My church talk

Every week, the local leaders of each congregation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ask a few members of the congregation to prepare a five- or ten-minute "talk" they'll share in sacrament meeting on Sunday. Last week, the first counselor to the bishop asked me. "Hello Jessica, the sister missionaries assigned to our ward are coming to speak this Sunday," he said, "and the bishop thought you might give a talk about what you can do now to prepare to serve a mission."

I hadn't been asked to give a talk in three years, ever since I came to college. Sometimes you're just lucky like that. But then again, it had been three years; it was probably past my turn to speak again, and how often in a 'singles' ward do you get a chance to speak with sister missionaries? I said yes. My family even made a special trip to attend my ward sacrament meeting so they could hear me speak. And as promised, here is a copy of my talk on this blog:

Sacrament Meeting Talk 3/10/13

Topic: What I can do now to prepare to serve a mission

When Brother Whitaker asked me to speak about things you can do now to prepare to serve a mission, I panicked a little bit. I know what I think and what the bishop thinks is important, but since I don’t really know what it’s like to serve a mission, I’m sort of taking a leap of faith in assuming that reading my scriptures and the words of the prophets, trying to be more social and looking for opportunities to share my testimony are the best things to help me to prepare to serve. One of the things I love about this gospel is how personal it is – but that’s frustrating too, because there is no perfect formula for preparing to be a full-time missionary.

I’ve never been a very patient person. I turned in my mission papers three Wednesdays ago, so I was really hoping my call would come last week, but it didn’t. When I finally asked the bishop to check my status online he said I was “ready to be assigned,” so last I’ve heard, I haven’t even been assigned yet. As I’ve been waiting, I’ve also learned my parents aren’t very good at waiting either. Starting Wednesday of this past week, I’ve gotten one or two texts from my dad every day. “Has it come yet?” “Have you checked the mail today?” And I’ve received lots of emails from my mom with links to articles or blogs she’s found about missionaries or missionary work. Sometimes I wonder who’s more excited for me to get my call, me or them. But then again, it makes sense that they’re so excited, because they’re the ones that brought me up in the Church. They’re the ones that taught me to be this way.

In fact, I called my dad yesterday to ask him about what he did to prepare for his mission to Bogotá, Colombia, and the last thing he told me after we’d talked for a little while was about the wait for my mission call. He said, “I kind of like the idea of the twelve apostles passing your application back and forth and asking each other, ‘Where in the world are we going to send this girl?’”

I know missionaries are divinely called to the place they need to be, and I actually don’t mind waiting because of that. In a talk during the April 2010 General Conference, Elder Ronald A. Rasband* described how he felt when he was a mission president in New York City about the missionaries assigned to his mission. “As I interviewed them on their first day in the mission, I had a profound sense of gratitude for each missionary,” he said. “I felt that their call to our mission was divinely designed for them and for me as their mission president.”

As strongly as I feel about the divine call of full-time missionaries, I don’t want any of you to tune out because you don’t have or aren’t expecting a full-time call. Maybe you’ve already served, or maybe you don’t feel a full-time mission is right for you right now. In either case, I think (I hope) what I have to say is as relevant to you as it is to anyone who is currently preparing to serve a mission.

In October 1997, Elder Richard G. Scott said, “There are few things in life that bring as much joy as the joy that comes from assisting another improve his or her life. That joy is increased when those efforts help someone understand the teachings of the Savior and that person decides to obey them, is converted, and joins His Church. There follows great happiness as that new convert is strengthened during the transition to a new life, is solidly grounded in truth, and obtains all of the ordinances of the temple with the promise of all the blessings of eternal life. President McKay showed us how to obtain such joy with his profound clarification of our responsibility to share the gospel: ‘Every member a missionary.’”

The January visiting teaching message puts it this way: “We don’t need a formal mission call to share the gospel. Others whose lives will be blessed by the gospel surround us, and as we prepare ourselves, the Lord will use us.”

In my research for this talk, I found lots of suggestions for how to prepare ourselves to share the gospel. I’ll only focus on four:

First, convert yourself to the gospel. Second, look for opportunities to share your testimony now. Third, practice listening to the Holy Ghost. Fourth, learn to love people.

In one of the introductory videos to the new youth program, one of the girls being interviewed says, “If we’re going to become converted, we can’t just listen. We have to act on what we’re learning.” I think the same goes for teaching. If we’re going to share the gospel, we have to know and live what we teach. As the saying goes, preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words.

Be an example of what we believe. Pray and read the scriptures consistently. It’s by remembering to do the “little things” that we invite the Holy Ghost into our lives and start building our relationship with the Savior.

When I moved away from home for the first time, I was a little unprepared for how easy it was to slip out of the scripture-reading habits I’d established at home with my family. It was hard to get myself to read consistently when I lived at home, but when I left the shadows of my parents and had to metaphorically stand on my own two feet, it got ten times harder. Even attending church could be a struggle. I remember several Sundays of my freshman year when getting up and going to church was a very conscious choice. I forced myself go because I knew it was good for me – kind of like what going to school feels like sometimes.

Even though it is hard, I wouldn’t trade the experience of choosing to build my own testimony for anything. I love the fact that in this church, we are encouraged not to follow the doctrines blindly. We are encouraged to seek our own confirmation from God whether it is true, and God has promised us, “Ask, and ye shall receive.” If we sincerely pray to know something, he will answer us. I think true conversion is a process; it doesn’t happen overnight, it happens as we slowly improve ourselves each day. As one of the young men in the “We Become” youth video says, “I think conversion is when you change your heart.”

In addition to studying the gospel, following the doctrines Christ has taught helps build your testimony – just like taking opportunities to share your beliefs does. As we learn to share with others and learn to share our feelings with the Savior during the conversion process, our relationship with him becomes closer.

When he spoke at the prospective missionary meeting, Elder Kopischke challenged us to open our mouths and start acting like missionaries now. The night I turned my mission papers in, President Lewis gave me the same challenge. I put a lot of thought into how I could act like a missionary now, even though I wasn’t on a full-time mission, and two words came into my head: “share or serve.” Every day, look for opportunities to share your testimony or to serve. Stand as witnesses of God at all times, in all things, and in all places you may be in.

It actually isn’t anything more than we were challenged to do in my Young Women’s classes, but I needed the reminder. It helps that I want to serve a full-time mission, and I want to be as prepared as I can before I get there. As another girl in the “We Become” youth video says: “As we become converted, we realize what the gospel is doing for us, and we want to share it with others.”

It’s not always easy to vocally share your testimony with someone else. Sometimes it’s really scary. I have a friend who’s going through a really difficult time right now. She’s grieving for one of her friends who died suddenly in February, she’s homesick, and she’s feeling alone. Last weekend, she opened up about some of her feelings in a blog post that broke my heart. I really wanted to say something to comfort my friend, but everything I could think to say felt really inadequate. I don’t know what it’s like to have a close friend die. I don’t know what it’s like not to have my family living twenty minutes away if I need something. (I do know what it’s like to feel alone, but not to the degree which she seemed to be feeling.) I did know the Savior knew exactly how she was feeling, and even though I was nervous about finding the right thing to say, I decided to try to talk to her. It was late at night when I read her blog post, so I couldn’t call her, but I could text her a message she might read when she awoke. Even though I wasn’t sure exactly the best thing to say, I was able to think about it carefully and then bear a brief testimony of the Atonement, that the Savior intimately knew the pain she felt, and that He loves her and won’t leave her to suffer alone.

I hope my testimony brought her some comfort. At least it made me feel better, because I know what I said is true, and the Lord will take care of her.

My dad has a strong testimony of opening up your mouth and sharing your beliefs. D&C 100, verses 4-6, says, “Therefore I, the Lord, have suffered you to come unto this place for thus it was expedient in me for the salvation of souls. Therefore, verily I say unto you, lift up your voices unto this people; speak the thoughts that I shall put into your hearts, and you shall not be confounded before men; For it shall be given you in the very hour, yea, in the very moment, what ye shall say.”

In the past, I’d always understood these verses to mean God would remind us of things we’ve studied in our scriptures and in church. That is definitely true, but my dad sort of takes it a step further, to a level I hadn’t ever thought about. When I talked to him yesterday, he said, “I believe the spirit we came to earth with has so much knowledge in it that if can use the Holy Ghost to help us tune into our own spirit, it will help us know what we know already… [I learned that] from feelings I’d had through the Holy Ghost that told me Heavenly Father knew me better than I knew myself and I had to trust the Holy Ghost to realize who I was.”

Having the Holy Ghost with you is so important. The Holy Ghost can be such a powerful force. He may act as a comforter, a teacher, a messenger with inspiration from God, or even just a constant source of strength we each can draw on. It’s important to learn how the Spirit speaks to you individually and practice listening and obeying. Matthew 10:20 says, “For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.”

The fourth and final suggestion I found to prepare to share the gospel is simply to learn to love people. My dad said he learned to suspend his judgment of other people from growing up in a big family. “I learned early on most of the assumptions you make about others are wrong,” he said, “and you need to pause just long enough to understand what somebody is telling you before you assume you know their story and jump in and try to help. So I guess my capacity to love others was just by giving them the benefit of the doubt, listening and putting myself in their shoes. … Once you’ve listened, you’ve got to hesitate a second or half a second before you open your mouth because those are the moments when you gain words that aren’t your own; when the Spirit jumps in to help you help them.”

Practicing loving other people can sometimes be the hardest suggestion to follow of all. But even when people aren’t being very lovable and you can’t quite bring yourself to love them, remember Christ loves them unconditionally, just like he loves you unconditionally. You can still love someone even if you don’t love their actions, just like you can feel God’s love for someone even if you don’t think you can love them yourself. **

(Testimony; power of missionary work, four things: 1. convert yourself to the gospel, 2. look for opportunities to share your testimony now, 3. practice listening to the Holy Ghost, 4. learn to love people.)

Extras if I have time:

*Elder Rasband told a fascinating personal experience where President Eyring invited him to sit in with the members of the Twelve Apostles as they assigned missionaries to their individual missions, and he bore testimony of how they acted completely on the Lord’s direction. He said, “First, we knelt together in prayer. I remember Elder Eyring using very sincere words, asking the Lord to bless him to know ‘perfectly’ where the missionaries should be assigned. The word ‘perfectly’ said much about the faith that Elder Eyring exhibited that day.”

**There’s a book that has made a deep impression on me called “The Hiding Place.” It’s written by Corrie Ten Boom, a woman from Holland whose family helped hide Jews from the Nazis during World War Two. The book is a detailed account of how her family helped the Jews, and what happened to them when they got caught. Corrie’s father died in prison and her sister died in a women’s concentration camp, but despite this family’s terrible trials, their faith in God stayed strong and sustained them through the hardest times. At the end of the book, Corrie describes how she felt when she met a man who had been a guard at her concentration camp:

“His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”

For us, learning to love people may not be so dramatic, but the principle is the same. The worth of every soul is great in the sight of God, and as easy as it is to automatically judge someone, it’s not up to us to judge. It’s God’s job to be the perfect judge.