By Faith All Things Are Fulfilled- Ponderosa Ward Farewell

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.