General Conference Odyssey

I really enjoyed Elder H. Burke Peterson’s talk, Harmony in the Home. It’s another one of those talks that makes you realize that there’s nothing recent about the Church’s emphasis on family: “In countless writings the prophets of the Lord have been trying to teach us that throughout time and all eternity the most important organization is the family.” That alone is a talk that makes it interesting to me, but what stood out to me in this particular talk was the relationship between Christ and family.

That’s something that’s not always obviously apparent. To some extent, it seems that the Church’s emphasis on family is separate from and might even detract from a focus on Christ. I happen to be reading a draft of my father’s next book,[ref]Sorry, no spoilers.[/ref] and those three topics (church, Christ, family) are central to his first chapter.[ref]Maybe the whole book, but I’m still in the first chapter.[/ref] And I saw a lot of the same themes in Elder Peterson’s talk.

First, it strikes me that “the Lord” comes before “family” in that snippet I quoted. It seems like such a small thing, but it really matters. Where does the emphasis on family come from? It comes from “prophets of the Lord.” The message is from Him. This kind of connection between the family (or the home) and the Lord ran throughout the talk, for example: “The home should be the great workshop of the Lord. Here is where children must be taught to walk in ways of truth and soberness, of love and service to each other.” Or also: “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more easily taught and longer remembered in a happy home.”

But here–and this is my second point–is the paragraph that struck me the most from this whole talk[ref]I’m patching together two quotes that are kind of far apart in the original[/ref]:

May I suggest that as parents we must require more of ourselves. May I suggest that we give more of ourselves, that we give more good experiences to our children, experiences that are love-producing and family-solidifying…What if you decided to be cheerful tonight at the dinner table, and in spite of what others might do or say, hold to your course. See how long you can uplift your whole family.

On the one hand, this could be read as such a banal little passage. “Be cheerful!” What could be more simplistic or, a cynic might argue, shallower? But I really love this idea at the end, “see how long you can uplift your whole family.” Because here are two great realities of Mormonism within this talk. The first is that little, everyday things matter. We’re used to seeing talks about controversial moral issues, but Elder Peterson’s focus was simpler:

One of Satan’s most effective tools is at work among us today—it is a destroyer of happiness, peace, contentment, family solidarity. Families are stumbling and falling because of its hobbling and crippling effect. This tool of Satan is called contention.

In other words: don’t argue. Be kind. Be nice. How simple! And yet, if you practice it in your everyday life, how profound the impact. Kindness matters. And if kindness really matters, than sacrificing yourself–your time, your energy, your priorities, your pride–to try and bring more happiness to your home is not banal. It’s truly following the example of the Savior. Not in a dramatic way, but in a true way. Giving that last ounce of energy when your day is long, your kids’ questions are irritating, and the to-do list seems never-ending is hard. You want to hold something back. You want to keep something in reserve. You want to give less than everything. But when you summon the courage and the love to go beyond what you thought you could do, even if it’s something as simple as putting aside your expectations or plans to just be with your kids, well… you’re being a savior in your home. You’re following Him.

It’s true that the Church’s emphasis on family goes way back. And it turns out there’s a reason for that. Home really ought to be the workshop of the Lord.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• A Home Where Mission is Part of Life by G
• Satan’s Effort to Influence and Control the Human Mind by Daniel Ortner
• Abomination and Understanding, Works and Grace by Ralph Hancock
• Zombies, Mormons, and Ants by Jan Tolman
• We are the catalyst by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

This is how I pick which talk to write about every week: I pick the one I can’t stop thinking about. This means that there are basically two kinds of talks that I write about.

First, I write about my favorites. These are the talks that strike me when I first read them, and that continue to resonate in my mind and heart long after I have reached the end. Elder Marvin J. Ashton’s talk Love of the Right from the April 1971 General Conference is one of those, and I ended up quoting from it in my Sunday School lesson on Sunday. This week, I liked Elder Gordon B. Hinckley’s talk Watch the Switches in Your Life, and especially one line that I took as a great comfort: “the work of the world is not done by intellectual geniuses. It is done by men of ordinary capacity who use their abilities in an extraordinary manner.”[ref]I’ve met some really brilliant people in my life, and so I’ve long since realized that in terms of raw mental power, I don’t have much to offer. Two things keep me going. The first is that there aren’t enough geniuses to go around, and so there’s lots of important work left for mere mortals to attend to. The second is this idea that Hinckley refers to: effort probably matters more than talent in practice.[/ref]

Second, I write about the talks that confound, puzzle, or even discomfit me. The first are talks I don’t want to leave behind, the second are talks that don’t want to leave me alone. This week, that would definitely be President Harold B. Lee’s concluding address to the priesthood session: Admonitions for the Priesthood of God.

There was an awful lot that I highlighted from this talk. Here’s one part that has been troubling me since I read it. President Lee recounts a question a sister asked “concerning the promise made that if one would keep the Word of Wisdom he should run and not be weary and should walk and not faint.” The sister asked, ““How could that promise be realized if a person were crippled?”

This is the kind of technicality my 7-year old son is always asking me about. It seems that every time I ask him to do something, or give an explanation, or basically say anything at all, he turns into a pint-sized lawyer and finds the exceptional case and then asks me about it (if I’m lucky) or does it (if I’m not lucky).

So sure, the question seems a little pedantic to me. General promises aren’t fulfilled in a perfectly regular, obvious, and transparent way without exceptions. And for good reason. That would turn Heavenly Father into a sort of cosmic vending machine. As with many hardships we face on Earth, the chaos and confusion of this fallen world are features, not a bugs. And yet here was President Lee’s response, “Did you ever doubt the Lord? The Lord said that.”

Well.

President Lee then goes on:

The trouble with us today, there are too many of us who put question marks instead of periods after what the Lord says. I want you to think about that. We shouldn’t be concerned about why he said something, or whether or not it can be made so. Just trust the Lord. We don’t try to find the answers or explanations. We shouldn’t try to spend time explaining what the Lord didn’t see fit to explain. We spend useless time.

If you would teach our people to put periods and not question marks after what the Lord has declared, we would say, “It is enough for me to know that is what the Lord said.”

Some of this, I love. The phrase, “too many of us… put question marks instead of periods after what the Lord says” is refreshing and memorable. But the thing is that if you were to boil everything I write about religion down into its distilled essence, you would be left with “try[ing] to find the answers or explanations.” That is, by and large what I do. And it is this which President Lee dismisses as “useless time” spend trying to “[explain] what the Lord didn’t see fit to explain.”

Well.

I, for one, certainly preferred Elder Tanner’s tone in the preceding talk: “let us listen to the prophet’s voice and follow him, not blindly but by faith”[ref]emphasis added[/ref] then President Lee’s sternness.

The peril for you, dear reader, is that when I pick talks the way I do, I don’t always know quite how to process them. I’m afraid that if this is a troubling passage for you, as it is for me, we must simply be troubled together.[ref]If it’s not troubling for you, then you’re probably one of the folks who already thought these kinds of pieces were wastes of time. So why are you reading it? :-)[/ref]

In this case, my provisional understanding is that President Lee’s primary point is that we should not let our questions or searches for explanations interfere with our obedience in the meantime. The pattern of faith emphasizes experimentation. If you try to work out all the pros and cons of (for example) following the Word of Wisdom without every trying it for yourself, then the quest for theoretical knowledge will crowd out and replace more valuable experience.

Rationalization? Cherry-picking? Perhaps.

There is no member of the Church who couldn’t benefit from prophetic guidance. We’re all wrong about something. That much is a given. It’s the reason we have prophets in the first place. But I don’t think that rushing precipitously from one view to its opposite is the best approach. The most important doctrines are the one that are repeated most frequently and most plainly, and that is where our attention should be focused.

For lesser issues—such as the precise implementation of the principles President Lee was teaching in this passage—I think the most important thing we can do is allow ourselves to be bothered by what we hear and read. Dismissing it out of hand is obviously folly. But rushing to try to adopt it before we really understand is another, lesser species of folly.

There are lots of quotes about how you should be kind to everyone you meet because everyone is fighting some battle, carrying some burden, wrestling some demon. This is both dramatic and, for the most part, true.

But it’s also true that everyone you meet is walking around with pebbles in their shoes. Little things that don’t make sense. That they haven’t figured out. Little irritants that remind them that they have something to learn, something to change, something to do, but they haven’t figure out just what or how quite yet.

If you have pebbles in your shoes, as I have in mine, that’s OK. Don’t ignore them, because they mean you have something to learn, but don’t obsess over them either, because there are probably bigger concerns.

In time, you will figure many of them out. And when you do, they will be replaced with new pebbles. And that, too, is OK. A kid who graduates from pre-algebra to algebra may feel equally challenged by both subjects, but they’re still progressing. That’s how it is for us a lot of the time, too. We learn and grow, but so do our challenges. It’s OK. Be patient. Trust God. He’s a good teacher.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• The Antidote for the Venom by G
• It is the Modern Scripture by which we are Judged by Daniel Ortner
• by Michelle Linford
• Mow the Lawn, Do the Dishes, Save Your Soul by Walker Wright
• Gospel Messages: Take It and Run With It by Jan Tolman
• Voices and Friends “IRL” by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

There were some very good talks during the Saturday afternoon session of the October 1972 General Conference. Elder Boyd K. Packer had a lot of important things to say about sticking to the basic (in general) and home teaching (in particular) in The Saints Securely Dwell. He taught, for example, that sometimes the most important things are also the easiest to overlook. “No one pays much thought to the beating of the heart,” he said, “until there is the threat that it may be interrupted or stopped.” He also hit on another theme that is starting to quietly emerge across the many talks that I’ve read thus far: the Church serves the family. In this case, “the object of priesthood home teaching is to strengthen the home.”

Another great talk was Elder Loren C. Dunn’s How to Gain a Testimony. It was notable to me for combining the statement “there is one thing to which he is entitled, and that is a testimony of its truthfulness” with the observation that “is no sin to admit to yourself that you do not know if, in fact, you don’t know.” There has been—and continues to be—an awful lot of talk about faith crises. I guess I like the idea of faith construction that Elder Dunn’s talk suggests to me instead. We are not all where we need to be. But there is a way to get there. That is true of so many things in general, and not just of testimonies.

But there is one story—and one paragraph within that story—that sticks out to me from all the several talks we read for this session, and it comes from Paul H. Dunn’s talk “Strengthen thy Brethren.” He writes about dropping off his little girl at a new school when she was afraid to go. She cried and clung to his leg and said “Dad, if you really love me—if you really love me—don’t send me in there.” He replied that “it’s because I do love you that I am taking you in there.”

But then a friend, his daughter’s age, came and cheerfully helped her get over her fears. Here is how he described it:

And before Kellie knew it, she had let go of my leg and got about ten paces away, then realized what she had done. I will never forget her expression and the sermon she taught as she looked back. “Oh,” she said, “Dad, you can go now; I don’t need you anymore.”

It’s an achingly poignant thing for a child to say. As parents, we strive to prepare our children to say it, but we can’t deny that pain that comes when—in one small matter after another—they are really able to say it.

There’s another layer to this talk, however. As I wrote about before, Elder Paul H. Dunn was consumed with scandal in the 1980s (about 10 years after this talk was given) for falsifying many of the stories that he told. Eventually, in 1991, he published an open letter in the Deseret News confessing to fabrications in his stories and to having “indulged in other activities inconsistent with the high and sacred office which I have held.” He also stated that the General Authorities had “censured me and placed a heavy penalty upon me.”[ref] Wikipedia[/ref]

There are those who like to pick at the scabs of the mistakes and imperfections of some of the Church’s leaders, but that’s not why I picked Elder Paul Dunn’s talk. I picked it because, as I said, it struck me so forcefully. It was only after I’d already written half of this post that I remembered who he was. I had every intention of writing this post purely about that story and what it meant to me. [ref]I had the title picked out and everything. It was going to be: “Dad, You Can Go.”[/ref] Then, when I remembered who I was talking about, I had a tough choice. Rewrite the post and make it about something else? Ignore the fact that the story was, quite possibly, embellished beyond truthfulness?[ref]Several of the details do not make sense, once you reread the story with a skeptical eye.[/ref]

There are lots of different ways that people can process the contradiction between the truths of the Gospel and the Church and the falsehoods—in stories, in behavior, or in character—of the men and women who serve. One response is to reject both: if the leaders tell lies over the pulpit at General Conference, what can we trust? Another response is to embrace post-modern ideas of truth. Does it really matter if Elder Paul Dunn had this exact conversation with his daughter? Surely what matters is the impact that the story has, or the principles that it teaches, right?[ref]You can see echoes of the idea that Book of Mormon historicity doesn’t matter, as long as it teaches moral truths.[/ref]

The move God’s Army deals with these issues, and there’s one scene that has stayed with me. It’s 1 hour, 6 minutes into this YouTube version of the film, so if the right spot doesn’t load up, you can scroll forward to that point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1VPIADCAXM&feature=youtu.be&t=1h6m1s

At the end of the scene, the senior companions says, “People let you down. At least your real father’s there for you.” The greenie response, “I haven’t seen him in thirteen years.” And the senior companion says, of course, “I was talking about your real father.”

People do let you down. And you’ll take your turn letting other people down, sometimes yourself and sometimes people who depend on you.

We live in a world without apparent guardrails. If they’re there, we can’t see them. Sometimes prayers are answered, sometimes they are not. Sometimes leaders are great. Sometimes leaders are failures. I’m not sure that it has to be that way by some kind of logical necessity, but I do believe that even these failures can be turned to good.

Paul said that “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God”[ref]Romans 8:28[/ref] and this sentiment was repeated again and again in the Doctrine and Covenants:

• “all things shall work together for your good, if ye walk uprightly and remember the covenant wherewith ye have covenanted one with another.”[ref]D&C 90:24[/ref]
• “all things wherewith you have been afflicted shall work together for your good, and to my name’s glory, saith the Lord.”[ref]D&C 98:3[/ref]
• “let your hearts be comforted; for all things shall work together for good to them that walk uprightly, and to the sanctification of the church.”[ref]D&C 100:15[/ref]

I can’t deny frustration and anger at what Elder Paul Dunn’s mistakes mean for the rest of us. They mean that we have to confront the fallibility of our leaders even in General Conference talks. This seems like a desecration and a horrible loss, as though a sacred space we all depend upon had been tainted.

But then, isn’t that the story of the whole Earth? Don’t we live in a Fallen world, a world brought about by the decisions of Adam and Eve? This is the whole pattern, is it not? I wrote, last week, about how home is Heaven’s construction site. I had to say that home was the “construction site” for the simple reason that, of course, our homes are imperfect. Spouses fight. Parents lose patience. Children lose their way. Home should be heaven, but it isn’t. We all inherit sacred spaces, and we all pollute them. Elder Paul Dunn is not a singular exception. He is all of use. I have no excuse to feel animosity towards a fellow sinner.

More importantly, his sins—and therefore our sins—are not irredeemable. One of my favorite songs of all time is a conversion song by Thrice called “The Artist in the Ambulance,” and it includes the simple line in the chorus, “I hope that I will never let you down.”

Of course, we will let God down. But we can still hope anyway, because Christ’s Atonement can swallow our failures. We can hope never to let God down, not because of our own abilities, but because of His Son’s. The hope is real, but the interpretation needs to be fixed.

God’s promise—through Paul and again through Joseph Smith—goes beyond just repair, however. The promise is that all things—not just some of the things—can work for our good. How can Elder Paul Dunn’s sins work for our good? How can all of our sins work for good?

Maybe, just as happens in the scene in God’s Army, when everyone else lets us down we can learn to rely on the ones who never have and never will. This doesn’t excuse anyone. “it must needs be that offences come,” said Jesus, “but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”[ref]Matt 18:7[/ref] It just means that there is a way for even the dark to be harnessed for the greater light.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• The Courage to Conform by G
• Doing the Will of the Lord by Daniel Ortner
• Saints Securely Dwell by Ralph Hancock
• Creatures of Habit by Walker Wright
• “Thy Will on Earth” by SilverRain
• Being the Ballast by Chastity Wilson
• A Complete Testimony by Jan Tolman
• Power in the ideal by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

The Saturday morning session of the October 1972 General Conference was another one of those sessions where there was one talk that stood out to me in a singular way. This time the talk was Altar, Tent, Well by Elder M. Theodore Tuttle.

Elder Tuttle begins by quoting from Genesis 26:25: “And Isaac builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the Lord, and pitched his tent there: and there Isaac’s servants digged a well.”

Then Elder Tuttle notes contrasts Isaac with is father (Abraham) and his son (Jacob):

[Isaac] did not reach the heights of Abraham… nor was he as impressive as his son Israel… yet Isaac is loved and revered. He worshiped God, cared for his home, and pursued his work. He is remembered simply as a man of peace. The eloquent simplicity of his life and his unique ability to lend importance to the commonplace made him great.

Isaac’s life, Elder Tuttle says, can be a template for our lives. His day to day concerns are our day to day concerns: altar, tent, and well: worship, home, and work. Elder Tuttle notes, “These basic things of life signified his relationship to God, his family, and his fellowmen. Every person on earth is touched by these three.”

In just a couple of short paragraphs, Elder Tuttle has captured the essence of Mormonism as a practical experience. This, to a great extent, is what it means to live as a Mormon: we seek holiness through the mundane by work and by relationships. Mormons do not try to escape the world to seek our destiny. We realize that many aspects of the world enable us to find that destiny right here and right now.

And so there is nothing poetic about Elder Tuttle’s statement that “To Latter-day Saints, the home is a holy place.” That’s not a metaphor an exaggeration. It’s our theology. The home is “patterned after the celestial home whence we came.” We affirm that God is our Father. We believe that we also have a Mother. We believe our parents want us to become like them. Home is the place where that happens. Home is not heaven quite yet—none of our families are perfect—but home is heaven’s construction site.

This work is mundane. The task of building heaven is not a task of great deeds or dramatic confrontations. It is a chore of practicing kind responses when we’re stressed and tired. It’s the discipline of constantly having to reconsider our priorities. It’s the labor of wrestling our recalcitrant personalities into congruence with love in countless small, unnoticed battles day in and day out. It is learning and growth as imperceptible and, when God blesses our lives, as relentless as a tree taking root in the soil and spreading branches towards the sun and the stars.

The work is relational. Of all the virtues we seek after, none is higher than love. And love is a virtue that only exists in the context of relationships. You can be honest with a stranger. You can deal generously with a stranger. But you cannot love a stranger, because love is friendship. Mormon congregations are determined by geography, and this means we can’t shop for a congregation we like. We don’t pick the people we set next to in the pews, and we don’t pick the bishop we like the most either. But this is just a shadow of the blood bonds that make up a family. Not being able to choose your fellow congregationalists is nothing like not being able to choose your parents, your siblings, or your children. The aim of all our mundane work, the objective to which our daily discipline is directed, is nothing but the cultivation of these relationships so that we may, with God’s grace, bring ourselves into harmony with each other.

One consequence of all this emphasis on the family is that, for Mormons, the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exists to serve the family and not the other way around. “The Church… is a family church,” says Tuttle, and “we may say that a prime purpose of this church is to perfect and exalt the family.”

Elder Tuttle concludes his talk:

How little things have changed since Isaac’s day—the things that really matter. There is the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the same family roles to fill, the same need to work. Altar, tent, and well: these things are essential. Placed in proper perspective by God’s revealed word, they provide at once our greatest challenge and achievement.

Altar, tent, and well. These are why we are here.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Family–Isn’t It about Time, and Eternity? by G
• Preach in Season and Out of Season by Daniel Ortner
• What makes Mormonism unique? by Michelle Linford
• A Love Story by Jan Tolman

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Elder Marvin J. Ashton gave the first talk of the Friday afternoon session in October 1972, and it was fantastic. What Is a Friend? is timely in so many ways, and is one of my favorite talks since starting the General Conference Odyssey last year.

One of the things I’m sure people noticed when reading it, is Elder Ashton’s push back against the conventional wisdom that “A friend is a person who is willing to take me the way I am.” In contrast to that view, Elder Ashton taught that “we are something less than a real friend if we leave a person the same way we find him.”  He expounded:

There seems to be a misunderstanding on the part of some men today as to what it means to be a friend. Acts of a friend should result in self-improvement, better attitudes, self-reliance, comfort, consolation, self-respect, and better welfare. Certainly the word friend is misused if it is identified with a person who contributes to our delinquency, misery, and heartaches. When we make a man feel he is wanted, his whole attitude changes. Our friendship will be recognizable if our actions and attitudes result in improvement and independence.

This became the central theme of the talk; friendship requires that we be willing to

1. take a person as they are and
2. leave them improved.

We need both, but so often the world teaches only the first. It teaches that a friend is “a person who passively nods approval,” rather than one who will “suggest and render the best for us regardless of the immediate consequences.”

I also loved the idea of friendship as Elder Ashton applied it to the priesthood hierarchy. “President Less is our friend,” he wrote, and also said, “I love President Tanner and I love President Romney because they are my friends.” This contrasts to starkly with the conventional view of leadership in the world. One example of this is the dichotomy between enlisted and officers in most military forces. The distinction, which hearkens back to class differences, has a useful purpose in a human institution. In On Killing, he wrote about “the paradox of war” saying that “to be a good leader you must truly love (in a strangely detached fashion) your men, and then you must be willing to kill (or at least give the orders that will result in the deaths of) that which you love.”

The officer / enlisted distinction serves to create that “strange detachment” that allows officers—even those who love their men—to send them to their deaths according to the cold calculus of war. This pattern of leadership persists across much of our society, even when there is no such rational basis for it. Leaders are different. They are aloof. They are separate.

But not in the Church. In the Church, there are not officers and enlisted. We’re all enlisted. There are no such barriers between the clergy and the lay members, we’re all lay members. And so we’re all—or we should all be—friends.

And then, Elder Ashton extended this principle even farther, citing several passages from the scriptures that describe God as our friend and concluding, “We need God’s friendship. He pleads for ours.” This is a concept that is only possible with the correct view of friendship, that love motivates both acceptance of a person and an unmitigated desire to help that person become better.

Of course, in our relationship with each other, we have to be wary of motes and beams, but the fundamental motive to help each other rise higher is fundamental to friendship, and it is that principle that animates our friendship with God who—unlike us—always knows exactly what we need to continue our ascent to be more like Him.

And so it is that, as Joseph Smith said, “friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of ‘Mormonism’.”

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• A Grand Fundamental Principle by Nathaniel Givens
• Making Ourselves Perfect by G.
• God Will Let You Know by Daniel Ortner
• by Walker Wright
• Rise Above “Normal” by Jan Tolman

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Last week we covered the last session of the April 1972 General Conference. In July of that year, President Joseph Fielding Smith passed away, so this week we’re covering the first session during which President Harold B. Lee served as President.

It also means that during the three-year period from 1970 – 1972, there were three different Presidents of the Church[ref]as President Kimball noted in his talk.[/ref]. Change for the Church continued rapidly, since President Harold B. Lee passed away in 1973, meaning that the Church had 4 different Presidents in just a 5-year period.

Change was the central theme of one of the talks this session, Elder John H. Vandenberg’s Becoming a Somebody. “Who is there who has reached that point in life,” he asked, “where he can afford to allow himself to stop growing or to stop improving?”

This idea of constant progress and growth is at the core of who we are as Mormons, and Elder Vandenberg did an excellent job of trying it to our foundational principles and ordinances. It starts with faith, of course, but then “repentance follows faith as naturally as the day follows dawn.”

Once again, we’re unearthing that connection in Mormonism between knowing and loving. When we see Christ, we want to be nearer to Him. And that means becoming more like Him. And so faith leads to repentance, and then to baptism which—“as it cleanses the reborn person”—initiates a whole new journey of growth that is guided by the Holy Spirit. And so Elder Vandberg concludes:

In these principles we find the unfailing power to change… As one acquires knowledge of the gospel principles and pursues his course, he can successfully apply those principles to his individual circumstances, whether his position be one of great or meager possessions; whether it be early in life, during his economic production period, or in retirement. The gospel is meant to temper life and to bring it into true balance and fruition.

Thus we see the Gospel as middle way: calling us to strive for ideals beyond everyday experience, but at the same time calling us to spend our days and years in mundane work and service. Mormonism makes us grow because, when we are truly trying to live it, we refuse to let go of either Heaven or Earth and find ourselves stretched between the two.

Two final points stuck out from this talk. First, President Vandenberg said that “the Lord has decreed that ‘the Church hath need of every member.’” Last week, news broke of Tyler Glenn’s new song from his solo album. Glenn, the lead singer of the band Neon Trees, had recently been a positive spokesperson for the Church but, it seems, has come to believe that the Church has no need of him because of his same-sex attraction. That’s not true, and it’s not what the Church teaches. We are all sinners, and the Church needs us all anyway. That need is absolute and—like the Savior’s love—it is not contingent on our worthiness or righteousness. Glenn’s loss is also our loss—as it is with every member who stumbles—and I hope one day he comes home.

And then there is this final question: “I ask you, brethren, sisters, where would we be, where would you be, where would I be, if it were not for the power of the gospel of Christ?” It’s a sobering question, and one well worth asking of ourselves.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• I Know by Daniel Ortner
• Revelation and Character by Ralph Hancock
• “Things Won Are Done; Joy’s Soul Lies In Doing” by Walker Wright
• Sustaining the Prophet: Powerful! by Jan Tolman