Find, Develop, and Give Your Gifts Alan L. Wilkins Ricks College Devotional October 31, 2000 It is a real pleasure to be with you on this brisk October afternoon. I have a great respect and admiration for President Bednar and his colleagues and I always enjoy associating with them. I have looked forward to this opportunity to share some insights and my testimony of the Savior with you. I have looked back and tried to remember myself sitting in your situation. I also have reconsidered lessons I have been learning since that time. Indeed, I have come to realize that if we are not careful, school can teach us the wrong lessons. For example, I have spoken as a professor and as a Church leader with many a student who was discouraged because the competition in school was so keen. They had come from a high school where they were in the top ten percent and were now in a freshman year where they were competing with all of the top ten percenters or they had just started the masters program, coming from a college where they had been in the top ten percent, and now they were competing with all of the top ten percenters; or they had just begun a Ph.D. program, and . . . well, you get the point. At each level we can learn that we aren't as good as somebody else and if our perceived goodness depends on our comparative advantage, we will always be found wanting. There is always somebody who is better. I have seen many students "drop out" as a result of such competition and what they concluded about themselves. Some "dropped out" in the literal sense and others merely ceased giving their best efforts because they no longer felt they could be the best. On the other hand, most of us overestimate our own relative ability, as it turns out. For example, a random sample of adult males was asked to rate their ability to get along with others. Fully sixty percent of them thought they were in the top ten percent. On athletic ability, where it should be harder for American males to deceive themselves, sixty percent of them thought they were in the top twenty-five percent. (Psychology Today, 1980) Consider my eldest son who, in politically correct language, is "vertically challenged." More directly stated, for most of his life my son has been the smallest one in his class and has been ever since he started attending school. Yet he fancies himself an NBA point guard, a la John Stockton. He asked me the other day if I thought he could make it in the NBA (that is, in professional basketball). My wife and I had worried about what our answer might be if it ever came to a question like this. Well, I decided to be honest. I told him how hard it was to make it into the NBA. I told him how few of the Jr. Jazz players actually got on a high school team, and how few of the high school players actually made it to a college team, and how few of the college players actually made it to the NBA and how few of the NBA players made it to the level of a John Stockton. What I most wanted for him, I said, was that he would grow up to be a good man, have a good family, and have a good enough job that he would be able to contribute to the church and help build the kingdom. He seemed pensive, and I thought maybe I had made my point. I worried that I might have discouraged him. A few days later I overheard our son talking to his brother. They had just watched Steve Young playing football and he had decided to try professional football instead of professional basketball. So we tend to have inflated expectations and we can also over-react to negative comparisons with others. As a matter of fact, my son often vacillated between feeling elated as he ran the Jr. Jazz team, and being in the dumps because he wasn't good enough compared with his expectations. Either way, our problem is that we too often use external comparisons to define ourselves. Of course, we can't afford to ignore completely how we compare with others. Such insight can help us make choices about a career or about when we ought to seek support from others. However, I believe that if we don't put God and His desires for us first in our lives, we will never amount to much in this life no matter how well we perform. Today I want to talk to you about making something of yourselves, about developing the gifts you have been given, and giving them in ways that bless others rather than in ways that merely conform to the world's definition of value. I also want to consider with you, in contrast, what occurs in our lives when we look beyond the mark and try to make something of ourselves that is other than what we can or should make of ourselves. As I was leaving for my mission, my father gave me a journal. On the first page of the journal he had written the following from JosP sde San Martin: "Ser I haven't come to you with 3 easy steps to finding, developing, and giving your gifts. I think the challenge is more complex than that. However, I have derived some insight from the scriptures, from personal experience, and from two Broadway plays. Since each of us is unique, usually the best we can do is listen for correct principles, observe the experiences of others, and let the Lord help us apply the lessons we learn in appropriate ways to our own situation. I have chosen to comment briefly on two plays: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. In each of these plays, we see the main character near the end of his life. We see people considering lessons from life from which we can learn much. Let's begin with Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman is obsessed with being well liked. He had considered other possibilities besides sales for a career, but then he met Dave Singleman who at eighty-four years of age was still a successful salesman. As Willy told it, Dave could "go . . . into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people . . . When he died . . . hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral." (p. 81) Well, after thirty-four years as a very mediocre salesman, Willy is fired from his job because he can't perform, because he is a sham--somebody whose dreams and promises far outstrip his abilities. He finally decides that his greatest worth is to commit suicide so that his wife and sons will have the $20,000 from his life insurance policy. At Willy's funeral the family and friends discuss his life. Biff, Willy's oldest son, who is beginning to see the lie his father lived, says this about his father: "There were a lot of nice days when he would come home from a trip; or on Sundays making the stoop; finishing the cellar; putting on the new porch; when he built the extra bathroom and put up the garage. You know something, Charlie, there is more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made. He had the wrong dreams. All . . wrong. He never knew who he was." (p. 138) It seems to me that Willy Loman could have contributed so much more to life and to his family if he had only been able to accept who he needed to be and was able to be. Perhaps he should have been someone who specialized in building things. Or, perhaps he should have tried to be the best salesman he could be, but admit his limitations and pride himself in building the front stoop and raising a good family. But, like many who walk through life following the world's standard of value, he didn't ever know who he was or could have become. He was afraid of his greatest gifts, perhaps because they seemed so small in the eyes of others and because he cared so much about being well liked. As a result, in many ways he was nothing. Next, consider Antonio Salieri, the main character in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. Amadeus was a Broadway hit for over three years and was made into a full-length motion picture that perhaps some of you have seen. Salieri is the court composer who, because of his jealousy and position of influence, insures that Amadeus, a man with a gift from God for music, is unable to be recognized for his gifts during his life. Salieri is jealous because he desires to excel in a way that only Amadeus was uniquely able to excel. When he is 16, Salieri makes a bargain with god. "You give me fame as a musician and I will serve you all my life." Salieri eventually becomes the court composer. And then, just as he is maturing and achieving the fame that he sought, Amadeus, a brash, crude, and divinely inspired brat, arrives at court. Salieri sees Amadeus' gift immediately. While others are repulsed by Amadeus' crude and haughty personal style, Salieri realizes with bitterness and envy that God has given to Amadeus the gift that Salieri had most wanted: the gift of pure, absolute, inspired music. Amadeus was so gifted that he produced first drafts of long and complex operas with hardly a correction. Salieri realized with horror that Amadeus "was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head and finished as most music is never finished." (p. 71) At the close of the play, Salieri is summing up his life following Amadeus' untimely death: "I remained in Vienna, city of musicians, reverenced by all, and slowly I understood the nature of God's punishment. What had I begged for in that church as a boy? Was it not fame? Fame for excellence? Well, now I had fame. I was to become, quite simply, the most famous musician in Europe. I was to become bricked up in fame, embalmed in fame, buried in fame, but for work I knew to be absolutely worthless. This was my sentence. I must endure 30 years of being called 'distinguished' by people incapable of distinguishing!" And finally - His masterstroke! When my nose had been rubbed in fame till vomiting, it would all be taken away from me, every scrap." Salieri finally goes insane and tries to take his own life. Shaffer's play, Amadeus, fairly drips with irony of this sort. Specifically, I want to note two major and related ironies that might be instructive to us: First, Salieri wants to serve as long as he can be famous. Ironically, he becomes famous but for work that is not only relatively "worthless" when compared with Amadeus' but that does not serve others. It is mediocre work and he knows it. This irony is related to the paradox my family and I have noticed recently as we have been reading the Sermon on the Mount together. The Savior first teaches that you should ". . . let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." (Matt. 5:16) The Savior then teaches that when we serve we should not let the "left hand know what [the] right hand doeth." (Matt. 6:3) What a paradox! How do we serve secretly in ways that are not hidden from the world? I believe that the Savior gives us the key later in the Sermon on the Mount when He focuses on our purposes for serving. He teaches that we should "seek not the things of this world but seek ye first to build up the kingdom of God, and to establish his righteousness, and all these things (he had been speaking about food and clothing) shall be added unto you." (JST Matt. 6:38) In this context, I believe that the Lord is saying to us that we must be willing to be visible when that will serve others and will lead them to glorify God rather than us, but that we must be careful what our purposes are. This is difficult doctrine. The Lord is not giving us an easy set of rules. Rather we are taught to seek a change of heart and then judge when to be secret and when to be public. Otherwise, we have our reward in the praise and attention of others. And, as Salieri discovers, the praise of the world does not satisfy ultimately. We can't really serve, then, if we are selfish. Our own selfish needs keep getting in the way. We are likely to give the wrong gifts like Salieri tried to do. Or we may give our gifts in a way that blesses us more than the recipient. A second irony is that Salieri is given a "complementary" gift, a gift that requires collaboration with other gifts, and yet he seeks to excel as an individual. Salieri is born with a uniquely gifted pair of ears. Not that he is a terrible composer--he just isn't great. But he has world-class ears. He has the capacity to recognize what few, if any, in his age could recognize. Yet, when the moment comes for him to exercise that gift, he instead seeks to make it impossible for Amadeus, with God's gift, to excel. The apostle Paul teaches about complementary gifts. He suggests that we each have different gifts and opportunities that should be "fitly framed together in the body of Christ." Each member of this body is able to contribute to the whole, in large measure, because it is different. Therefore, ". . . the eye cannot say unto the hand: I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet: I have no need of you." (1Cor 12:21) Gifts, then, are complementary in the sense that if we each do our part we can enhance and expand the effectiveness of the other parts. Salieri's great sin is that he does not do his part because he is so selfish. As a result, he is doomed to become, as he calls himself, "the patron saint of mediocrities." He is not mediocre at all. He is just mediocre relative to his own prideful pursuits. He is, more accurately, "nothing" because he doesn't use his gifts and opportunities to bless others, to do what only he could do. In the end, such seeking for self leads us to lose our best selves. The Savior teaches that we must lose ourselves in His service if we would truly find ourselves. "Amadeus," the title of the play, means "friend of God" or "lover of God." In the end, both Amadeus and Salieri fail because, in spite of magnificent gifts from God, they do not love Him and they do not seek to serve anyone but themselves. The contrast between Willy Loman, a man with simple and quiet gifts, and Amadeus and Salieri, men of unique talent, is stark. And yet they suggest a common conclusion: When we look beyond the mark and try to become something other than what is needed, other than what God would have us become, we amount to nothing. Have you noticed any of these paradoxes and patterns in your own life? I suspect you have begun to notice from your patriarchal blessing, your comparative performances, the comments of others, and the whisperings of the spirit, areas of both weakness and strength. I suspect that you have also noticed how selfish you can become with your gifts, your abilities, when school pressures mount or when you are far from the spirit of the Lord. When I was in my first year of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program, I can remember running from one building of campus to another so that I would have less chance of being stopped by someone in my stake where I served as stake mission president. I was so focused on surviving in a program for which I felt less prepared than many of my colleagues that I didn't have time for anyone else. I soon saw the irony. I was preparing to become a manager and hoping to use the insights and skills I gained to serve the Lord and my family but I didn't have time to talk to someone who might need me as I walked between buildings. So if selfishness is the great impediment to giving our gifts, how do we proceed? I have learned that the best antidote to selfishness is the atonement of Jesus Christ. I have discovered from my own personal experience that when I put my faith in the Savior, seek forgiveness, and make and keep my covenants with Him, He changes my heart and fills me with peace and love through the operation of the Holy Ghost in my life. I remember quite clearly the night when a young woman came to me as her bishop and confessed some rather sordid activities. I remember thinking as she began to talk that I knew what kind of person she was. That is, I knew from the way she dressed and talked that she was "dangerous." I knew that when I had been a student at BYU a few years earlier I would not have associated with her. I remember pleading with the Lord that He would help me to help this young woman, that He would bless me to overcome my first, rather judgmental, impression enough to really understand her. As she continued with her story, I felt something I can only describe as the pure love of Christ come into my heart. I know that this feeling didn't come from my natural self--I'm not that good. She felt that love and I witnessed miraculous healing and change in her over the ensuing months. I know from personal experiences like this one that the Lord can fill us with His love so that we can overcome our personal limitations and selfishness to help each other. This experience and a recent observation by Todd Britsch, a professor at BYU, give me a sense of why the apostle Paul follows up his teaching about the body of Christ and our unique gifts by extolling in the very next chapter of 1 Corinthians the virtues of charity, the pure love of Christ (see Moroni 8:47). When we possess that gift of Christ-like love, we are able to allow and encourage one another's gifts to flourish. We suffer long and are kind. We envy not, and are not puffed up, nor do we seek our own interests. We are not easily provoked, nor do we think evil (see 1 Corinthians 13:4-5). Now, in closing, I want to share with you a personal experience I had with my grandfather, Harold B. Lee, an Idaho boy like some of you and a past president of the Church, wherein he taught me about developing and giving our gifts. When I was a senior in college, I took my patriarchal blessing to Grandfather. My request to him was that he read my blessing with me, and counsel me as to how I might recognize, develop, and give my gifts, using the patriarch's inspiration as context. Grandfather read my blessing and then said: "Well, Alan, that's a fine blessing." He paused, and continued: "My impression is that you worry too much about the future, Alan." This was not what I had come to hear. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, in my heart of hearts I hoped he would look into the crystal ball and tell me about a career. In fact, I would have been even more delighted if he had told me my future wife's name, and how to find her. Grandfather went on to recount briefly, his own personal history. He said, "You know as a boy growing up in Clifton, Idaho, we prayed for the 'pillars of the Church.' We meant the Brethren, the General Authorities. I could no more have thought of becoming one of them than fly to the moon, which in those days also seemed an impossibility." He came home from a mission and thought he would be a farmer, but things weren't going well there so he decided to attend a university. At the University of Utah he met a young woman who was willing to walk home with him the five miles after a date, because he didn't have the five cents to pay the trolley. Friendship ripened into love, and they were married. Upon graduation, Grandfather found a job as a high school principal. After a few years, his wife suggested maybe he could be doing something else and he got into distributing books throughout the Western United States. Then, one of the city commissioners died in the middle of his term, and Grandfather, because of contacts he had made as a book distributor, was asked to fill the rest of that man's term. He was then elected to a term of his own. During this same time, Grandfather had been called as a Stake President. Then the 1930 depression hit. He and other leaders in his stake dusted off the revelations, and tried to find a way to help the almost 70% of their stake members who were out of work. They established a Bishop's Storehouse and found ways to have those who were out of work harvest wheat that was going unharvested because the price for wheat was so low it didn't pay to harvest it. Then the Brethren called him to set up a welfare program for the entire church. Several years later he was called as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, and at the time we were talking he was in the First Presidency. His question to me was: "Alan, do you think I could have taken thought, and prepared myself to be where I am now? The only counsel that I have ever felt comfortable giving to young people is that they get up each day and regain their testimony. And then in the light of the inspiration of the Lord, 'in the moment thereof,' that they do what the Lord asks of them. Don't live too far into the future," was his counsel. "Live for today. You don't have tomorrow; all you have is today. You don't have yesterday. All you can do is repent or feel good, depending on your yesterdays. So make your yesterdays days to feel good about by living fully for today." I've struggled to understand that counsel. I have come to understand that the strait and narrow path is indeed a twisty passage, a maze through which we must pass. A strait (s-t-r-a-i-t) path is a narrow path. If we are to stay on that path, we must be open to inspiration from the Lord. In order to do that, we must give up our own selfishness. We must invite the Lord's spirit to be part of our lives by regaining our testimony each day. We must stay attuned or, as Elder Maxwell says, we may climb the ladder of success and find it leaning against the wrong wall. We should not wait until we have "arrived" to give our gifts. As we go through the maze of life we must learn to give our widow's mite, to give what we have at the moment. If we stay on the narrow path, the Lord will prepare us for what He needs from us. The Lord will inspire us, if we remain true to His guidance, about which gifts to develop and how to give them. He may also guide us to avoid some gifts. For example, at the funeral of Elder Bruce R. McConkie, Elder Boyd K. Packer told of a time when Elder McConkie was in tears because of the criticism some had made of him. Some felt that he was too doctrinaire, too stern. Nevertheless, Elder McConkie said that when he would attempt to humanize and personalize his talks his mind would be darkened and he would feel the Lord's spirit withdraw. Elder McConkie had a gift for understanding and expounding the scriptures. He played a significant role in bringing forth the new edition of the scriptures in 1981. He learned that our gifts must be developed and offered under the direction of the Lord lest we lose them. It may be that the Lord will one day call you to perform some very visible task. Perhaps you might respond as did Moses, "but I am slow of speech," or Enoch, "I am but a lad." Indeed, that was the feeling that my Grandfather expressed. But then, if you have relied upon the Lord, you can call upon him to magnify your gifts, and to help you be equal to the task. He expects you to give only what you have, and He will make up for the difference. It may also be that you will say, as did my Grandfather, even if you were to have such a position, that the greatest success that he had ever had as a leader in the Church was as an Ensign Leader (the equivalent of our Priest's Quorum Advisor today), when he worked with a group of young men who were inactive, but who liked to play basketball. He played basketball with them, and loved them, and eventually each one of them went on a mission and became a faithful contributor in the Church and Kingdom of God. Or, perhaps you would be led to say as did President Lee, that "the greatest work you will ever do will be within the walls of your own home." May you become what you must become. May you develop your God-given gifts. May you work hard and persist even when it seems your gifts are only a widow's mite. May you seek the inspiration of God, to know when to take the twists and turns that he would have you take, as you confront life's challenges. May you be willing to work in obscurity, or in the public eye, as "seemeth Him good." May you be great fathers and mothers and give your gifts to the Kingdom of God, that you will indeed make something of yourself, or, better said, let God make something of you, is my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. REFERENCES Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman. New York: The Viking Press, 1949. Psychology Today, "How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways," May 1980, p., 16 citing David Myers, The Inflated Self. Shaffer, Peter, Amadeus. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.