Struggling
with a testimony is something that I’ve often seen, how can one group be so
moved by something that cannot be proved? But blessed is He who believes in the
things he cannot see and that’s where I agree, I say FAITH, dig it J Because all the proof that I need comes from a
feeling I’ve received, a tenderness within my chest, a welcomed, warm, familiar
guest. It’s the Holy Spirit, I can hear it, and while whispering in my ear it
quiets all my deepest fear it’s there—I have faith, DIG it.
Brothers and sisters, I stand before you this day to
tell you that if you aint got faith, you aint got nothin. Quote attribution:
sister horrocks of the colorado colorado springs mission.
Faith is everywhere. It is preached, sung about,
there are countless talks and songs and poems about it. Faith is “a belief in
things that are not seen but are true.” Faith is “not a perfect knowledge.”
Faith is “things which are hoped for, but not seen.” “Faith is knowing the sun
will rise lighting each new day.” Faith is everything. The bible dictionary
says that faith is having confidence in something or someone. That’s probably
got to be my favorite definition of faith, because faith isn’t purely
religious, I mean faith centered in Jesus Christ is essential for salvation,
but nonreligious people practice faith everyday when they get in their cars and
naturally expect to arrive safely at their destination. They have confidence in
their cars. They have confidence in their driving abilities. I have confidence
in going to sleep at night with the assurance that I’ll wake up in the morning.
Maybe not always on time, but I’ll wake up. I have faith that going on a
mission is what I need to be doing and that it will shape me and I will find
people who need me. I have faith that I will become the version of me that the
Lord intended me to be if I continue to choose the right in my life and to pray
and to seek counsel from the prophets and the scriptures and then follow that
counsel.
Having faith helps us become who we need to be and
get to where we need to go.
Becoming who we need to be relies heavily on our
faith in ourselves, but it also hinges on other people’s faith in us. Likewise,
another person becoming who they need to be can depend on our faith in them.
Galatians 5:6 states “faith worketh by love,” which makes sense, because if we
think about it, to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, we manifest it by how we
treat others. We have faith in him, He says “love one another,” his greatest
commandment is to love one another, and by our works (love) we show our faith.
There’s this cute little quote that says “treat people as they ought to be and
they will become who they ought to be. Treat people as they are, and they will
remain as they are.”
The place I’ve seen this work in its truest form is
when I was in young women’s. Now if you’re new to the ward or you haven’t known
me that long or if you don’t know me at all, I was a really..uhm..interesting
beehive and mia maid. But I had some truly incredible leaders who became my friends
and who made the biggest impact on me. And Sunday school teachers, too, really.
I didn’t have a lot people in my life who believed in me, but my leaders and
teachers did. They tried to understand me when I threw tantrums at girls camp,
they wrote me letters of encouragement, took me out to ice cream on my
birthday, and invited me into their homes and they nurtured me out of this
young girl who acted out and was mad at the world and pushed people away into
someone who believed in herself.
When I was very young, as many of you know, my
parents divorced when I was seven and my brother died suddenly when I was ten
and luckily, I had faith, because if I didn’t I would be so lost right now, but
when I was fifteen, I think I hit my lowest point in terms of believing in
myself. And I was hurting everyday and I finally realized that I needed to
change and that I needed to pick myself up, because I had to take care of
myself. So I went shopping and bought a wardrobe of color (because I had always
worn black, and dark eyeliner) and I wrote out a bunch of inspirational quotes
and put them in my locker, and I just focused on becoming more positive and it
worked. Miraculous.
I know that if I hadn’t had that faith, well let’s
just say I owe my life to faith.
I also know that having faith in ourselves and in
the Lord when we receive promptings is very important. When we receive
promptings, and we act on them and prove that we have faith that the Lord knows
people better than we do, and also when we act on our faith, we invite
miracles. I think sometimes we receive weird promptings or ones that don’t make
sense to us, but when we ignore them, we not only doubt our own ability to
recognize instruction from the Lord, but we also undermine his omniscience. Sometimes,
we’re afraid to act on promptings, but in his talk “by faith are all things
fulfilled” by Marcus B Nash, he says that
Fear distracts from
and undermines faith in the Savior. The Apostle Peter looked to the Lord one
stormy night and walked on water—until he averted his gaze and “saw the wind
boisterous [and] was afraid” and then sank into the stormy sea. He could have
continued walking if he had not feared! Rather than our focusing upon and
fearing the boisterous wind and waves in our lives, the Lord invites us to
“look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.”
He also goes onto say that
sin diminishes the
presence of the Spirit in our lives, and without the Holy Ghost, we will lack the spiritual stamina to hold onto and
exercise faith. It is best to exercise our faith to “touch not the evil gift,
nor the unclean thing”30 and
to “be diligent in keeping all [the] commandments, lest … your faith fail you,
and your enemies triumph over you.”31 If
sin has stained your life, I invite you to exercise “faith unto repentance,”32 and
the Savior, through the Atonement, will purify and heal your life.
There is a talk by Lawrence E Corbridge called “The
Fourth Missionary” and he talks about how there are four different kinds of
missionaries and how ultimately, we should strive to be the fourth one. What he
says about the first two missionaries is similar—they lack faith enough to
become who they need to be and go where they need to go. The word missionary
can easily be replaced with person.
The Second Missionary cannot have
faith anymore than the First. He cannot know "that the course of life which
he is pursuing is according to God's will" because it isn't. If you are
not doing what the Lord would have you do, you cannot believe in yourself; you
cannot believe that you are worthy to receive God's help and guidance in your
life. You cannot have faith to pull down the blessings of heaven into your
life. The Second Missionary cannot have faith. Not because he does not believe
in God; rather, because he does not believe in himself.
Another very important point of faith, though, is to
remember that it’s not just our faith in ourselves, eachother, and Christ. It’s
Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ’s faith in us that matters too. We have to
recognize that it is there. As members, we are taught to see other people as
the Lord sees them. The Lord has faith in all of his children. All of them. We
all made the correct decision in the preexistence, and we’re all loved and
cherished in Him. He knows each person’s eternal potential and knows the people
they are capable of being.
Faith helps us get where we need to go:
I’m so done with all these 21 year old sister
missionaries saying they went on a mission before it was cool or decided to go
before it was cool. Excuse me, going on a mission has always been cool. For me,
going on a mission was always something I was going to do. Well, not always.
When I was young, I heard my mom tell stories about her mission in Uruguay and I
thought it was really cool, but I didn’t know that it was something I really
wanted to do. I would go back and forth in my early teens thinking about it,
but ultimately it was pretty far away so I just kinda didn’t worry about it.
When I was fifteen, however, I went in to get my patriarchal blessing on a
really early Sunday morning and the whole time, all I heard was that I was
going on a mission. At the time, I didn’t think it was something I wanted to
do, but I accepted that revelation as my own personal mandate. I was going on a
mission. The weird and cool thing, though, was after that, I got my blessing
back written down, and all it had was a small 3 sentences at the end of the
blessing that said anything about a mission and it didn’t even say that I was
going to, it just kinda said I’d get the opportunity and it’d be fulfilling. So
from then on, I became the girl who was going on a mission. I would tell people
and they would say “oh, but what if you get married? That’s more important.”
And I would just say “sorry, but no. I’m not getting married. I’m going on a
mission. I know it. It’s going to happen. The Lord and I have already talked
about it, just let it happen.”
I started getting serious about the whole thing
(well, more serious) around senior year and even moreso after graduation. I
went to the singles ward where we had sister missionaries and I thought it was
so cool. I hadn’t fed the missionaries in like 13 years, so I didn’t really
know how to go about it but I fed them and we started talking and I let them
know that I was going on a mission and they were like “oh, cool, how old are
you?” and I would just kinda go…well, 18, but I’ve known I’m going on a mission
for 3 years.” For some reason, after that, they asked me if they could start
doing lessons with me because they were doing it with a few people in the ward,
just reteaching the lessons, and they felt so inspired to pick me. So that was
awesome, I became really comfortable with them and they taught me some awesome
stuff and I would go teaching lessons with them, and so I took it upon myself
to buy a pin from Deseret Book that said “missionary in training” (which I
thought was cool because my brother wore a tag that said future missionary and
I just feel close to him when I am preparing for a mission) and not long after
I started going teaching with them, they bought me my own Preach My Gospel and
left it on my doorstep with a note that said “it’s never too early to start
preparing for your mission.” In September, I remember being at work one day and
just feeling like I needed to get out of here and that I wanted to go to
college (not just arapahoe where I was currently taking classes) so I applied
to BYU I and got accepted and planned on going up there for the Winter/Spring
track of classes. I would talk to my dad about how I was going to plan my life.
Get my associates, work until my mission to earn money, then go on my mission,
come back and finish school. Then I changed my mind, graduate by 21 and then go
on my mission. One day, my mom came home from the temple and said “how set are
you on going up to idaho?” and I was like…yeah I’m pretty set on that, why?”
and she said “I don’t think you should be going up there. I feel like you
should be going on your mission” and I was skeptical of that because my mission
was still years away so I was confused and said “mom I’m not going to get
married if I go there…” and she was just saying she didn’t know what it was but
she didn’t think I should go. I kept on asking why why why and she said “if you
knew why, you wouldn’t be making a decision out of faith.” So I got on my knees
that night and prayed and said “I know it wouldn’t be faith if I knew why, but
please tell me why. I feel like I’m wasting time here. I don’t feel like I
should be here anymore.” Sure enough, conference was a week or two later and
I’m sleeping in on Saturday morning when I hear my mother downstairs screaming
my name. I thought she was dying, the way she was screaming. So I bolted out of
bed and ran downstairs and I just barely missed the announcement when my mom
looks at me so enthusiastically and tells me “you’re going on a mission!” …I
know mom. Tell me something I don’t know. “No you can go now! They just changed
the age!’ for that, I had to take a moment. I sat down on the couch, puzzled.
Deep in thought. Then there was dancing for the rest of the day. I even wrote
an embarrassing little song. I had a meeting with the bishop a week later, my
papers in a month later, my call a month after that, and today, here I am
standing before you ready to leave. A fun little side story in all this is that
there was a girl on youth council with me last year and at the beginning of the
year, we were going around the table saying something we wanted to do in our
lives and I said serve a mission and another girl said she also wanted to serve
a mission and she’s in the Pinery ward and we both report to the MTC on
Wednesday.
There’s a cute little quote by Phillip Yancey that
goes I have learned
that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
I’m
still in the faith phase of that quote with my mission and the going part, but
I learned to have faith in another person’s prompting (which is really hard
when it’s not your own prompting) and everything that had happened the past
year at least had all made sense leading up to my mission.
If I had not had faith to follow the impressions I
received during my patriarchal blessing and if I had not had faith to make the
decisions that I made with college and such, then I would not be here, standing
before you, about to leave to serve a mission. I know that this is where I need
to be in my life. And having faith has brought me here.
One time when I was at girls camp a few years back,
I was talking to sister stewart, and I must’ve been a second or third year, and
I was disheartened and I said to her “I feel like I’ll never get to the
celestial kingdom, I feel like I’ll never be good enough.” And she said to me
something along the lines of “it doesn’t matter where you are, it matters where
you’re going” and that has stuck with me. I remember that all the time. Then,
of course, Elder Holland comes out a few years later and says “God doesn't care nearly as much
about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help,
where you are willing to go.” So I think he got that from her.
I know that this is true. I know that if we just
have faith in the Lord and in ourselves, we become the people the Lord needs us
to be and get back home, where he wants us to return. If we hold to the iron
rod and we endure to the end and have faith that we are doing those things
necessary for salvation, we will achieve it.
Much like Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ know who
we are capable of becoming, they know where we are capable of going. We just
have to have faith and sing the song in our hearts “I’ll go where you want me
to go. I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ll say what you want me to say.”
I also know
that the prayers of the righteous are heard. It says it countless times and
everywhere in the Book of Mormon. I know that it’s hard to play faith vs. fate,
because there is a plan for everyone, but I also know that prayers are never
wasted. He hears them and He answers them.
