We have been asked to speak on this year’s Young Men and Young Women’s Theme –Stand in Holy Places. When I was given the theme, I immediately remembered a letter I wrote to myself in my 1964 yearbook, when I was 2...no,I was 15 years old. I am going to read just some excerpts that apply to our theme today. By way of explanation, I had been very active in my High School’s Biology Club and attended a two day field trip with about 20 other High School students to Daytona Beach. I was living in the Southern states and it was during the Civil Rights protests and riots.
"Well, today it’s June 5, 1964 and I am out of the tenth grade. This is a wonderful year for me I’ll never forget it. I know life is worth living if you only try to do your best. I’m growing up and I know it. I can feel myself. I know some of my whims aren’t childish anymore. Tonight I’m in love with the world itself. I have no greater yearning than to live life to its fullest. I want to be a success and I want others to have success. I don’t want to think about hate and violence. I wish I could write all I feel but it's hard to know what to say.
I loved Daytona; I loved the waves, the hair dryers, the blisters, the sun, the rafts, the moon, the night, the boys, and the atmosphere, everything about it. I loved. Graduation. Bobby graduated yesterday. No tears, just smiles. He likes me and I like him. That’s all that counts right now. Summer is here and I going to have fun. I’m growing up! Everyone is. We don’t depend on each other so much anymore. Everyone is maturing now. I’m 15 and I know I’ve got a lifetime ahead. I think you realize it only at 15. I can accept responsibilities now.
I want to meet many people I want to become a part of them. I want to really mean something to someone. I want to find my place in life. I’ve got a lot of living to do and lots of people to meet and places to see. And I don’t want to ever fail anyone.
Most of all I want to be me. I want to mean a lot to someone who means a lot to me.
Tonight my brother and I had a long talk and I just beginning to understand him. Mary is leaving and I know we’re not crazy teenagers anymore. We’re beginning to see how life was meant to be lived.
God help find myself and what I really want in life. I want to really have a wonderful life. I want to have lots of kids and a husband and a career and I want to be loved. I want to live every moment of everyday as something new and exciting. I want to live as a good kind person should. Yes, I want to be religious but that will come when I am ready for it.
In closing, I want to say that I vow to try to make the very best of life. Help me to help others and myself as well. Dear God.
Thanks,
Roxanna"
I didn’t know it at the time but I was writing a prayer. Looking to God to help me find my way. I didn’t have the Gospel to guide me or examples of healthy adults living responsible lives. I felt really vulnerable and floundering looking at all the choices I could make back in the turbulent 1960’s. The world seemed like such a troubled place and I didn’t want to get lost in the turmoil.
About seven months later, through a series miracles, tender mercies and blessings, I had joined the church and was asked to give my first talk as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the form of reciting that year’s Young Men/Young Women's theme. Listen if you would to the words of the theme contrasting them against my earlier letter: “I, a Laurel, standing on the threshold of life, see before me rich blessing which are mine for the seeking. As I pursue my quest, I must choose wisely, that the treasures I seek will be of lasting worth. I will seek that which is beautiful in thought, in word, in deed, that my life may be as a shining light guiding others to goodness and virtue. I will seek wisdom and an understanding heart that I may walk humbly, live valiantly, and progress eternally. I will seek the rich blessings of love which are found in service to my fellow men and obedience to the commandments of the Father in Heaven. Thus will I seek to enrich my life with all things virtuous and lovely that I may find “joy unspeakable here and eternal happiness hereafter.”
What I had learned during those seven months of new member church activity is that there are many spheres or worlds to live in, in this world, depending on how we choose to live; that’s the world we inhabit. I am talking about our internal world. There are lots of different social-economic circumstances that people live in in this world but the inner world, the world of our thoughts, dreams, ambitions and spiritual relationship with our Heavenly Father, that is the world we choose. Joing the church didn't make me better than other people but it did make me better off and a much better me.
When I joined the church, I gained an understanding that God loves me and is approachable, a clear vision of how to grow and improve myself through repentance and daily striving, I gained access to multitude of people who wanted to help me too, and I gained a desire to give these gifts to other people.
I think of the ladder in Jacob’s dream as representing our inner or spiritual self. Jacob saw in a dream a ladder that reached to heaven where the Lord stood above it with administering angels going up and down the ladder. Elder Marian G Romney explained that “Jacob realized that the covenants he made with the Lord were the rungs on the ladder that he himself would have to climb in order to obtain the promised blessings-blessings that entitle him to enter heaven and associate with the Lord.
When we are lifted to a higher rung on the ladder to Heaven, it is only a higher rung on our ladder, not a higher rung compared to someone else. From a gospel perspective, all of us have our own individual ladders but we climb our ladders of spiritual strength step by step, principle by principle or grace by grace. We are not on our ladders in a race or competition to out climb someone else. We are all on an upward or downward journey independent of any one else, learning and growing at our own speed with our Heavenly Father over seeing our progress. And we can lift or discourage others on their journeys.
Marian G Romney also taught that the steps on the ladder represent covenants we make with God that bring us closer to Him. He said, “Temples are to us all what Bethel was to Jacob. Temples are “mountains of the Lord” where we go to lift ourselves above the things of this world, draw nearer to God and heaven, and learn how to enter His presence eternally. Which is symbolized by our “stepping up” into heaven through means provided by God and administered by His angel servants. For there were angel servants in Jacob’s dream. Just as there are angel servants in all the tender mercies we witness so often in our lives.
Our lives are very much like River Runs. Church leaders have long counseled us stay in the main stream of the church activity to avoid the pitfalls of our culture and society. Even if we stay in the main stream, there may still be huge obstacles in our way, cross currents that threaten to tip the boat or snags and boulders to maneuver around. With or without asking God for His help in our lives, it’s still a difficult journey.
And there are the “back eddies.” A back eddy is a side current that can waylay a boat out of the main current into a holding pattern until through tremendous efforts, the boat members oar the boat out of the back eddy if they can. Sometimes on River Runs just as in life, we purposely guide the boat into a back eddy to rest from life, gather our strength, bail out the boat, catch our breath, knowing we will have to gain enough strength to row the boat out of the eddy and into the main stream to eventually get where we want to go.
There are some back eddies that boatmen avoid at all costs only to have the currents or life experiences toss them into a back eddy like the one on West Water called the “room of doom”. Boats caught in the “room of doom” have to be rescued sometimes by power boats and many volunteers not unlike many of our fellow men who are in serious danger and circumstances threatening their spiritual life.
Or we can separate ourselves from the main stream for a sandy beach, warm springs or beautiful camping area only to lose track of time and spiritual experiences whiling away our life in a current that goes nowhere.
One of the great stories of our time is Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables made popular by the recent movie version. Jean Val jean’s spiritual journey of learning to do God’s will is contrasted with Javert’s willful insistence on living his life based on his judgments of his fellowmen.It is a marvelous example of man’s triumph over his self-will and man’s tendency toward self-deception. Where Jean Valjean strove to think through how his actions might help someone else and how God, what God would have Him do; Javert judged people against himself and found them lacking. The simple answer to how we make progress on our spiritual ladder’s is found in D&C 93 using Christ’s Life as an example, He learned to do the Father’s Will growing grace or grace, precept by precept.
In the book “He Did Deliver Me from Bondage”, Colleen C. Harrison writing about changing our nature says: “On our own, the best we can accomplish is a sort of white knuckle, uptight feeling of resistance to our desire to sin. The fact is that internally nothing has been changed and we still want to do our sin just one more time. This state of constant struggle is not the best we can hope for. Life was not mean to be a long slow, torturous journey of constant tension, fear and guilt. A God-given remission of sins (in contrast to a self-imposed self-powered effort) brings periods of unspeakable peace and comfort best described as the “rest of the Lord”.
What usually keeps us from the “rest of the Lord” is our pride. We don’t ask God, believe in God or trust God because like Javert we think we know better or can do it on our own.
But when we come to our senses, think about our spiritual experiences and what we know from those experiences, we can humble ourselves and do the will of the Father in our lives.
Mosiah 4:9 says-
Believe in God; believe that he is and that he created all things both in heaven and in earth; believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.
I know the church is true.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen
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