Would you take a minute to create in your mind a picture of what exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom will look like? One thing in that beautiful picture that you may not have thought of, that I would like to think about on this Devotional before Valentine's Day, is that you will be there with someone you are very much in love with, and who is very much in love with you. You might say he or she is your eternal Valentine.[1] Since that is an essential part of making that beautiful picture of exaltation complete, then all of us should be preparing and helping others to prepare for that part, though individually some preparation will be able to take place in this life, and some will not be able to take place until after this life.[2]
So in the spirit of New Year's resolutions that many of us just made, I have two suggested Valentine's Day resolutions, one about helping ourselves, and one about helping others, to prepare for that beautiful complete picture of exaltation.
Suggested Valentine's Day resolution number one:
When I was a student at BYU and in my senior year, my parents were on a mission on a very tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Letters took weeks to get to them, and calling the phone available to them was difficult and expensive. They were pretty much out of day-to-day contact with their family on this mission.
But I was getting ready to go to graduate school, and I wanted to talk and plan with them about where to go and how to pay for it. So after talking with other family members, it was decided that I should try to call them. I really looked forward to hearing their voice and talking to them again. So that next Saturday morning, using two operators to place the call, I got a call to work and suddenly heard my father's voice as clear as if it was a local call.
I told him I had called because I had important things to talk to them about. But before I could tell what that was, my father said to me, "Jack, I'm so disappointed in you, you give up too easily. You need to not give up just because something doesn't work out right away. You have to keep trying." I thought, "What is he talking about?" Then he said, "You need to go back and kiss that girl. Don't give up, you go back and try again!"
Then I knew. I was their last unmarried child, and they had been worried about going on a mission with me not married. And in one very small part of a letter I had sent to them a while before, I told them that I had actually gone out with a girl several times, and even tried to give her a first kiss, and she didn't let me, so I wasn't going to ask her out again.
That is what was bothering him. He went on, without stopping, and said things like, "Are you a man or a mouse? You are thinking about becoming a lawyer, so you should learn to use your persuasive skills." He then said, "Now you go back and kiss that girl, ok?" I didn't want to argue with faithful parents on the other side of the world on a mission, so I said yes, I would. I also wanted to get on with what I had called about.
Then the call got cut off. I tried to call back, but the operators couldn't connect again. For the rest of the day I tried and could not get a connection. Now I eventually did talk to them, but not that day, and not about that subject again. On that Saturday, I never said a word to my parents about why I called, and instead I had committed to them to kiss a girl that I knew did not want to see me again.
The next day was Sunday, so being obedient, I found the phone number of that girl, called her and asked if she remembered me, and then told her that my roommate and I were coming to visit her ward that day. That was all I could think up. I was hoping that if I at least got in her presence, some kind of idea would come to me on what to do.
Of course nothing happened during Sacrament Meeting, so I went to Sunday School, where she was one of the teachers. She asked a question at the end of her lesson that went something like this: "Does anyone want to share a personal application of any of the verses from these chapters we've discussed?" The chapters were some of the epistles of Paul the Apostle. Suddenly I thought "Oh no, is this my opportunity? Am I supposed to raise my hand, say 'yes, I have one, and it's with you?'" The verse I was looking at was one of those familiar ones at the end of Paul's epistles, where he says,
"Greet ye one another with an holy kiss."[3] I was too scared. Instead, I remained quiet, went home after church, and realized that was probably the end of my efforts, at least for a while, to do what my father wanted me to do.
That night there was a fireside in the Marriott Center at BYU, which is the big BYU basketball arena that holds 20,000 people. I went with a couple of roommates, and we sat up in the top section, where the lights are dimmed and only a few scattered little spotlights light up the aisles. Waiting for it to start, my roommates and I noticed a group of girls coming up the aisle we were on, and realized it was the girl I was to kiss and some of her friends. As we watched, they stopped several rows below us, and as they went to sit down, her friends went in first, and she sat down closest to the aisle. But, she left one seat open right on the aisle, and right next to her. And, I'm sure I remember wrong, but it seemed like one of those little isle lights was shining right on that empty seat. My roommates jabbed me in the ribs, pointed out what had happened, and told me to go sit by her. I think at that time my thoughts were, "Did my father know all this?"
I was then faced with an important decision. I could either stay seated where I was, or pursue what my father had told me to do, which in his mind, was possibly taking me towards that beautiful picture of exaltation. So at that moment, I made a decision that has made all the difference in my life. I got up and changed my seat.
There is more to this story, but stopping there for now, there is a Valentine's Day resolution I'd like to suggest. It is that sometimes the way to head towards that beautiful picture of exaltation is to get up and change your seat.
Jacob of the Old Testament was living where his father told him there were no worthy women of the gospel covenant to marry, so he changed his seat and went back to the land of his fathers, finding and marrying Rachael.[4] Ruth and Naomi, both widows, returned to the land of Naomi, and Naomi guided Ruth to change her seat, to be with Boaz in whose fields they were gleaning, and whom she eventually married.[5] Lehi had his sons go get the brass plates from Laban, and when he read them he prophesied of his descendants. But wait: there were no wives for his sons, which means no descendants. So he told his sons that the Lord needed them to change their seats, to seats inside Ishmael's home, where, if full disclosure was made of how few there were on this future journey, and of the prophecies of future seed that led Lehi to send them, those young men basically proposed marriage. And they received a collective "yes."[6] So if you are like some of my young adult children and their friends at different times, and you have found your seat to be studying every night alone in your apartment bedroom, maybe you need to change your seat to study in the library or the MC or even outside the doors here at the I Center, where you can meet others. Or if your seat on Friday night is on your couch, alone watching football, you might need to change it to a more social location. If you are married, it may be changing your seat to be next to your spouse so you can go with him or her when you normally haven't been spending that time with them. It could be a seat on a pre-planned well-deserved date night, or in a rocking chair taking your turn holding a sick baby.
In the spirit of BYU-Idaho and "we don't just talk about things, we do and become," you might even change your seat during this Devotional.
The flip side of resolving to change your seat might be to resolve to make the seat next to you a comfortable seat for someone to change to.
For example, one of the businesses I've been involved in was BYU single student housing in Provo. To keep up on it, I subscribed to the BYU daily student newspaper. On one occasion, in looking at advertisements, I came across an ad of a competing complex. A few issues later, I noticed that the ad had been slightly changed.
At BYU in Provo, shorts are allowed on campus, but the dress and grooming standards require that shorts go to the knees. Someone did a photo-shopping job to lower the shorts of the girl in the later picture, until her shorts went to her knees.
Why? I didn't know for sure why it was changed, but I knew why I would change it. Their target customers were the same as ours. Our complexes appealed to recently returned male missionaries, and that was a business fact. So the business reason for the change was this: if you want to attract as many as possible of those target customers, who attend church regularly and are ecclesiastically endorsed by their bishops and stake presidents - then if you are a young woman, cover yourself completely in compliance with the dress standards. Even if the covering is pretty makeshift, like this photo-shopped one, do it. I think that business principle could be applied to making the seat next to you a comfortable one.
As another possibility, if you are sitting in movie theatres with a seat next to you, and what is on the screen is something that some people might turn their eyes away from in modesty, or maybe even walk out on, but you do not look away from it, then maybe the seat next to you is not a comfortable one for some people to want to change to.
Suggested Valentine's Day resolution number two:
Again, while I was in your situation, when I first came home from my mission and returned to BYU, I ran into a friend I had before my mission, named Paul. He and I had done a lot of social activities together at BYU before our missions, going to dances together and on double dates. I think today you would call us "wingmen." When we saw each other again after our missions, it made sense for us to again become friends and "wingmen."
But, as a recently returned missionary, I was careful about getting back to regular life. In particular, there was a very specific promise in my patriarchal blessing that used the unusual phrase of "social activities" and said that if I chose for close friends in my "social activities" only those who were righteous and desired to live the gospel, I would be greatly blessed.
So when I met Paul again, I wanted to make sure he was the kind of person described in that part of my patriarchal blessing, so that I could obtain the promise. It was Fast Sunday coming up, so I fasted and prayed about Paul and us being "wingmen" again. At the end of my fast, a very distinct answer came to me, that didn't make a lot of sense at the time, so I sort of put it on the shelf for later. But the answer was clearly a "yes," that he and I should share our social activities again.
And for the next several years, we did do a lot together. One of the activities we did was to visit the on-campus dorms during what was called "Open House." These particular dormitories were seven-story tower buildings, and since the girls only had bedrooms, boys were only allowed up on the floors during a supervised time called Open House, which was for two hours every other Sunday. So we would sometimes go to Open House and visit and meet, in what I would call "tracting," in honor of the missionary activity we had done so much of.
One Sunday, Paul asked me to meet him during Open House at the room of a girl that I knew. I took my roommate also, but we got there late, so we missed meeting Paul. We decided to just tract around all the floors of that tower looking for him. When we didn't find him, I chose just one floor of the next tower, since we were running out of time. We still didn't find him, so we went to the last of the three towers, and I turned to my roommate and said, "I chose one floor in the last tower, so you go ahead and choose one floor in this tower." He said, "Fifth floor."
We got up to the fifth floor and decided to go different directions. As I was going past one door, I suddenly heard someone call out my name, so I went back and looked in, and it was my friend Paul in that room. I went in, and he introduced me to the girls in that room, and one girl in particular. She had a letter from a missionary serving in France, and he had written some things in the letter that were in French, and she wanted to write some things back to him in French. I spoke French, so I sort of helped, though I admit I was not quite honest in what he said and in what I wrote to him, since he should be focusing on missionary work anyways. As I was working on it, there was an announcement that Open House hours were ending, so we three boys left to go to my car.
As I walked out with my roommate and Paul, I asked Paul, "So how do you know that girl with the French letter?" He said, "I don't know her." I asked if he even knew her name or where she lived, and he didn't. He then explained how he was there. When I was late, and missed meeting him where we had talked about, he began looking for me, and well, tracting. He had been going through the towers and was walking past this particular room when someone said "Hi." So he stopped, and went in and said "Hi." That was when he was asked, "Do you speak French?" His answer was, "No, but I'm looking for a friend of mine, and he does. And there he is!" And that is when I walked by.
Since he didn't know her name, and since I also had not learned her name, I decided that there was no way of ever seeing her again. As we kept walking together to my car, I suddenly realized I had lost my car keys. We decided I must have lost them in the room we were all just in, so we ran back to the dorms and up to that room. It was crowded with people leaving, but no one was at that room, so we split up to find anyone. I luckily found one of the girls from that room by the elevator, the one with the French letter, who held my Eiffle Tower keychain, like this one, that she had found, and figured was mine. Waiting with her by that elevator, I had some time to find out her name and where she lived.
It wasn't until many months later, when that girl and I were engaged and just about to be married, that I remembered what the answer had been to my fasting and prayer years before, about whether or not I should be close friends with Paul in my social activities. The answer had been: "How dare you think that Paul is not the kind of righteous person you should include in your social activities. He definitely is. He may someday introduce you to your wife!"
And he had. He had only met her just moments before me, but he met her first, and introduced me. And it wasn't a great introduction, since he didn't know her name or where she lived. That girl with the French letter, is the same girl who wouldn't let me kiss her the first time and my father had to tell me to try again, and is now with me on the stand.
So the final suggested Valentine's Day resolution is not about you, but about others, a sort of "cupid" resolution. It involves being like my friend Paul - a righteous friend that helps others find someone they can love and that will love them eternally in that beautiful picture of exaltation. I'm not advocating matchmaking. My friend Paul was not matchmaking. He was just... tracting. I would like to instead call him a righteous "go-between."
I love the story of an important person in the scriptures, the trusted servant of Abraham, who also was a righteous "go-between." He was told by Abraham to find a wife for his son Isaac, back in the land of Abraham's nativity, and not among the non-covenant-keeping people where they lived. The servant worried that he would not find one or that she would not come. Abraham promised him angels to help him. What a great go-between job, where you are promised angels to be with you!
When he got there, he prayed for help in identifying the right girl, and it was fulfilled when Rebekah offered to water his camels. When he found out she was of the right lineage and upbringing, he praised God aloud, right then and there, for how happy he was being a go-between with this success. He went with her to her family, and when her family consented to her going with him, he again immediately praised God aloud.[7] Why was his job such a happy one? Because he had the Lord's hand in leading his life - and what a great experience that is, to be led by the Lord so clearly - as he helped to be a go-between and helped bring two people together.
Let me end with this experience. Many years ago, my son and I were home teachers to an older couple. As we visited each month and got to know them over the years, we learned that Christmas was a sad time for them, primarily because of a family situation of sadness.
One year, the couple asked us to help them change Christmas for them, to make it a happy time again. Our role as home teachers was to ask the bishop or anyone else we knew if there was a family of young children that needed some Christmas presents that year because they could not afford them. The couple we home taught would buy presents, give them to us as home teachers, and we would deliver them to the family. The family was not to know who brought the presents, and the couple did not want to know who the family was. The only people who would know who was who, were my son and I.
The first Christmas was a wonderful experience, both for the family that received all those gifts, but more importantly to us, for our home teaching family, because looking for presents and shopping and choosing gave new life to them, and my son and I saw it.
The next Christmas was even better. As we delivered the presents that year, after our third armful from my car, the mother receiving them was overwhelmed. As we went to walk out the door, she could hardly speak. But she stopped me and looked me in the eyes and said quietly, "You have no idea how much this means to us." I then felt I needed to tell her, "You have no idea how much this means to those giving it to you."
At that moment, I think I felt something that I never would have guessed: these two women in particular - the mother receiving the presents, and the wife of the couple giving them - they loved each other, dearly. And they didn't even know each other. It was amazing, that I had been the go-between in bringing two people to love each other, even though they don't know each other. It was like I was a little piece of warm air, in the middle of their warm embrace.
So how can you be a go-between for your friends? You have been reminded by President Clark and others that the Honor Code includes the obligation to help others live it, including living a chaste life, a commandment that is directly related to being clean and ready for being deeply in love with someone in that beautiful complete picture of exaltation we thought of. If you really do help a roommate or friend to stop making bad choices involving those principles, or you help rescue them from a serious problem, your friend might someday say to you, "You have no idea how much this means to me." Maybe on that day, like I felt, you will feel you could say to your friend, "You have no idea how much this means to the other person who will love you so much in the future." Like me, you may feel that two people love each other very much, and they don't even know each other. And you can have the joy of being a go-between. No wonder Abraham's servant praised God aloud for seeing the Lord's hand in his life, as a righteous go-between.
Now I know that this devotional is being broadcast live on radio and internet, and rebroadcast on TV, and that it can potentially reach the entire world. This is likely the only time in my life I will have what I say broadcast to the world. Knowing the serious consequence of testifying before the world of anything other than what I actually know and what I can actually witness of, I now bear witness that I know that God our Heavenly Father is real. I know personally that he communes with his children in prayer, for he has communed with me in prayer and manifested to me his reality and love. I would give up the rest of my existence to be in His presence and feel that continuing love.
I also bear witness that I know that the man who is documented to have lived in the Holy Land 2000 years ago, who was crucified by cruel men in a corrupt government at a young age, that man called Jesus of Nazareth, is the Messiah and the Christ, and the Son of Almighty God. I witness that He literally redeems from sin, for he has redeemed me, an imperfect and sinful man who still needs his redemption. I witness that I know He rose from the dead, and is alive and living today. I witness of his love and healing and power.
But most importantly, if I can witness nothing else, I bear witness that I know that He has been very personally involved in my life, in preparing me and directing me to love and be loved in his exaltation. I testify that I know he is that close and that personal.
Paul the Apostle stood on Mars Hill, and saw the idols and statues they had. He realized how nice it must feel to anyone to have gods you can see all the time, and know they see you and are right with you, because they are idols or statues and you can touch them. But Paul's words are my words, when he said that God was not in those statues, "though he be not far from everyone one of us,"[8] I witness in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] D&C 131:1-4
[2] Matthew 22:1-14
[3] 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Corinthians 16:20 and 1 Thessalonians 5:26. The JST changes it to be much less applicable
[4] Genesis 28:1-2; 29:1, 18-20
[5] Ruth 3:1-11
[6] 1 Nephi 7:1-5; 1 Nephi 16:7-8
[7] Genesis 24:1-67
[8] Acts 17:27