Our Lives Are Our Declaration

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Here is a quote that I stole from my father a long time ago:

To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery.  It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist. – Cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard

And here are the words of (then) Elder Gordon B. Hinckley in The Symbol of Christ in response to a minister who asked, “what is the symbol of your religion?”

I replied that the lives of our people must become the only meaningful expression of our faith and, in fact, therefore, the symbol of our worship.

Later on, he clarified exactly what he meant by this:

As his followers, we cannot do a mean or shoddy or ungracious thing without tarnishing his image. Nor can we do a good and gracious and generous act without burnishing more brightly the symbol of him whose name we have taken upon ourselves.

And so it is in that sense that “our lives must become a meaningful expression, the symbol of our declaration of our testimony of the Living Christ, the Eternal Son of the Living God.”

“It is that simple, my brethren and sisters,” he said, “and that profound and we’d better never forget it.”

Amen.

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