed out in the book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, “Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead … but one thing it will never be able to do is to create person-to-person connections.“ According to Brooks, “If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.“ [9]
If you want to get “exceptionally good at connecting with others,“ I invite you to consider how practicing the ten-minute miracle might help you. Can you think of just one relationship that may feel distant, decayed, or difficult—with a child, a parent, a spouse, a student, a colleague, a roommate, or even someone you minister to? Maybe you even have someone in your life you consider an enemy, someone whose actions or beliefs or political stance may seem so awful that you can’t imagine how you can even tolerate them. And yet, Christ commanded us to not just tolerate enemies but to love enemies. And how can we love them if we don’t ever spend time with them? Let me be quick to say that there are some people who are truly not safe to be with, and you should not feel bad at all for keeping your distance. The Lord doesn’t command His sheep to seek out wolves. But I have met some sheep in what seemed like wolves’ clothing—people who I thought were enemies but turned out to be amazing humans I just couldn’t fully understand. Understanding others—especially enemies—isn’t easy, but it is possible if we’re willing to allow ourselves to listen. I don’t suggest trying to do this without practice. Deep listening is something that takes emotional strength and stamina. But what if you only had to do it for ten minutes? And what if you started with people you already want to love? In truth, the ten-minute miracle isn’t really about ten minutes. It could be twenty minutes or even two minutes! The miracle comes from taking time to develop charity, the pure love of Christ. And when we make time to give pure love to others, especially in the simple act of giving them our full attention, miracles can happen.
Relationships with Ourselves
So, we know that miracles are possible in relationships with others, but what about our relationship with ourselves? I don’t know about you, but sometimes the speed trap affects not only how I treat others, but also how I treat me. Sometimes, I’m so busy taking care of my family, and my church calling, and my students that I don’t take very good care of myself. I feel a little like Bilbo Baggins on his 111th birthday: “thin, sort of stretched … like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.“ [10]
Recently, I had the opportunity to address the feeling of being stretched too thin as I sat in on a creative writing class taught by my gifted colleague, Brother Josh Allen. It was in his class that I learned about a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Cameron has coached all kinds of artists—painters, actors, dancers, and writers. In Cameron’s experience, some artists get caught in a version of the speed trap where they purposely stay busy so they don’t have to feel guilty about dreams they haven’t pursued or projects they haven’t started.
Cameron’s remedy for this speed trap is something she calls the “Morning Pages,“ and like the ten-minute miracle, this is a fairly simple strategy. You just sit down and write—by hand, on paper—whatever is in your head for three pages every day. And I’ve found it is important to do it by hand and not type it because handwriting forces me to slow down. It also keeps me from censoring myself too much. On paper, I can just let myself ramble as long as I need to, and just as the ten-minute miracle of listening to others has amazing results, I’ve found that there is also a miracle that comes from listening to myself. As Cameron puts it, “Pages clarify our yearnings. They keep an eye on our goals. They may provoke us, coax us, comfort us, even cajole us, as well as prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. If we are drifting, the pages will point that out. They will point the way True North. Each morning, as we face the page, we meet ourselves.“ [11]
I have loved meeting myself on the page each day, but I’ll be honest. I don’t always write three full pages. However, writing for even a few minutes on paper every day has helped me to slow down and understand myself, even appreciate, and love myself. It’s helped me recognize unhelpful thinking patterns—what psychologists call cognitive distortions—and rewrite them or revise them into more compassionate thinking.
I also see this connection between writing, revising, and better thinking in the scriptures. In 2 Nephi 4, Nephi explains that in these plates, he writes “the things of [his] soul,“ but though his soul “desires to rejoice,“ he often feels that he can’t because of his many weaknesses. [12] However, as Nephi continues to carve his deepest feelings into the plates—which must have forced him to slow down even more than writing on paper—he found not only his weak, frail, sinful self but also his faithful, trusting, beloved self. He wrote himself into remembering that God had led him through afflictions before, and those memories helped him remember other times when he was “filled with love“ and carried away on the “wings of his Spirit.“ [13] When Nephi was struggling the most, he was able to write himself into repentance and even rejoicing, and because he wrote it down, we now have a pattern for finding joy for our souls, too. I don’t know about you, but I’m so grateful he took the time to write down the things of his soul. And I can’t help wondering if maybe some of the things of my soul will one day be helpful to someone else.
If you, like Nephi and me, are struggling to feel like you love yourself or know yourself, maybe it’s time to take some time and give yourself a dose of the ten-minute miracle, to put yourself on the page and really listen to yourself, to write out and find out what you’re thinking and decide if those thoughts are helpful and—if not—recognize that you can change them. Through the miracle of Christ’s grace, you can come to know yourself and love yourself. And you can come to know that God knows you and loves you, too.
Relationship with God
And speaking of God’s love for you, I would invite you to consider how you might apply the ten-minute miracle to your relationship not only with others and yourself, but also in your relationship with God. The Bible Dictionary entry on prayer claims that “as soon as we learn the true relationship in which we stand with God (namely, God is our Father and we are his children), then at once prayer becomes natural and instinctive on our part.” [14] Do you ever feel distant from God? I do. A few months ago, I started to wonder how my prayers might change if I took some time to really think about who God is and what I—as His child—mean to Him. I wondered, how would my prayers change if I not only spoke to Him but also took a few minutes to listen? President Russell M. Nelson has taught that “our prayers can be—and should be—living discussions with our Heavenly Father.” [15] I hate to admit it, but too often, my prayers are more like efficient emails than a “living discussion.” However, since November of last year, I’ve made an effort to not only pray more regularly, but also pray more earnestly, and this small and simple effort has made my prayers much more efficacious. The greatest and most important result I’ve seen is my sense of deepening conversion. The more I take time to consistently and conversationally pray, the more I am filled with trust and love for God.
And I see this connection between deeper prayer and deeper conversion not only in my life, but also throughout the scriptures. It’s fascinating to me that when Alma the Younger describes his conversion, he doesn’t say, “Behold, I testify unto you that I know that these things are true because I saw an angel.“ He did see an angel, but he does not say it’s the reason he has a testimony. He says, “Behold, I have fasted and prayed many days that I might know these things of myself. And now I do know of myself that they are true; for the Lord God had made them manifest unto me.” [16] Brothers and sisters, dear friends, we don’t have to see an angel to have deep conversion and a powerful testimony. But we do have to put in the time—even many days of prayer—to come to know God for ourselves.
As we prioritize our relationship with God by giving him more of our time—even just a few minutes daily—I know we can each experience the miracle of personal conversion. In fact, if you had to choose just one way to apply the ten-minute miracle, I would invite you to start with your relationship with God. Because if you really understand who He is, you will better understand who you are. And if you know who you are, you’ll know who others really are, too. And you will see that your relationships—with God, with yourself, and with others—are truly the things that matter most.
In conclusion, I hope you will do all you can to avoid the many speed traps in this life—the many temptations to shortcut your way through getting to know people, getting an education, or getting an answer to prayer. I hope you won’t get trapped by putting efficiency before efficacy. Remember that efficacy is the “power to produce desired results.” Starting today, I challenge you to find out what your desired results really are, and as President Nelson has taught, when you think about what those results should be, “think celestial.“ [17]
If you do this, then you’ll avoid letting problems to be solved become more important than people to be loved. And though not everything you need can be learned in just ten minutes, I can assure you that by this small and simple thing, great things can be brought to pass. [18]
I’ve spent many minutes, hours, days, and even decades trying to improve, and I still have so much farther to go. But as I start each new day, I know that God will take my small offering of ten minutes, and much like the 16 small stones that the Brother of Jared offered, or the few loaves and fishes that were offered to Christ, or the small handful of meal that the widow of Zarephath offered the prophet Elijah—my ten minutes of time and attention can become a miracle that changes lives, including my own.
I’ll be honest with you. My family still hasn’t finished Shannon’s quilt. But we’re working on it. We’re close! And when we do finally finish it, I know that she will feel not only the warmth of a thick blue jean quilt but the love of her family. She will know that she was worth our time and so much more.
I pray that each of us may recognize the ways in which we can take more time to really focus on our relationships—with others, ourselves, and our God. As we do, I know we will see not just ten-minute miracles but eternal miracles. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Thomas S. Monson, “Finding Joy in the Journey,“ Ensign or Liahona, November 2008.
[2] Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Of Things That Matter Most“ Ensign or Liahona, October 2010.
[3] ”Efficacy,” Merriam-Webster Online, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/efficacy.
[4] Luke 10:41.
[5] Luke 10:42.
[6] Marie Holmes, “This Toddler Tantrum Fix Only Takes 10 Minutes,“ Huff Post, Aug. 12, 2022, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/toddler-tantrum-fix-10-minute-miracle_l_62f6929ae4b0da517ef864d6.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College (John Hopkins University Press, 2020), 2.
[9] David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023), 11
[10] JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.
[11] Julia Cameron, The Miracle of Morning Pages: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Most Important Artist's Way Tool (TarcherPerigree, 2013), Kindle Edition.
[12] 2 Nephi 4:15, 18 .
[13] 2 Nephi 4:21, 25.
[14] “Prayer,” Bible Dictionary.
[15] Russell M. Nelson, “Think Celestial!,“ Liahona, November 2023.
[16] Alma 5:45–46.
[17] Russell M. Nelson, “Think Celestial!,” Liahona, November 2023.
[18] Alma 37: 6.