A colleague of mine was invited to work on a humanitarian project in a somewhat closed country. He was accompanied everywhere by representatives of the government who, as part of their duties, had been given access to read about the church online. One man had done his research extremely well and amazingly knew everything about the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's first vision, Brigham Young settling the valley, the welfare farms - his one question to my colleague was: What is Liahona? He couldn't find anywhere a translation for that concept.
If that were you, how would you describe to the man what is Liahona? Alma calls it a ball or director or compass that pointed the way they should go in the wilderness[1] but that doesn't really describe fully this spectacularly individual spiritual phenomenon that still exists in the lives of believers and pioneers today.
While you are thinking, let me describe a Liahona experience that has been important to me: I notice how often the Lord places a question in my mind and then works with me to try to find an answer. Of course this isn't special just with me. He works this way all through the scriptures. He asks his apostles in the New Testament: "Will ye also go away?"[2] He asks the Brother of Jared: "What will ye that I should do?"[3] He asks Mary in the garden: "Why weepest thou, whom seekest thou?"[4] He asks Joseph Smith: "What greater witness can you have than from God?"[5] The Lord continues in our day to use this way of teaching. It may not be as visible as a brass ball sitting on the ground when you wake up, but sometimes a question will be sitting in your mind when you first open your eyes. Or maybe throughout all the mundane things we do all day a question gets asked that sticks around. Sticky questions. When this happens to me, when I take the time to ponder that sticky question, I get pointed or guided to prophetic information, and then I have a chance to respond and talk to the Father in prayer about my personal answer to the question he asked me. That conversation is an amazing journey and I never know where He is going to take me but it is almost always toward the promised land.
Today, I thought I would share with you three questions that have come to me in this way. They aren't mind-blowing, but they have gingered me into a path that has blessed my life and pointed me to great insights that have helped me grow. My testimony of the Lord as a Master Teacher of me—working actively in my individual life—is bold and sure.
It was Christmas time when this question came to me. What do I personally do to express joy? Something that isn't created by someone else and consumed by me? Handel wrote the Messiah, Jewish elders sound the shofar, my mother sews matching Christmas dresses in taffeta plaid-but what do I create myself that shows the Lord I am feeling the Spirit and using my gifts in His world?
Shortly afterward, a new baby was born into our family. My oldest nephew James was a firefighter in Kalispell, Montana. He and his wife Mary had their first little baby boy. I was a great aunt. I wanted to do something so this little boy would know when he grew up how much he was wanted and celebrated. But what could I do? When I myself was born my great grandmother made a quilt for me. Based on a nine square pattern, it was the quilt I hid under when I was scared, made forts out of in our basement, and dragged out to the couch and tucked around myself when I was sick.
So, I decided to make a quilt for this new great nephew. Only one problem: I was kicked out of sewing classes and had no idea how to sew. I had never made a quilt. I didn't know how to start. I didn't know any of the tricks to make the corners line up or the nine squares fit evenly. I worked on it doggedly for six months. I pored over the squares and actually prayed over the sewing machine bobbin not to tangle while I sewed because I had no way of fixing that. Making this quilt stretched me, but it was something I was creating to show joy and love.
This is what President Uchtdorf has to say about our efforts to create:
"Creation means bringing into existence something that did not exist before—colorful gardens, harmonious homes, family memories, flowing laughter...
Creation is your opportunity in this life....and your destiny in the world to come."
And so I ask you: What do you do to personally express joy? What do you create when you feel the Spirit of the Lord?
The second question is about Spiritual Panicking. This is the idea that when things don't go right within a day or two of our praying for them or if we have been working on something for 1-2 weeks and we don't feel God is responding to our requests, we panic. We freak. We believe our prayer isn't being heard or that the Father is deaf to us or we aren't somehow righteous enough. We start taking things into our own hands and forgetting or ignoring that we asked him to intervene in his own time. We put the burden of the thing back on our own shoulders. All because we have about a two week window before we start to panic.
My best friend last year had a back injury that was creating severe pain. She had surgery scheduled but it was four weeks away and she was almost incoherent from the pain. Her faithful home teacher Ron Barney came and gave her a beautiful blessing that she would be pain free. But as days and then weeks went by, I believed the blessing was not coming to pass. "Nothing" happened between the blessing and her already scheduled appointment on December 31. I wanted relief for her that very night. I wanted a doctor to have a cancelation in his schedule and operate immediately. However a month from that blessing, after the surgery had been performed at its scheduled time, she called me up to say she had sat through ward council that day pain free and feeling great. She returned to her regular work and her back continues to heal from the very competent surgery that was performed by a very fine surgeon.
She also tells me that this was the best Christmas she has had in a very long time. She had time to really ponder the life of Jesus and also to think about other people who are dealing with physical and emotional pain. So I see that I am a spiritual panicker and yet how tenderly the Lord says, "Sharon, give me a month or two, or give me a year, or give me 10, or give me until your next life. I see the long view and I will never leave you comfortless."
Listen to what Elder Robert D. Hales says to those who spiritually panic:
"We may not know when or how the Lord's answers will be given, but in His time and His way, I testify, His answers will come. For some answers we may have to wait until the hereafter. This may be true for some promises in our patriarchal blessings and for some blessings for family members. Let us not give up on the Lord. His blessings are eternal, not temporary."[6]
Elder Hales was the priesthood advisor in the Quorum of the Twelve for Relief Society when I served on the General Board. He was ill in his bed and not able to come to the office almost the entire time. He rallied at the end of 2011 and came to our Christmas dinner frail and fragile for an hour or so. He somehow communicated to me and others that night just how much he longed to do the work before him and how much the pain and the suffering he had been through had refined him. This talk was given during that time and reflects his own experiences of "waiting on the Lord." I like the idea that while we wait upon the Lord, He also waits upon us.
"In my life I have learned that sometimes I do not receive an answer to a prayer because the Lord knows I am not ready. When He does answer, it is often "here a little and there a little" because that is all that I can bear or all I am willing to do."[7]
What should we do while we wait on the Lord? When His answers and the things we have longed for are taking far longer than we thought they should...?
Elder Hales gives some insight there too:
"Waiting upon the Lord gives us a priceless opportunity to discover that there are many who wait upon us. Our children wait upon us to show patience, love, and understanding toward them. Our parents wait upon us to show gratitude and compassion. Our brothers and sisters wait upon us to be tolerant, merciful, and forgiving. Our spouses wait upon us to love them as the Savior has loved each one of us."[8]
This isn't philosophical, it is real. He lived it. It came from the depths of his sorrow and it took much of his energy and will to say it. I want to be kinder to others and kinder to myself. I want to wait on the Lord for longer than two weeks and show my trust in his never failing kindness to me.
How Long Will You Wait Upon The Lord?
The final question I want to consider today didn't actually come as a question but as a phrase in my mind that I had heard somewhere. Something about 'you will never be the same after an encounter with the Son of God.' I couldn't remember where it had come from and since I didn't have the wording exactly it took some digging to find it but it was this powerful talk of Elder Holland's from three years ago.
"If ye love me, keep my commandments," Jesus said. So we have neighbors to bless, children to protect, the poor to lift up, and the truth to defend. We have wrongs to make right, truths to share, and good to do. In short, we have a life of devoted discipleship to give in demonstrating our love of the Lord. We can't quit and we can't go back. After an encounter with the living Son of the living God, nothing is ever again to be as it was before.[9] The scriptures are full of individual and group encounters with the Son of God. We cannot just be consumers of their experiences or we soon become unmoved by them. Your job and my job use the scriptures to create our own encounters with the Son of God. So the question comes: How am I different since I encountered the Son of God? Let me tell another story from my family. My mother didn't come from a very religious home. She married my dad when they were 19 and 20. My dad had stopped going to church when he was 14 and my mother was not a member of the Church. But in their neighborhood near their small apartment they became friends with another young couple who had both just joined the Church. Keith and Margaret Miller were on fire with the gospel and the scriptures. They loved to talk about how happy they were and what they were learning. They shared these things with my parents as they socialized and finally invited my parents to hear the missionaries.
My parents came into the gospel just before I was born. Keith and Margaret's encounter with the restored gospel and with the Savior created something that did not exist before—a desire on the part of their friends, my parents, to have religion and truth guide their family. It drastically changed my parents' trajectory. Now they have lived more than 50 years in the gospel. And their encounter with Jesus Christ and his gospel changed everything about my own life. How thankful I am that when Keith and Margaret felt joy, they expressed it by creating a friendship that hadn't existed before. They were creators of eternal friends.
When we encounter Jesus, wherever that is, he usually—in some form or another—asks us the same question he once asked of Andrew and John when they followed him along the seashore: "What seek ye?"[10] What do you want? In your deepest heart, in the longing of your soul, the things you never tell anyone because they sound lofty or unreachable or ridiculously small.
What do I want? I want to understand the whisperings of the Holy Ghost. I want to be a friend of the prophets. I want additional records to come to light and I want to add my own records to the trove. I want to build up anyone who comes to me. I want to ease the poor. I want peace from whoredoms for the whole earth. I want my specific husband. I want to raise my children in the mortal way, even if they arrive after mortality. I want to be an extraordinary friend. I want to stop fearing my own power. I want to stand as a witness.
Some of these desires I will create, and others I will wait upon on the Lord for, but each of these desires is a powerful encounter with the Son of God. How am I different since encountering Him? The Lord did with me what he has done with disciples in every age. He asked me what I want. I answered that question in my deepest child-like sincerity. And now He and I are working together every day to achieve the desires of my heart.
This Liahona of learning through questions is available to you. It is the same kind of miraculous gift that it was when it was given to Lehi and his family when they woke up that morning. The questions that will guide you are scattered everywhere. In class. In a conversation with a friend. In your mind as you jog. In the scriptures as you study. Once they stick to you and you start to truly consider them, the Lord begins guiding you step by step to a new place.
As an example, let me share this four minute video. This is a premiere. This is the first time this video has been shown and I got special permission to show it to you. It is from a very fine series by the Mormon Channel called Give Back and if you haven't seen the previous videos in the series, I encourage you to look them up. The video shows some of what your fellow saints are doing in Beirut, Lebanon to answer the question "What can I do to help?" They are Arab Latter-day Saints. The man you will see in the blue shirt is the first Arab district president the Church has had - maybe since Jethro! This branch is acting on its love and commitment to Jesus Christ to serve others and they are teaching their children by active example what it means to follow Jesus Christ.
As you leave this devotional, will you do one thing? Write it down somewhere you are going to see it every day. "What Will I Do Now That I Have Encountered the Son of God?" As you uncover the answer to that question over the next months, maybe you will participate in the Give Back series by sharing what you are doing in your own circles to Give Back and serve others. Or perhaps you will do something known only to you and the Lord. But whatever you do, make it be an action and not just a thought.
I testify we are made for joy. We are born to be creators in partnership with the Great Creator, Jesus Christ. I testify that while all our joys are not realized now, if we wait patiently on the Lord and stay faithful, we will have the desires of our hearts. I testify that in our sins and weaknesses as we encounter the Son of God we will never be the same. He strengthens us, changes us, cleanses us, teaches us individually, and shows us the future and our parts to play. May we have the courage to answer the questions He poses to us every day. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Alma 37:38
[2] John 6:67
[3] Ether 2:23
[4] John 20:15
[5] DC 6:23
[6] Elder Robert D. Hales, "Waiting Upon The Lord" October 2011 General Conference
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "The First Great Commandment" October 2012 General Conference
[10] John 1:38