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Finding Safety in Counsel

"Another fallacy is to believe that the choice to accept or not accept the counsel of prophets is no more than deciding whether to accept good advice and gain its benefits or to stay where we are. But the choice not to take prophetic counsel changes the very ground upon which we stand. It becomes more dangerous. The failure to take prophetic counsel lessens our power to take inspired counsel in the future. The best time to have decided to help Noah build the ark was the first time he asked. Each time he asked after that, each failure to respond would have lessened sensitivity to the Spirit. And so each time his request would have seemed more foolish, until the rain came. And then it was too late. Every time in my life when I have chosen to delay following inspired counsel or decided that I was an exception, I came to know that I had put myself in harm’s way. Every time that I have listened to the counsel of prophets, felt it confirmed in prayer, and then followed it, I have found that I moved toward safety. Along the path, I have found that the way had been prepared for me and the rough places made smooth. God led me to safety along a path which was prepared with loving care, sometimes prepared long before... An example from Church history is that of Reddick Newton Allred. He was one of the rescue party sent out by Brigham Young to bring in the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies. When a terrible storm hit, Captain Grant, captain of the rescue party, decided to leave some of the wagons by the Sweetwater River as he pressed ahead to find the handcart companies. With the blizzards howling and the weather becoming life-threatening, two of the men left behind at the Sweetwater decided that it was foolish to stay. They thought that either the handcart companies had wintered over somewhere or had perished. They decided to return to the Salt Lake Valley and tried to persuade everyone else to do the same. Reddick Allred refused to budge. Brigham had sent them out and his priesthood leader had told him to wait there. The others took several wagons, all filled with needed supplies, and started back. Even more tragic, each wagon they met coming out from Salt Lake they turned back as well. They turned back 77 wagons, returning all the way to Little Mountain, where President Young learned what was happening and turned them around again. When the Willie Company was finally found, and had made that heartrending pull up and over Rocky Ridge, it was Reddick Allred and his wagons that waited for them. (See Rebecca Bartholomew and Leonard J. Arrington, Rescue of the 1856 Handcart Companies [1992], 29, 33–34.)" (then Elder Henry B. Eyring, CR., April, 1997).

“A resistance to anything that limits one’s conduct has almost taken over society. Our whole social order could self-destruct over the obsession with freedom disconnected from responsibility, where choice is imagined to be somehow independent of consequences” [President Boyd K. Packer, Ensign, May 1996.]

To Live Well

Elder Richard G. Scott, To Live Well, April 21, 2011, BYU Spring 2011 Commencement

Sixth, smile. I don’t need to teach you that. Just being on this campus teaches the importance of knowing how to smile and enjoy life. I don’t mean by that that you need to be cracking jokes every day. But a good joke now and then is an escape valve. It is not all that bad. You will soon learn that everybody has problems and nobody wants to hear about yours. Put those things aside and smile. Have a good sense of humor as the prophets do. I wish I could tell you some of the things that we talk about. Not flippant things, not things that are inappropriate—just a good sense of humor. Today we are a little more serious than usual, but I will tell you a secret of how to wake up in the morning with a smile on your face no matter how you feel. Now I’ll have to whisper, because this is a secret. If you want to wake up in the morning guaranteed to have a smile on your face, go to bed with a coat hanger in your mouth. Remember, a good sense of humor helps you greatly.

Seventh, don’t complain. Life isn’t always fair. That’s a fact. But it’s always charged with marvelous opportunities if you know how to find them. I remember once when I was working as hard as I knew how. I happened to be working for a man who took all of the ideas and suggestions and work that I did and passed them on to his superior as though they were his own suggestions. For a while I was really upset about that. As I pondered it, a thought came to me, and I decided from then on I would write reports to him of everything that I was doing or trying to do, and I sent a copy to his boss. He didn’t like that, but it worked beautifully.

Gain Mastery and then Enslave Them

"We again warn our people in America of the constantly increasing threat against our inspired Constitution and our free institutions set up under it.  The same political tenets and philosophies that have brought war and terror in other parts of the world are at work amongst us in America.  The proponents thereof are seeking to undermine our own form of government and to set up instead one of the forms of dictatorships now flourishing in other lands.  These revolutionists are using a technique that is as old as the human race - - a fervid but false solicitude for the unfortunate over whom they thus gain mastery and then enslave them." [Elder J. Reuben Clark, Conference Report, Apr. 1942, 88-97]

Great Transfer Board in the Sky

“We do not control what I call ‘the great transfer board in the sky.’ The inconveniences that are sometimes associated with release from our labors here are necessary in order to accelerate the work there. Heavenly Father can’t do His work there, with 10 times more people than we have on this planet, without on occasion taking some of the very best sisters and brothers from among us. The conditions of termination here, painful though they are, are a part of the conditions of acceleration there. Thus we are back to faith in the timing of God, and to our need to be able to say ‘Thy timing be done,’ even when we do not fully understand it” (Neal A. Maxwell, Ensign, July 2002).

God is in the Details

"Recall the new star that announced the birth at Bethlehem? It was in its precise orbit long before it so shone. We are likewise placed in human orbits to illuminate. Divine correlation functions not only in the cosmos but on this planet, too. After all, the Book of Mormon plates were not buried in Belgium, only to have Joseph Smith born centuries later in distant Bombay....God, who oversees the interlacings of galaxies, stars, and worlds, asks us to confess His hand in our personal lives, too. Have we not been reassured about the fall of one sparrow and that the very hairs of our heads are numbered?. God is in the details! Just as the Lord knows all of His vast creations, He also knows and loves each in any crowd—indeed, He knows and loves each and all of mankind!...Of course we cannot fully comprehend all this right now! Of course we cannot know the meaning of all things right now. But we can know, right now, that God knows us and loves us individually!" (Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Encircled in the Arms of His Love, Ensign, November 2002, p.16)

Get it First Hand

"There is an increase in the attendance of the people at meetings. There is nothing that causes the people to grow more in the Gospel than attending their meetings. There is nothing that is more calculated to cause the spirit of the Gospel to dry up, figuratively speaking, than to stay away from our meetings. When we are in a meeting we partake of the spirit of that meeting. When we are absent from it and somebody tells us of the wonderful spirit that was present and what was accomplished by being there to partake of it, we cannot appreciate those things. It is very much like the man who was hungry and someone told him of a fine dinner, but he did not appreciate that dinner. We have to eat for ourselves, we have to live for ourselves, we have to be in the line of our duty in order to partake of the Spirit of the Lord, if the Spirit of the Lord is manifest.

I call to mind that a brother who lost his standing as an apostle was a very, very poor attendant at the meetings of the Council of the Twelve, other matters occupied his attention. Francis M. Lyman had to come from Tooele the night before our meeting and spend one night here and all day in order to be at the meetings of the Presidency and Apostles which lasted two or three hours, but he never missed one of them. I said to him one day: 'It is remarkable to me that you are so prompt and always present at our meetings.' He said: 'I do not want to miss any inspiration from the Lord; I do not want the Spirit of the Lord to come to me second hand. I want to partake of it, and to feel it, and to realize it, and to know it for myself'" (President Heber J. Grant, CR, October 1934, p.122-123).