Sister Dyches and I express our gratitude to all of you wonderful young Saints gathered today in this beautiful auditorium on the campus of Brigham Young University-Idaho. This is our first visit to campus and what a meaningful time we have had with your President Eyring and his wife and his associates. Your joyful faces radiate a divine light within; you are the hope of Israel, our only delight.
In the early 1950s in a small developing suburb of Salt Lake City, young families were nestled in homes, many with pastures in their backyards along irrigation ditches full to the brim with spring water for the fields. On one spring morn, two five-year-olds were in the pasture with a three-year-old undetected, red-headed brother—me—inquisitive as to what they were doing.
As they came to the wide ditch, they delicately balanced on the two-by-four and,
As he grabbed handfuls of grass, the swift water lifted his head up. And he did what he could do best—yelled for help. A wonderful mother was beginning to frantically search for him back at the house, but it was a vigilant carpenter across the ditch who heard incessant cries for “Mamie.” He could not see the source but reacted and ran to the bank. Unable to actually reach his little hands, he did what he could, using a pitchfork to gently nestle the little fellow’s legs between the tines, lift him out, and hand him to the frantic, crying mother, who took the shivering, crying son to a warm bath and safety.
Resilience is a process of adapting and recovering in the face of adversity, bouncing back from difficult experiences. President Nelson has taught:
Your Heavenly Father has known you for a very long time. You, as His son or daughter, were chosen by Him to come to earth at this precise time, to be a leader in His great work on earth. You were chosen not for your bodily characteristics but for your spiritual attributes, such as bravery, courage,
We do not know the specifics
“If our lives and our faith,” President Howard W. Hunter declared, “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.” [3]
With that clearly stated, why are so many off-center? Has the world’s influence purveyed a “new and improved model” of the disciple’s life that creeps into ours? Listen as one stake president recently addressed the most significant spiritual and temporal challenges facing his stake:
Complacency, worldly distractions, immorality, and the philosophies of men. Peer pressure faced by the youth and pressure to conform to societal norms is at an all-time high.
Among adults, many are faced with the pressures and pleasures of life and often forget the bigger picture and true focus of this life. They, too, are faced with conforming to societal norms that don’t always match up with the principles of the gospel.
Your tenacity and resilience to be true and faithful to your sacred covenants made with God will help you and me
If it were easy, would this spiritual willpower grow and develop at all? As this is the time for men and women to perform their labors in preparation to meet God once again, [5] our capacities will be stretched, hope dimmed in certain
“Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life.” [6]
Bad things do happen to good people in this life. From The Princess Bride comes one of our many family-famous lines: “Get used to disappointment.” [7] Some things happen that are beyond our control; others occur precisely because of our choices.
In the United States, on the morning of the Fourth of July 1952, as all the three major networks at the time were present with cameras rolling at the eastern edge of Catalina Island off the coast of California, 34-year-old Florence Chadwick waded into the water. She was a celebrated endurance swimmer, who now planned to swim 21 open-water miles to the southern California coast. Twenty-one miles! She had already conquered the English Channel. Now she was determined to be the first woman to swim the California Catalina Channel. She began the solo swim.
Minute after minute, hour after hour ticked by as Chadwick resolutely swam on, despite bone-chilling cold, unpredictable currents and terribly dense fog. Several times, sharks had to be driven away by rifle shots from the support boats. Ultimately, fatigued and chilled to the bone, an exhausted Florence Chadwick stopped. She lifted her goggles and looked in all directions but could not to see the shore through the fog bank. Disoriented, she lost her perspective and, temporarily, she lost her will.
From one of the support boats, her mother and her trainer pleaded with her not to give up. But from Chadwick’s compromised viewpoint in the water, all she could see was fog. So, after 15 hours and 55 minutes of constant swimming and over 58,000 strokes, she was pulled out of the water into the boat. She was utterly exhausted and was attended to medically. But Florence was even more devastated when she discovered she had tragically miscalculated her effort and distance. Where she had swum to was less
"I'm not excusing myself," she later told a reporter, "but if I could have seen land, I know I could have made it. I was licked by the fog." The resilient Florence Chadwick had been through tough times before. She immediately and resolutely began training, planning, and preparing again.
Two months later, renewed and indomitable, she once again entered the water off Catalina Island, determined to succeed in what no woman had done before. The networks were missing now but not Chadwick’s resolve.
Again, the same factors were equally present, along with their timing. The thick fog bank again descended and obscured her view at the same critical moment in this daunting endeavor.
But this time, Florence resolutely swam on, knowing that somewhere beyond this fog and ocean was land. I can imagine her repeating over and over, “Just keep swimming; don’t give up.”
This time, she swam directly through the fog bank and emerged on the sunlit, California seacoast. Not only was Florence Chadwick the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel but she beat the standing men's record by two hours!
Willpower and grit make it possible to not only survive misfortune or tragedy but, in some, to thrive both during and after these trials. The resilient humbly adapt and learn; a failure is a form of helpful feedback for the next attempt.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”, noted Winston Churchill. As an inventor, courageous Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."
We learn as we go. As Elder Bruce C. Hafen explained, “Because of the Atonement, [we] can learn from [our] experience without being condemned by it.” [8] Seek to find meaning in the disappointments as you rise again.
Throughout all recorded scripture, we read of so many individuals who were resilient. Each faced
In the Old Testament, Joseph, the son of Jacob, was sold into slavery by his brothers, tempted by Potiphar’s wife, and cast into prison. But his faith in God never wavered. He righteously waited upon the Lord, adapted and endured.
In the New Testament, Peter, who denied Christ three times, found renewed strength through the Holy Spirit and performed miracles in the name of the Savior.
Think of the resilience shown in the Book of Mormon by Nephi of the “Broken Bow Club,” who, beaten and bound by his brothers, still had faith to build a ship and sail to the promised land.
And Joseph Smith, who, although tarred and feathered one painful, winter night, arose the next morning and preached a sermon without mentioning the violence that had been inflicted upon him.
And what can be said enough of the resilience of Brigham Young and the pioneers, many who traveled in handcarts, no less!
What would we discover in the DNA of those of you who are resilient? Would we find hope, obedience, the holy temple, and the sacrament?
Hope is a vital and critical component of life. One of the blessings of hope is resilience; one of the products of resilience is hope. Hope is a gift from God to those who seek Him and love Him. The brightness of hope brings a zest for life, a looking forward to what yet may be. It is the hidden courage to forgive. Setbacks and comebacks are just part of the journey.
“Gird up your loins; fresh courage take. Our God will never us forsake.” [9]
So, “
The resilient are never weary of doing good. “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength...and [t]hou shalt love thy
Obedience. Spiritual courage and willpower are grounded in the obedient; the resilient are obedient. We express our love to God by obedience to His commandments. “If thou lovest me thou shalt serve me and keep all my commandments.” [12]
“There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.” [13]
Further, “I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise.” [14] When you are obedient—exactly so—and seek the Holy Ghost, He can whisper encouragement, direction, and truth in your times of need.
The holy temple—President Russell M. Nelson said in his January broadcast, "Now, to each member of the Church I say: Keep on the covenant path. Your commitment to follow the Savior by making covenants with Him and then keeping those covenants will open the door to every spiritual blessing and privilege available to men, women, and children everywhere
The holy temple restores your spiritual resilience. When we experience pain, suffering, the loss of a loved one, disappointment, or ponder our purpose here on earth, the temple can provide comfort and peace to our hearts. The temple is a source of “enduring joy.” [16]
As we take the sacrament, we renew all our covenants and our commitment to take upon us His name, “to always remember him and keep his commandments.” [17] We find that repentance and resilience are traveling companions filled with hope and joy as we worthily participate.
The sacrament facilitates and reaffirms the blessings promised by King Benjamin: “[I]f ye do this ye shall always rejoice, and be filled with the love of God, and always retain a remission of your sins
A true story: As a boy working in my father’s drugstore, I was rewarded for work and given a model plane in its box. The name of the plane was the Grumman Hellcat. As I assembled the parts, I looked on the colorful images on the outside of the model box, where it was fighting Japanese Zeros in World War II.
Later in my life, while serving as mission president in Oregon, I visited the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum and was surprised and excited to see the real Hellcat preserved in just the way it looked in 1942 and flight-ready. All the memories flowed back. Inscribed on the plaque on the adjacent stanchion to the plane was a brief history.
Two things caught my eye: how successful the Hellcat was and the motto of the Grumman Corporation. Prior to this airplane being commissioned, we were doing poorly in aerial dogfights in the Pacific theater. But a tenacious and resourceful aeronautical engineering team at Grumman changed all of that. The Hellcat achieved a 19 to 1 success ratio; for every 19 planes it downed, 1 Hellcat was lost. The key to success was Leo Grumman’s motto: “Keep it simple. Build it strong. Make it work.”
Simple, strong, and fast, it was very successful. These three maxims are there for the taking: Keep it simple, build it strong, and make it work. What can I do to simplify my life? What can I do daily now to strengthen my faith and trust in God? I can do the hard thing.
Just as a rubber ball rebounds after being squeezed or squished, so do resilient people. The spiritually resilient emerge through the bitter better. Let’s begin with what the experts in resilience have found and apply it to us:
1.
Develop a core set of foundational doctrines and principles as your personal code of conduct that nothing can shake or replace. This is your testimony.
We deepen our foundation and understanding of Him through faithful, consistent, and dedicated use of the holy scriptures, especially the Book of Mormon, and the teachings of living prophets and apostles.
“Treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour...”[19]
Christ-like service renews our resilience as we minister to others, a service that often allows us to receive added revelation tailored to our own needs.
In the past general conference, our prophet counseled, “[W]e can pray to our Heavenly Father and receive guidance and direction, be warned about dangers and distractions, and be enabled to accomplish things we simply could not do on our own. If we will truly receive the Holy Ghost and learn to discern and understand His promptings, we will be guided in matters large and small.”[20]
2.
Without relinquishing your core standards and beliefs, learn how to adapt and cope with challenges. According to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.[21]
3.
Never lose sight of your purpose on earth and your divine destiny. I have a granddaughter, Karina, with cerebral palsy, a condition I am certain she accepted before coming to this earth. She knows the Lord. “In His Hands” exemplifies the highest level of resiliency and capacity to thrive in spite of severely physical limitations coupled with a brilliant mind:
Like knives in the “refiner’s fire,”
Like clay in the “Master’s hands,”
The Lord molds us with His tool: trials.
And it’s up to me to be soft and pliable,
Or I can choose to be hard and crumbly.
And I know the Lord will find me reliable.
At one point, I knew what I would be.
In the next life, I’ll see,
If I remain faithful now,
What He first meant me to be.
And I’ll know the when and how.
And it’s up to me to be soft and pliable,
Or I can choose to be hard and crumbly.
And I know the Lord will find me reliable.
At one point, I knew what I would be.
The when is my life on earth.
The how
My molding began at birth.
I’ll remain faithful and true.
And it’s up to me to be soft and pliable,
Or I can choose to be hard and crumbly.
And I know the Lord will find me reliable.
At one point, I knew what I would be.
4.
Interestingly, behavioral scientists have learned that working your body’s muscles regularly seems to positively improve the thinking processes in your brain, increasing your resilience. Finding an exercise regimen you will stick to seems to be more important than the caloric expenditure, as exercise itself develops new neurons, some of which may have become damaged by constant stress.
5.
Choose happiness. To me, there is nothing more important and life-altering than to develop a positive outlook in your life. Optimism is an essential key to resilience. As President Gordon B. Hinckley encouraged, “Be believing. Be happy. Don’t get discouraged. Things will work out.” [22]
In Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel by Mark Sullivan, the main character of this true story, Pino Lella, who as a 17-year-old teenager, survived World War II in Nazi-held Italy with great resilience and grit. At the end of his story it reads:
After several moments of quiet, Pino said, “You know, my young friend, I will be ninety years old next year, and life is still a constant surprise to me. We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose.
Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed. And we must have faith in God, and in the Universe, and in a better tomorrow, even if that faith is not always deserved.
Helaman said it this way in reference to “doubt not, fear not”:
[R]emember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall. [23]
Yes, symbolically, the water all around that foundation is
Fear not, I am with thee; oh, be not dismayed
For I am thy God and will still give thee aid
I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand
Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand. [26]
In the Christ-centered life, yours is not the option of doubting and fearing. Trust God and believe in good things to come. Said the Apostle Paul to James: “Behold, we count them happy which endure.” [27] I humbly bear you my testimony of Jesus Christ, the living Son of the living God, and that the infinite virtue of Christ’s sacrifice is available to all who endure. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Russell M. Nelson, “Decisions for Eternity,” Ensign, Nov. 2013; lds.org.
[2] Doctrine and Covenants 6:34, 36.
[3] Howard W. Hunter, “’Fear Not, Little Flock,’” 1988-89 Devotional and Fireside Speeches, Provo: Brigham Young University, 1989; lds.org.
[4] 2 Nephi 2:27.
[5] Alma 34:32.
[6] 2 Nephi 31:20.
[7] William Goldman, The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner (1987; Beverly Hills, CA: Act III Communications).
[8] Bruce C. Hafen, “The Atonement: All for All,” Ensign, May 2004; lds.org.
[9] William Clayton, “Come, Come, Ye Saints”; lds.org.
[10] Ether 12:4.
[11] Mark 12:30-31.
[12] D&C 42:29.
[13] D&C 130: 20-21.
[14] D&C 82:10.
[15] “A Message from the First Presidency,” January 16, 2018; lds.org.
[16] Russell M. Nelson, “Let Us All Press On,” Ensign, May 2018; lds.org.
[17] D&C 20:77.
[18] Mosiah 4:12.
[19] D&C 84:85.
[20] Russell M. Nelson, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives,” Ensign, May 2018; lds.org.
[21] As quoted by Leon C. Megginson.
[22] As quoted by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland in “President Gordon B. Hinckley: Stalwart and Brave He Stands,” Ensign, June 1995; lds.org.
[23] Helaman 5:12.
[24] Psalms 30:5.
[25] 2 Nephi 2:25.
[26] Robert Keen, “How Firm a Foundation”; lds.org.
[27] James 5:11.