Good Morning! It is a privilege for me to be with you today. Hawaii and the entire Pacific Rim have much to offer in terms of both geographic and climatic beauty. It is a beautiful here but the real beauty of the Pacific is the intangible and subtle love of God that is found in the hearts of the inhabitants.
I also recognize this as a humbling opportunity because I believe that the staff, students, faculty, and administrators of this University honor and also bring honor to the name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You represent the very best of many wonderful cultures. As I stated, it is a privilege for me to spend time with you today.
I begin today by telling you a story about an event that happened to me when I was 16 years of age. My father had recently and unexpectedly passed away. It was difficult for me and my siblings. It was often unbearably difficult and traumatic for my mother.
My Mother was preoccupied with making certain that each of her children receive their patriarchal blessings. She wanted each of us to benefit from the direction that comes from a patriarchal blessing. I was the youngest and the last to receive my blessing.
I was fortunate to live in the ward where the Stake Patriarch also lived. His name was William A. Budge. If a movie was made about a patriarch and Central Casting was asked to find a believable model, William A. Budge would be at the head of the line. He looked the part. He was a respected bank president and community leader. He had beautiful white hair, had a deep and yet calming voice and it was obvious that people deferred to Patriarch Budge. In fact, in my youngest days I mistakenly thought he was President David O. McKay and that the Prophet attended our ward every Sunday.
When I went with my mother to his home for my blessing he engaged us in a discussion about a patriarchal blessing. It was a discussion intended to help a young person understand the significance of the event that was about to occur.
The message he wanted me to hear and to understand was that I was important to our Father in Heaven. I was receiving a blessing given by the mouth of an ordained Patriarch. He had been ordained by an apostle of Jesus Christ after he had been had been called by revelation to a prophet of God.
And I, a sixteen year old kid, was receiving insight through him, but also the insight was coming from a loving Father in Heaven. The Patriarch wanted me to understand the message we find in the Book of Moses (1:39) where we are reminded that the goal of our Father is to "bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." And by the 'eternal life of man' he means the eternal life of his children.
He told us a story that I have remembered to this day. When Patriarch Budge was younger he had served many years as a stake president. In preparing for a stake conference, where a member of the Twelve was going to attend, President Budge asked the Stake Primary President to prepare a primary choir for the coming conference and to also compose a new song to sing during conference. Two very daunting tasks! Her name was Nomi Randall and everyone in this room has not only sung the song she wrote, most of you have it memorized.
She wrote for that stake conference the song "I Am a Child of God." It was pre-formed in the Lorin Farr Stake conference and the rest is history and a wonderful addition to our culture. It is a song that is part of every primary and many adult meetings in the church and it is so important in our culture it is also a frequent song sung by grandchildren at the funerals of their grandparents. We learn we are children of God in our earliest days and as we say goodbye to those we love we help send them on their way by singing this song and reminding us that they are going home to Father. The song is an important thread in fabric of the Mormon experience.
For me the significance of the story was a way for Patriarch Budge to teach me I was a child of God. It was not just a song that contributes to the culture of Mormonism; it is a song that informs the youngest members of the Church a fundamental aspect of the doctrine that we all bear witness to. It is a message I have tried to remember in my roles as a son, brother, missionary, Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood holder, husband, and father.
The words bring a feeling of deep love for my Father in Heaven and for my own family. The first few lines tell us a profound message.
I am a child of God, And he has sent me here,
Has given me an earthly home
With parents kind and dear.
Lead me guide walk beside me help me find the way.
Teach all that I must do to live with him someday.
But the song also presents us with a challenge. When much is given much is expected. I have a young neighbor who is six ten and has always been tall for his age and has been asked all his life if played basketball. Because of his height he is expected to be good. He is now a returned missionary and he does play basketball for BYU. For us the expectations are not as obvious as his, nevertheless we are all children of God and much is expected.
I try to live like I understand the obligation of being a child of God. This is not always easy for me or for most of us. Attendance at the Church is not 100 percent, visiting teaching assignments go unfilled, not every temple marriage is successful, not every young man honors the request to serve as a missionary, and some who serve as a missionary struggled with the work. Simply put, no one is perfect.
There are times and events when I have behaved like I have never heard the song. There are multiple excuses for my shortcomings. I suspect this may be true in your lives.
What I hope to accomplish today is to help each of us find ways to recognize shortcomings or strengths and use simple steps to correct those that need correcting and strengthen the ones we are proud we are doing; in other words, to measure our lives as a child of God.
I will now try to explain why we behave at levels that are below the mark set by our royal heritage.
Allow me to tell another story from my life.
This Spring I was wandering through a State Park in Central Arkansas. The park is in a beautiful part of the world and the State of Arkansas has created an exceptional arboretum with tall magnificent trees, bushes and plants from all continents. It has beautiful streams and water falls. There are paths that lead to secret spots where it is easy to forget challenges and easy to remember what is important.
I was with my wife, two of our grandsons, and a brand new granddaughter. We were also with the children's mother who is our second daughter. It was the kind of day we will always want to remember. It was a day where grandparents are able to completely spoil their grandchildren. If they wanted ice cream they got ice-cream. If they made eye contact with a Snickers bar they got a Snickers bar. We were reminded that while our grandchildren enjoyed the sugar overdose what they really wanted was the undivided attention of their grandparents.
They wanted us to take the time to explore the world with them. We were gently required to look at flowers, climb on rocks, look at the fish, and allow them to explain to us the world as they experienced it. It is also a time when they ask questions that are almost impossible to answer. You know the ones, like 'are fish married?' Followed by the ubiquitous, why, and additional whys. It was during one of these required mini explorer events that the following happened.
Our grandson, Bram who was then four years old, became concerned when he discovered we were in the general proximity of a Dragon Fly. I apologize to the biologists on the faculty and the biology majors for not having the correct scientific name of the Dragon Fly on the tip of my tongue. Candidly, even if I did know the name I would likely butcher the pronunciation.
Bram exclaimed that Dragon Flies are poisonous and he was serious and deadly concerned. He did not explain how or why they were poisonous. I initially suspected his concern was because Dragon Flies do have a somewhat sinister look to them.
First the name Dragon is probably not a good way to start, and then there are the big eyes, long body, lots of wings, and an irregular flight trajectory. I asked him how he knew they were poisonous, expecting a just because response to his grandfather, instead he explained that Gary, his then six year old brother, had told him they were. I realized then that the toxicity of Dragon Flies had been established beyond doubt in Bram's mind because to a four year old there are few humans with more expertize than an older brother. And with their darting flying style and unique shape it easy to sell the story that dragon flies are deadly.
Except that six year old brothers and sisters, even if they are children of God, are often wrong. However, perceptions formed in young minds soon turn to reality and reality, right or wrong, is passed down to siblings and friends. Such perceptions are generally harmless. There will be a time when Bram will discover that his brother Gary does not have all of the answers and those he has may be wrong regardless of how logical they seem. His deference to for his brother will also change with time. Four year olds become six year olds and then they seem to know a great deal and older brothers seem to know less. Who knows, Bram may become an entomologist and spend his entire life studying Dragon Flies, and whether he becomes an expert on dragon flies or not, he will realize someday they are not poisonous and he was wrong. That is the most important part of this story we can be wrong about things and ideas and even behave inappropriately like an irrational fear of a harmless insect. We can be wrong for the most innocent of reasons -the miss guided expertize of a six year old brother ---or even the most sinister of reasons.
I would now like to slightly adjust the direction of this discussion.
I want to talk about lines. What I want to do with lines is to employ them to help us think about and even measure our ever evolving relationship with our Father in Heaven. I know that for most of us lines seem like simple aspects of our daily lives. Stay inside the lines when you color. Don't crowd in lines. Stay between the lines when you drive. Follow the straight and narrow path or the straight and narrow line.
Actually lines are very intriguing, if I was a math professor I could probably go on for hours about the complexity of lines. I have a colleague at BYU that has done research using a linear optimization methodology know as Data Envelopment Analysis or DEA. Many of the results from DEA are reported as lines or the relative length on lines. His name is Professor Larry Walters and early in his career he and a colleague wrote an article that was published in Decision Science and in the article they demonstrated that in the world of DEA, a line is a dot and a dot is a line. I know it sounds and looks irrational but in fact the research by Walters and Desai was a significant contribution to understanding how to utilize the outcome of DEA modeling. Lines are not simple and following them in our lives is not simple.
I would like you to consider the following three lines that you can see on the screen. All three lines are plotted on a two dimensional graph. On the bottom of the graph or horizontal axis we can measure almost anything we want like time or distance and on the other or vertical axis we measure change in volume or the rate of change of the line over time.
The first line on the screen is flat and it illustrates a situation where there is no change in the direction of the line. If the vertical axis was measuring the change in your weight since graduating from high school and the horizontal axis is measuring time it might be consider a good line. If the vertical axis represents the amount of knowledge you have acquired since entering Brigham Young University-Hawaii and the bottom axis measures the amount of time in school, it would not be considered a good line.
The second line illustrates a line that is declining and is declining at an increasing rate. If you are my age and the vertical axis represents the reduction in weight over the past year and the horizontal measures time it would be a good line. On the other hand if the vertical axis is measuring the amount of hair it would likely be considered a bad line. As you can see I can speak with some experience on the direction of such a line around the issue of hair.
The third line is increasing and increasing at an increasing rate. If the vertical axis is measuring weight gain and the bottom or horizontal axis represents the past three years and you are over 30 years of age this is a line of some concern. However, if you are engaged in a rigorous physical routine that is intended to add muscle mass to your body, then the line is a good line. If you are a premed student and the vertical axis measures your understanding of physical chemistry over time it is again a good line.
One of the reasons that I want to talk about lines is the observation that humans are better at grasping ideas and facts when they are visually demonstrated. For example, saying that visiting teaching has increased in a ward is good news, but the facts will have more of an impact if they are demonstrated by a line like line number three.
The point is that human reactions or emotions are triggered the better we understand the information. I believe that telling someone they are getting better is not as powerful as showing them a line like line three showing them that they are getting better and at an increasing rate over time. There is a significant literature that argues the results of empirical and statistical analysis can fall on deaf ears unless the results are visually presented. Such findings are true in the physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences.
Consider for example the data that are in front of you on the screen. It is part of an analysis of what occurs when different rates of sales taxes are imposed within a state. For example what happens if Albany, New York has a higher sales tax rate than White Plains, New York? The results shown on the slide represent an analysis of millions of transactions over a ten year period and suggest that policy makers should be cautious when they allow one city to have a sales tax rates different from another city. However, to most policy makers the numbers on the screen are meaningless. And explaining their meaning is difficult no matter how hard an elected official may want to understand.
But, if the data are converted to pictures like the one on the screen policy makers are able to understand the arguments for and against differential sales tax rate. I know because I have had the occasion to explain both types of representations to policy makers. Using the first slide only confuses and using the second allows understanding and perhaps even better decisions.
I believe we see this principle used in the scriptures. For example, talking about "the iron rod" has far more influence than simply saying that it is "the word of God" that the iron rod represents. I can visualize holding on to an iron rod, on the other hand is much more difficult for me to visualize holding on to the word of God. The thought of holding on to something physical like an iron rod is easy for all to understand including young children and individuals learning about the gospel for the first time. Think of those missionary discussions where you could use I Nephi Chapter 11 to explain the path we are expected to follow. Your investigators could grasp what you were trying to tell them.
Using the concept of lines I would like to talk about factors in our lives that should be increasing at an increasing rate. Like the pattern we saw illustrated in graph number three.
The first of these is knowledge. I believe that in our progression to become like children of God we need to evolve from ignorance and move towards truth and knowledge. How do we gain that knowledge? One sure way is to attend university and to apply yourself and master the topics in class. But knowledge does not always require a formal education. Some of the most insightful individuals I know never spent a day in a university. My oldest son is a reasonably successful attorney. In his legal career he has sought and obtained legal redress for his clients from the United States Supreme Court and has even occasionally prevailed
His formal education At BYU was beneficial as was his legal training at a law school of some note. But the person he gives much of the credit to his success as a student and as a human was an individual he worked for during his four years at Brigham Young University. The person hired and trained my son to install dry wall in new homes or to replace the dry wall in remodeled homes. I think he became good at installing dry wall, taping, and finally sanding and finishing the dry wall to an acceptable level. But what he learned from this individual had almost nothing to do with dry wall. What he learned was the importance of thinking and asking questions. He learned to wonder about things and to seek answers. And to not only seek answers from books or professors but from the "average Joe" and his father in heaven. His boss may not have graduated from High School but he influenced our son on how to think and what was important to think about.
There is a common myth about education. The myth is that secular education is all you need. Secular education is important and when it helps us understand the world it can draw us closer to our father in heaven as we learn to find amazement in the complexity of the world and the human condition.
But there is a danger with just secular knowledge. It can obscure the role and importance of spiritual knowledge in our lives. One reason this happens is because if we only gain secular understanding we likely apply the wrong measure to evaluate our status or the direction of the lines we are following. Secular education is important but it is never enough. We must also increase our spiritual understanding. I offer a simple example of what happens when the wrong measurement is used to calibrate progress or the wrong measure is used on the horizontal axis of a graph.
In 1958 a group of MIT students who decided to measure the distance across the Harvard Bridge that spans the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Exactly how they came to the decision that this action was needed is not clear but I suspect a certain level of alcohol, perhaps a substantial level of alcohol, was part of the decision process. The choice of measurement was probably also influenced by alcohol. The measurement was not in feet, inches, meters, not in any standard unit of measure but in terms of the height of a fellow classmate. His name was Oliver R. Smoots and this is what the students decided to do with him in order to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. Smoots was placed horizontally on the bridge and every time he was laid down the distance between the bottom of his feet and the top of his head was marked. The distance between his feet and head was labeled a "Smoots" . And on this particular night the Harvard Bridge was measured in Smoots. I believe that a "Smoot" is roughly 5 feet 7 inches in length.
I first discovered this unique measurement when I was jogging over the bridge and saw the distinctive and rather odd markings. First, five stoops were marked then ten stoops until I reached the end of the bridge where I discovered the Harvard Bridge is 364.4 Smoots in length "Plus or minus one ear." There is no indication about whose ear was used but I assume it was Mr. Smoots. This event is has been reenacted multiple times. The tradition is over 50 years old.
Does it matter how a bridge is measured, or for that matter, how we measure our lives and the direction of our lives? I believe it does. For example when I flew to Honolulu this weekend I traveled about 3100 miles between Salt Lake City, Utah and Honolulu, Hawaii. The pilot of the plane calculated the distance of the flight, the weight of the plane, and the expected temperature and head and tail winds the flight would face. He then calculated how much fuel he needed. When I am in the middle of the Pacific Ocean I want to make sure our pilot did his calculations correctly. But what if instead of measure in miles the pilot had measured the distance in Smoots? If the plane had started out from Salt Lake and been off target because Smoots are imprecise I might not be here today. I want my pilots to use the best and most accurate method to calculate the jet fuel need to fly to Hawaii from the mainland.
Now think about being off in how you measure your life by just a small amount. Perhaps you miss judge by only one "Smoot" or some other inappropriate measure the results could even be more disastrous. In this case the trip, the trip of life, is not 3100 miles here the trip covers eternity. And the implication of missing something that has eternal implications is almost impossible to comprehend. We need to clarify what we use to measure and validate our lives. I hope as fun as it might sound to use Smoots to measure distance the process is simply too crude to be of any significant use.
Because Smoots are silly it is easy to see that a Smoot is not much help in measuring anything. But there are other measures that may seem important, at least in the eyes of man, but may give us a false sense of accomplishment. A common one to identify is wealth. The question is, does it make sense to use wealth as the unit of measure on the vertical axis of our life? Most of us want to see our wealth increasing and increasing at an increasing rate. I can give no argument against the need for some wealth even substantial wealth in a person's life. Wealth allows freedom to support ourselves and others. Wealth provides us with opportunities to send children on missions, to provide for health care for our dependents, to assist children with schooling, to support the activities of the Church and other worthy undertakings. The fact that wealth has blessed countless lives is easy to establish.
But wealth also has its downsides. In the book by Author Brooks, "Who Really Gives" Brooks reports on the unfortunate lives of children that have inherited substantial wealth from parents. While many succeed with the wealth, many more flounder. The same is true of when individuals win substantial amounts of money from state sponsored lotteries. The incidence of subsequent bankruptcies, broken marriage, and suicide among lottery winners is compelling evidence that unfettered wealth often creates more problems than it solves.
The danger of wealth is that it can become so important it clouds what is really important in our lives. Accumulating wealth easily becomes more important than using wealth to help others.
When I first started my academic career I had occasional contact with a very driven professional colleague. He had finished a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in economics with an emphasis in public finance. Soon he was in high demand to discuss public finance with public and private officials all over the US. He was in demand because he could explain terms like revenue elasticity or dead-weight loss in a manner that people and groups could understand. He was also an accomplished analyst. When he spoke people understood and his observations were generally on target and devoid of rhetoric. He was respected by fellow academics and his work was published in the best academic journals in his field.
Early in his career he discovered the concept of frequent flyer miles. He not only discovered them he embraced them. Frequent flyer miles became an obsession to him. Frequent flyer miles were placed on his vertical axis and on his horizontal axis was time and he wanted the line to be increasing at an increasing rate. His obsession was so strong that if he was going to Austin, Texas he would not take a direct flight but would take a series of flights, Chicago to New York to Miami and Miami to Austin. Such a route would allow him to accumulate thousands of extra miles on each trip. I found out this practice when I had a chance meeting with him in a New York airport and he was on his way to Austin via Miami.
He learned that he could be very productive on an airplane. He could write papers on the plane, he could edit papers on the plane, he could prepare lectures, and he could even correct student exams on an airplane. Travel provided him with credits to his frequent flyer accounts and the freedom to produce academic work without interruption from the phone, colleagues or students.
After several years he was offered a position that took him away from his current posting in a Midwestern University to a University located in the Northeast. As part of his bargaining with his new employers he sought additional salary because he thought the new position would not allow him to travel as much and he felt he needed to be rewarded for the potential reduction in his frequent flyer account. He thought the new position would reduce his rate of accumulation of miles. Or the rate of change on the vertical axis would slow. The account might grow but not as fast as he was used to or wanted.
His new employer agreed and granted him a boost in his compensation. There was no need to do so. He actually now traveled more than he ever had. The miles now accumulated on not one but multiple airlines. Not thousands, not hundreds of thousands but millions of miles. He had, at least in his mind a graph for each airline and they were increasing.
Did he use the miles? Did he take a vacation and travel around the world? No! Flying on an airplane for him would be like a bus driver going for a ride on his or her day off, or a postman going for a walk on his day off. The miles just kept accumulating.
Again he was offered a new position with a prominent think tank. This time the location was Washington, DC. Once again he used the argument that the new position would reduce his ability to accumulate frequent flyer miles and again the new employer agreed to his request. About this time Eastern Europe was being transformed from governments based on socialism to democratic governments. These governments now needed to understand how to develop efficient processes to fund their operations. Governments in Eastern Europe wanted him to help them design their tax systems. The same processes began to occur in countries in Asia. And he was off to Asia. And the travel continued to increase at an ever increasing rate. He continued to accumulate millions of miles on multiple airlines and as far as anyone could tell he never used them.
But a cruel reality occurred in this life. One day he noticed a small sore inside his mouth that would not heal. After a series of medical tests it was determined that he had an aggressive form of throat cancer. Within a year this disease imposed a heavy toll on his life. His last months were consumed by surgeries, chemo therapy, and radiation.
He spent most of the time in hospital gowns and hospital rooms. He spent no time using his frequent flyer miles. You might wonder how important the frequent flyer miles were to him. After he passed away the speakers at his memorial service almost universally commented on the millions of miles he had accumulated. Millions of miles that did him absolutely no good. He had found a way to kept score on the vertical axis but the score he accumulated was meaningless.
The danger is the same with wealth or power or status. It can become a measure that consumes us. But in consuming us it consumes everyone associated with us. This is the most important point from this story as the miles accumulated and as they consumed him they also consumed his family, his students, and his associates.
If you are accumulating "things" at an increasing rate make certain that they are things that matter in the eternity. In other words if I asked to plot over time your relationship with your family I hope it is increasing at an increasing rate. Now think about what really matters to you? And if you decide that what you are accumulating does not make any sense for the eternities then following a model of decreasing at an increasing rate would be appropriate.
If we read 2 Nephi the 28th chapter we can find in the first 15 verses a story of what happens when we use the wrong measures or we value things that are honored by man but not by God..
The 28th Chapter of Second Nephi begins by describing how Children of God can sometimes get things wrong. Beginning in the third verse we read:
"For it shall come to pass in that day that the churches which were built up, and not unto the Lord, when the one shall say unto the other: Behold, I, I am the Lord's; and the others shall say: I, I am the Lord's; and thus shall every one say that hath built up churches, and not unto the Lord.
"And they shall contend one with another; and their priests shall contend one with another, and they shall teach with their learning and deny the Holy Ghost, which giveth utterance.
"And they deny the power of God, the Holy One of Israel; and they say unto the people: Harken unto us, and hear ye our precept; for behold there is no God today, for the Lord and the Redeemer hath done his work, and he hath given power unto men.
"Behold, harken unto my precept; if they shall say there is a miracle wrought by the hand of the Lord, believe it not; for this day he is not a God of Miracles; he hath done his work.
"Yea, and there shall be many which shall say: Eat, Drink, and be Merry, for tomorrow we die; and it shall be well with us.
"And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, Drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God-he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for they neighbor, there is no harm in this, and do all these things , for tomorrow we die, and if it be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God."
Think of the message in this scripture. It is not about necessarily bad people. It is about people who are simply mistaken about what matters or how we judge our lives. It is not about people who deny a God or miracles it is about a people who deny the currency of God and the currency of miracles. It is about people whose spiritual path started to decline over time. Perhaps the decline was very slow at first, maybe off by just a Smoot! But it a few thousand miles or a few decades this modest change in direction resulted in a subtle but fatal denial of the things their fathers and mothers once held sacred.
Remember a miss understanding of dragon flies can lead to unreasonable fear likewise a miss understanding of a gospel principle can also begin a decline that has far reaching and unintended outcomes.
I conclude with two suggestions that are polar opposites.
First, a very negative suggestion from me.
I think I have observed, and it is nothing more than an observation that I believe is correct, it goes like this: if we know about the behavior of a 12 year old we will have a reasonable expectation about his or her behavior at 14. If we know about his or her behavior at 14 it can give insight about behavior at 16 and if we know about his or her behavior at 16 we will be able predict the behavior at 18. Trends matter to us. We don't just turn them off and on. If I am correct in my observation this is unnerving.
The difficulty of making a change or altering the direction of a line on a graph makes it all the more important to think about what matters and decide how we are doing? It also requires honest self-evaluation. Are we measuring the right things? Is our spirituality going up and going up at an increasing rate? Is the sense of a positive relationship with family members increasing or decreasing? Do we need to change? Trends not corrected are very dangerous.
Second, a positive suggestion.
I have placed on the screen a graph that shows the Sunday circulation of the Salt Lake Deseret News. You see a downward trend in the Sunday circulation. If I presented more historical data you would see that for years the Deseret News has been declining in Sunday circulation. It is a trend that many newspapers have faced. There are multiple reasons for the decline. Competition from TV, radio, and most recently the internet has continuously eroded the number of newspapers produced and sold.
Newspaper owners and editors viewed such trends with concern but the business model continued to be profitable. Selling newspapers was important but even more important than selling newspapers was selling the want ads and employment notices that were printed in the paper. The fees from want ads were like financial manna to newspapers, the ads produced more than enough revenue to make newspapers profitable even in periods of declining circulation. However, when want ads began to be posted on the internet and not in newspapers the decline of the American newspaper was cast in stone. The financial sustenance from want ads was gone and so unfortunately is the future of newspapers around the world.
However, something has happened to the Desert News and the downward trend is being reversed. The managers of the Deseret News saw the decline in the line and knew they needed to make changes.
And the change did not happen by accident. It was part of a carefully designed policy to change the format and the content of the Deseret News. It was a decision to change the vision and the mission of the Deseret News. The reversal in the Deseret News trend gives us hope that we don't have to live with bad trends as if they are cast in stone. Change agents can intervene in organizations and often do so successfully to reverse patterns.
Third Nephi describes the visit of the resurrected Jesus to the new world. It resulted in a remarkable transformation of a society. The consequence of his visit and teachings lasted for hundreds of years. Downward trends were changed overnight.
Of course, we can't depend on the Lord appearing in such a manner as he did to the new world.
But we must not despair.
We have the advantage of being able to access the very best change agent! We have been given the Gift of the Holy Ghost and he can make dramatic changes in lives. He can, when we seek him in humility, intervene and validate transformations we have made. Notice I suggest it requires transformations we have made or are making and then during and after the change we gain his strength and his validation.
What is required is an honest review of our lives and an honest and correct measure of the behavior of a child of God. If adjustments are needed and trends are going in the wrong direction, then we can change, and if trends are going in the right direction we can find strength to continue.
I testify that we are children of a loving Father in Heaven. And by correctly identifying what matters to him and calibrating how we are doing we can find the line or the path that will allow us to return to his presence. Measuring our lives as a child of God is important.
In the name of Jesus Christ amen.