"To Be Spiritually Minded is Life Eternal"
Scott Samuelson
July 2, 2002
I add my greeting to that offered you by President Bednar. I am especially mindful of those who are attending their first BYU-Idaho devotional. I presume that many of you graduated from high school a few weeks ago, and perhaps there are many who were serving as full-time missionaries until recently. And now "You've found the place which God for us prepared, far away in the west."
Whether you are a newcomer or an old timer, you love to receive personal letters, and Sister Bednar just handed me a couple personal letters, and I think they must be for you. I can't make out the name exactly, but, yes, it is to you:
Dear (fill in your name here),
Your mother and I are very pleased that you are attending BYU-Idaho. From the time you were a youngster, we dreamed of the day. Great things lie ahead for you. Of course, the home seems a little empty without you here. It sure is quieter.
I'm writing just to remind you that we love you, we pray daily for your success, you health and safety and spiritual well being. We have raised you to work hard and remind you that your job, so to speak, now is university work. Study hard.
Be a good roommate. Don't steal their milk. And if they steal yours, work it out. Your experiences with your brothers and sisters should help you there. By the way, they send their love, as of course does your mother. Your sister says to tell you she loves your room and wonders if you mind if she goes through your boxes looking for that blue sweater. She doesn't think you'll need it in Rexburg. Right.
Love, Dad
P.S. Please send money. Ha, ha. Just kidding.
Look. Here's another one. This one looks a little more formal.
Dear (fill in your name here)
I'm so glad you decided to sign up for my class. As I said the first day of class, I love teaching at BYU-Idaho.
Though we covered the introduction to the class the first day, I wanted to drop you a personal note. First of all, I want you to know that I love you. It may be a little unusual to hear that from a university professor, but I don't think it's inappropriate to tell you that I love and respect you for the righteous choices you have made in your life and for your great potential. As the semester progresses I will learn to connect your name to your face. I want you to know that I will pray for you by name this semester. I hope you will avail yourself of my office hour to come and get help with the course or to chat if you need advice or a friend.
I also think it's important to the spirit of our class and the university for you to know that I have a testimony of our Savior and His church. Our primary work in class will be working to master our academic subject, but I want you to know that the thing that gives that subject its importance for me is the way it dovetails with gospel principles.
I know that Christ lives and loves you and me. I believe one of our chief goals is to build a Zion classroom and a Zion university.
I wish you a happy and successful semester, university career, and life.
Sincerely,
(The names of 406 BYU-Idaho faculty)
God's work and glory is, as you all know, "To bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." (Moses 1:39) So, wherein lies our work? I believe our work is to align ourselves with God's efforts, to work ourselves toward those same goals. And how are we to attain eternal life, or life with God? Many scriptures address this question; but one I keep coming back to is 2 Nephi 9:39:
"To be spiritually minded is life eternal"
A university is an institution devoted to expanding the life of the mind.
A Zion university is devoted to developing spiritual mindedness.
Spiritual mindedness can be defined as thinking as God thinks, valuing what he values, and knowing what he knows.
I will begin by sharing with you three true BYU-Idaho anecdotes that to me illustrate some of the attributes of spiritual mindedness as I have experienced it on this campus.
Early last September as I approached the Faculty Office Building I saw a man about my age with a backpack, a piece of paper, and a slightly lost look. No, he was not a faculty member. I greeted him and asked if I could help him find something.
"The Taylor?"
I answered: "That the white brick building up beyond the Manwaring Center that looks like a church."
He was orienting his map. "And the Clark?"
"Just down the hill from the Smith," I said, pointing. "And the Kirkham beyond that," I said anticipating.
He smiled. He had found himself.
"You've come back to school," I ventured.
"Well, my son is released from his mission in about ten days. I registered for him, and I'm attending classes in his place until he makes it here."
"Good for you. You're a very considerate father. How is it going?"
"Pretty well so far. I'm a little tired. I wish my roommates would let me get to sleep before 1:30 in the morning."
We chuckled and parted. I was so impressed by that father and his efforts to help his son make the mission to college transition. It seemed that he was performing a great act of service for his son. He was being spiritually minded because he was consecrating and dedicating his time to serve his son.
Not long ago at the end of fall semester, my advanced composition class decided to have a gift exchange. Because we had worked hard to have the spirit of unity in the class, we thought that we might stretch ourselves to give gifts in the spirit of the Zion classroom. That semester in two classes we generated more than $200 for the Perpetual Education Fund. One student, Aaron Bahn, gave me a gift I will always treasure. It is a mission pin from his mission in Peru. To it was attached a note: Early in my mission in Peru, my native senior companion had only two or three pair of garments. I gave him a couple of mine; he gave me all he had--this mission pin. I would like you to have it in love and memory. Aaron's gift, both to his companion and to me, illustrates spiritual mindedness because to him service and giving exceeded the desire for personal possessions.
A few years ago I was walking across campus and saw one of my fellow faculty members. I greeted him. He had on a wonderful necktie. (There's an oxymoron, a wonderful necktie.) Red and gold and green. I complimented him on it. He started to take it off and give it to me. "I said it had great colors; I didn't say I wanted it. Keep your tie on."
He said, "I would like you to have this tie."
"I can't take your tie."
"Look, I'm giving you this tie. You can take it or leave in that bush right there."
Humbled, I took the tie.
The next day I took to his office while he was in class a wooden box I had made. I had written a note that said something like this: I do not give you this box in exchange for the tie. I give it to you in honor of our friendship. Long after the tie and this box have the gone the way of all the earth, I believe our friendship will endure. Thank you, my friend.
I called that tie the consecration tie, and I wore it fondly on the most important occasions. One day, one of my fellow English faculty, a man who had once been a student of mine, complimented me on a special red and gold and green tie. I put it in a manila envelope with a note telling the story I am telling you, telling him how glad I was to pass the consecration tie along, and how much I appreciated his friendship. When I saw him wearing the tie, it made me happy. You guessed it. The next semester, a student of his complimented him on the tie, and he gave it to him with a story of its history.
I am not suggesting that you tell your teachers or even friends what wonderful ties they have on. They are listening to this talk too, and they might think you have ulterior motives. This tradition of giving illustrates spiritual mindedness because the unity born of friendship is more important than individual ownership.
I move now from my anecdotes associated with practical spiritual mindedness to three doctrinal principles of spiritual mindedness that I believe if you understand and practice will be a great blessing to you personally as you begin your life at BYU-Idaho.
Idea 1: The Holy Ghost is the great teacher.
Let's try an experiment:
Step One: Reverently, open a notebook, and get out a writing implement.
Step Two: I will suggest the kind of prayer you could offer in your mind and then will be quiet while you offer your version of it: "Heavenly Father, I desire to be taught by Thy Spirit, to find comfort and insight during this hour. Please reveal to my heart and mind what thou would have me do. I invite Thy Spirit to be with us all here now. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen."
Step Three: If you listen carefully to what the Spirit whispers to you, your prayer will be answered. You should write it down the prompting and act upon it quickly.
I love the example President and Sister Bednar set for us at devotionals and other settings as they sit with their pens poised and their notebooks open. In case you don't know, they are not outlining my message; they are listening for promptings from the great teacher, the Holy Spirit.
Step Four: Practice this process daily. This should be an ongoing process. And if guidance does not come to you during this hour it may come as you walk to class or tonight as you brush your teeth. The point is that you seek the influence of the Holy Spirit daily.
The scripture says "Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings and he will direct thy paths for good." Does this mean seek help with school problems, roommate challenges, relationship difficulties? Yes. All thy doings. What aspect of your life is the Holy Spirit not interested in helping you with? None. To what inquiry would the Holy Ghost say, "Boring." There isn't one. The Holy Spirit accompanies the Savior at the door of our lives, knocking, wanting to be let in to help. What are his office hours? He is always available. "The Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings."
But there are a few principles that the Spirit does adhere to.
Amulek admonishes us to cry unto Heavenly Father for all things, but the Holy Ghost does not cry back. His voice is still and quiet. Loud laughter, unseemly music or TV shows will drown out his calm voice. So may a general lack of orderliness in your life, or clutter in your space, or a frenzy of social activity.
Our Father has said that he cannot look on sin with the least degree of allowance. That does not mean that the Holy Ghost will prompt us only when we are perfect. But sin does tend to deaden our desire and ability to listen. If we want his help, we need to align ourselves with his values and commandments
And those values include obedience and work--even academic work. Do you see the irony of the great prayer of desperation offered sometimes outside the Testing Center: "Heavenly Father, if you will help me pass this test, I promise to be better about studying." The Holy Spirit, I imagine, is more impressed with this prayer, "Heavenly Father, I am grateful for thy bounteous gifts to me, being here and being able to expand my knowledge. I really want to use my knowledge is serving thee. I have worked really hard to master this material. I have completed my assignments and sought help from those who have offered it. I went to bed early and slept eight hours last night. I am working to love and serve my roommates. Please quicken my understanding and recall."
Does this prayer sound far-fetched? There are those who are succeeding academically and spiritually here who offer prayers very much like this one. They are spiritually minded because they have aligned themselves with the kind of thinking evident in the scriptures regarding mental preparation and obedience.
Students who offer this prayer understand the parameters outlined in D&C 88:123-125. Please turn there with me. I will not read the entire verses:
"See that ye love one another. . . .Cease to be idle. Cease to be unclean, cease to find fault one with another; . . . retire to thy bed early that ye may not be weary; arise early that your minds may be invigorated. And above all clothe yourselves with the bond of charity" (emphasis added).
Most of the world's books on how to do well in college probably would not list charity and love as part of their formula for success, but the Lord emphasizes it. Those books do emphasize getting enough rest.
If you were to see a faculty member or fellow student drink a cup of coffee, you would be shocked and alarmed. But daily in all the housing units few seem alarmed at the violations of this law of physical and spiritual health as students stay up well past curfew and then wonder why they next day they are weary, sluggish, and their minds are not sharp. Sometimes I ask my classes how much sleep they received the night before. Commonly much of the class has slept five or six hours or less.
The Holy Ghost is always ready to help. But those who obey the outlined laws of physical, mental, and spiritual health are more inclined to ask for and ready to receive his help.
Idea 2: The Atonement of Jesus Christ enables and empowers spiritual mindedness.
As you know, Christ's atonement enables life: "It was expedient that an atonement be made. . . all are hardened yea, all are fallen and are lost and must perish except it be through the atonement which is expedient should be made." (Alma 34:9)
Christ's atonement gives us the hope of the resurrection. We will live again. He also paid a vicarious payment of mercy to satisfy the demands of justice " and bringeth about means unto men that they may have faith unto repentance." You know the "great and eternal plan of redemption."
I ask, how can the atonement help us achieve spiritual mindedness and succeed at BYU-Idaho?
As I have contemplated his question, I have found it helpful to distinguish between The Atonement with at capital A and atonement with a small a.
The Atonement (Capital A) is that transcendent act at the center of all human history and beyond, the crowning act of obedient sacrifice whereby Christ met the demands of justice in our behalf and wrought the great resurrection.
We avail ourselves of that great gift by believing in him, repenting, keeping the commandments and enduring to the end.
The center of being spiritually minded is loving and living the doctrine of the Atonement.
How may this be done? We can participate in The Atonement by striving to understand and live the principle of atonement. Atonement with a small a is the unifying principle of service and sacrifice embodied by our Savior. He wrought The Atonement the last days of his life as he suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross of Calvary. I believe he prepared for that great event on behalf of all of mankind as he lived the principle of atonement every day of his life, loving and serving the individual souls he encountered in Galilee and Judea. I believe that in the extremity of the Atonement he somehow was conscious of each of us--our names, our faces, our lives.
But as he did not receive a fullness at first, but learned grace for grace, he must have practiced atonement one individual at a time, learning the great lessons of empathy and service daily. We avail ourselves of his Atonement as we emulate him one act at a time, as we serve and sacrifice for, empathize with and strive for unity with his children line upon line, hour by hour, one act at a time.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said,
"For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men's faces."
In other words, part of seeing the love God has for us and for all of our brothers and sisters is to see the family resemblance, to see Christ in the faces of those around us. And to treat them accordingly. Learn their names, find ways of serving them, certainly saying kind words, controlling moments of irritation and impatience.
I want to suggest a practical application of the principle of atonement and building a Zion University. The Lord says, "If you are not one ye are not mine." I know of an apartment where the roommates took a picture of their group and put it in a frame that said, "Friends." A picture alone will not bring apartment unity, but thinking of yourselves as friends is a start. I know that when roommates will be as much like a righteous family as possible, they practice the spirit of atonement. Praying together, reading scriptures together, holding family home evening, keeping curfew and other commandments, doing random acts of kindness with and for each other--these are the building blocks of spiritual mindedness.
Idea 3: Heavenly Father's love is especially evident in the temple, the central place for spiritual mindedness.
What is the relationship between the classes you are currently enrolled in and will be enrolled in at BYU-Idaho and the holy temple, the Lord's university? Is there a sense in which the turning of the hearts of the fathers to the children and the children to the fathers finds application in the classroom and wards of this university?
Of course it is possible that you might meet your future spouse in one of the classes you are taking. I understand it has happened before.
Sometimes students come to me and say, "I don't know what to do with my life," they almost invariably are speaking of a career, vocational, major choice. Once I felt bold and said to an advisee, "Yes you do. You want to be a husband and a father." I then went on to help him with his educational plan, but the real education is closely associated with family.
The temple teaches us to keep the long view and to see the central place of family in our lives and in the kingdom. I encourage you to do as the prophets have admonished: set your sights on the temple. Let the temple be the grand symbol of your life. You may say, "But how am I to balance my academic demands with my desire to attend the temple, receive my endowment, and be sealed?" Acknowledging that "to everything there is a time and a purpose under heaven"--a time to study and a time to attend the temple--let me suggest to you in the striving for that balance lies a possible source of great blessings. Many BYU-Idaho students attend the temple weekly.
I am very grateful for my academic training--my degrees and experiences. But I join with President Packer in stating that the most important lessons I have learned in life, especially in relationship to my Heavenly Father, I have learned in the walls of my home. May I solemnly proclaim my wonder and awe for the gift of love with which I feel blessed in relationship to my wife and children. It is a thing of such transcendent beauty and power and magnitude that I speak of it in the greatest of reverence.
So when the Lord enjoins the saints to establish a house, a house of order, a house of learning, a house of prayer--is he speaking of the temple, the school of the prophets, or your BYU-Idaho apartment? I think the answer to that question is "yes." Our homes and our classrooms need to be more temple like.
I believe our success as students, teachers, and as children of Heavenly Father is directly related to the seriousness with which we take our prophet's lead in taking temples to the people. We need to take our temple worthiness more seriously, and we need to link it to our being at BYU-Idaho:
To think more of the temple, to attend more often, to strive more diligently to understand and practice principles of vicarious service is a key to spiritual mindedness.
I move from these three doctrinal ideas to a personal story that illustrates a time in my life when I learned of the inadequacy of my spiritual mindedness.
I was a freshman at Brigham Young University. My friend Ken and I had built a simple two-man kayak out of plywood ribs and covered it with canvas that we then waterproofed. It was a crude affair, but it worked, and it matched our level of knowledge concerning river running. We didn't know much.
We decided that spring to run the Provo River from the mouth of the canyon to Utah Lake. As we put in, there seemed to be plenty of water, maybe too much, I thought , but, of course, didn't want to say so. A ways down the river, we hit a shallow spot. Our kayak hung up on the bottom. We turned sideways and started to roll. We did manage to get out, but in the process I dropped my paddle. It floated away, and we never found it.
We were stuck. I held the boat against the powerful cold current about knee deep while Ken, using his paddle to steady himself explored all around us to see if we could get to shore.
As he explored down stream, I though it would be great fun and a way to relive tension to pick a rock from the bottom on the river with the hand that wasn't holding the kayak, throw it at Ken and splash him. After the first splash he tried to swing and hit the water back at me with the paddle. I pick up another rock and since he was in a baseball like swinging stance, I threw him a strike. He swung and hit it. The rock didn't go anywhere, but half the paddle did. We had broken the other paddle. We were, literally, up the creek without a paddle.
To our credit perhaps, we bowed in prayer and offered a petition for help. We were stuck, and we knew it.
I pause in this narrative to tell you a little about my mental state. I had been in some tight places rock climbing, but not what I would call real trouble. It seemed that every year people drowned in Provo River. The spring run off was very cold and the pressure of its flow against us very strong. We couldn't stand against it long and we were in an out-of-the-way part of the river. Not many people came there. One or both of us could easily fall prey to the power of the river.
I consciously remember saying in my mind, "I know that I should have faith in Jesus Christ. He could help me. Help us get out of here, help us to transform our fear into action. And I don't have that kind of relationship with him. I lack faith. I have never needed him like I need him now, and I am afraid."
It was clear that we were in trouble with the river, but I realized as I never had before that I was in trouble with my spiritual preparedness. I was weighed in the balance of the swift current, and I was found wanting. And I sensed keenly my spiritual inadequacy. I wanted to be able to call upon the powers of heaven and receive comfort and deliverance.
It seemed that we were left alone long enough to get really scared and sense our dependence on Heavenly Father.
A young man came along the road skirting the river, fishing pole in hand. He was puzzled to see us standing in the middle of the river with a kayak but with no paddles. On each end of the kayak we had a rope for tying up; we took the one off and tied it to the other rope. The fisherman cast us his line; we hooked the line to the end of the rope. By moving the craft as close as we could toward the shore into the deep, fast water, he could grab the end of the rope. Hanging precariously close to the river, he held on. We held on to the side of the boat, and the current swung us against the shore where we scrambled up and drew the kayak after us.
I doubt that when that young man, who I think I recall said he was a BYU student, set out fishing that day, he thought about being spiritually minded, but I am glad he came along that road at that time. I believe he was led.
Brothers and Sisters, we all face our moments of extremity. Someone says, "Did you hear about. . . ." and they tell us about something unthinkable that has happened. The phone rings and your mother sounds more solemn that usual and says, "There's been an accident." Or "Your father went to the doctor today." Or you have the accident or go to the doctor. Or have a friend confides something in you that shakes you to your foundation. I can promise you that such experiences will come to you. Many of you already know the sinking feeling that comes in the face of tragedy or potential tragedy.
What do you do when the bottom drops out, as it were? If you have cultivated habits of spiritual mindedness, if you are no stranger to the workings of the Holy Ghost, the Savior's Atonement, and the love of an Eternal Father, you will find it easier to cope. You may still find yourself on the brink and stretched to the limit, but you will have resources. You will know Him because you have been a frequent visitor in His house.
May I review with you:
To be spiritually minded is life eternal, to be carnally minded is death.
You are greatly loved by those around you; they yearn and pray for your success.
The Spirit is the great teacher. The atonement enables spiritual mindedness. Heavenly Father's love is temple centered.
"And this is life eternal that that might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent." (John 17:3)
I express gratitude for the opportunity to share these ideas with you. Many a time in the last months and weeks I have prayed for spiritual mindedness or have thought in time of decision, what would a spiritually minded person do. I pray that you will find success in your attempts to be more spiritually minded.
I testify that
The Lord is extending the saints' understanding.
The knowledge and power of God are expanding.
The veil o'er the earth is beginning to burst.
We through our faith may begin to inherit
The visions and blessings and glories of God.
Let glory to them in the highest be given
Henceforth and forever.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.