Our 9 year old daughter Louisa has a best school friend LilyRhadika. They have been best friends since the moment they met when they were five. LilyRhadika was adopted by her family from Fiji – she is Fijian Indian and she looks like an Indian princess, she has particularly dark skin, very thick curly hair and is quite tall for her age. Our Louisa is small for her age with straightish brown hair – and obviously is white. Louisa and Lily seem to be able to communicate without words. They seem to think they were separated at birth. Last year I heard them in Louisa’s bedroom getting ready for school after Lily had slept over,– they don’t wear uniforms to school and they had dressed in the same clothes and they were saying ‘I bet Patty and Caryl (their teachers) will mix us up all day.’
At the beginning of this year Lily’s mum started work again. This meant that she couldn’t drive Lily to our school anymore and Lily had to change schools. Louisa’s teachers and I spent a long time talking about how to handle this separation and what to do to support Louisa through this. Of course Louisa was devastated. That was at the beginning of the year.
Then yesterday I was talking to one of her teachers. Our children go to an unusual school and so we have perhaps unusual relationships with their teachers. Caryl, one of her teachers was saying how Louisa had really blossomed this year and I said ‘isn’t it strange that Lily leaving has really benefited Louisa.’ Caryl said ‘we really should just have more faith – God always sends a blessing in the end.’ We talked about how much we wish we could develop the kind of faith that allows to trust in the blessing at the end while we are still at the beginning. And we talked about the parable of the talents and how the Master gave each of servant varying numbers of talents, and how the talents really represent opportunities. We talked about the servant with one talent or opportunity and how he did nothing with it. Maybe we said this could be because he didn’t recognise it as being a valuable gift, just like we didn’t recognise Lily leaving as a valuable gift– maybe he thought – if I just hang on that will do – after all it is a paltry amount. After Lily left we worked very hard to make it a valuable gift for Louisa – but I wouldn’t say that we recognised it as such at first. Incidentally Louisa is visiting Lily now and they are still best friends.
Maybe the servant with one talent looked at his fellow servants and thought – see how many they have (or see what wonderful opportunities they have) and I have but one. I will just struggle through this time while the Master is away and since I have so little it will suffice for me to give it back in tact. Remember when the Master returned the servant said: “Lord I knew thee that thou art an hard man, …. And I was afraid and went and hid thy talent in the earth, lo, there, thou hast that is thine.”
Our Master is Jesus Christ, and he does the will of our Father in Heaven, and to each of us he has given opportunities. The essence of the parable is that we need to be like the servants who enlarged their opportunities rather than like the servant who simply held on to it. Then comes the really tricky part – recognising opportunities as opportunities rather than imagining them to be obstacles.
When children argue, this can be an obstacle to family harmony, or an opportunity to teach kindness and meekness and gentleness of speech.
When a loved one is making eternally dangerous choices this can be an obstacle or an opportunity to practice forgiveness, meekness and patience.
When illness strikes this can be an obstacle or an opportunity to bind the family and draw nearer to God, and learn Gods law of health.
When we have little financial means this can be an obstacle or an opportunity to understand what really matters and to feel pride in our work. We had some experience with this when I decided that we should paint the inside of the house and od up the bathroom without spending any money. This translated to doing all the work ourselves , which in turn translated to Peet, our 11 year old tiling the bathroom wall - he did pretty well too. But the next day he changed his MSN sign on name to "I feel very accomplished - I helped tile our bathroom today.' That was a feeling and an experience that money could not buy.
All of this is about having faith sufficient to trust that all that God does or allows can be worked to our good if we rely upon Him.
Of course there are much more exacting trials than a friend moving when you are 9. Many of us are in midst of those trials now. And if we’re not we can be assured that our time will come – or maybe has already been. Richard G Scott said “Don’t look for a life virtually free from discomfort, pain, pressure, challenge or grief for those are the tools a loving Father uses to stimulate our personal growth and understanding.” In times of “discomfort, pain, pressure, challenge or grief” we can slip into the mode of the unwise servant and say to ourselves – this is all I have – this a paltry gift when compared to those around me I will just hold on – I will just endure.
But Neal A Maxwell, who learnt a lot about enduring in his own struggles with cancer, instructed us that “Patient endurance is to be distinguished from merely being ‘acted upon’. Endurance is more than pacing up and down within the cell of our circumstance; it is not only acceptance of the things allotted to us but also the determination to ‘act for ourselves’ by magnifying what is allotted to us.’
So rather than just holding on while the opportunity passes we are to do something with it. Certainly while we are in the midst of trials it is hard to see the opportunity waiting for us. These types of opportunities can only be seen with spiritual eyes – so we need to do all we can to keep those spiritual eyes active and alert. We keep our spiritual eyes healthy through things like prayer, study and service. There is a lot that is great in an LDS lifestyle for keeping spiritual eyes healthy. Things like family prayer and Family scripture study, personal prayer and personal study, family home evening, attending church, attending ward activities, taking children to faith in god activities, working through Duty to God and Personal Progress programs, gathering food storage, visiting and home teaching, searching out our ancestors and attending the temple, Home Family and personal enrichment meetings and activities, minding babies and delivering meals, preparing for and serving missions and on and on.
These things are tremendous blessings – the enduring part comes in recognising them as blessings, and in not being distracted by the things of the world. For almost every opportunity being a member of the church affords us, the world offers a counterfeit. Our aim of course, is to not be distracted by these counterfeits and instead to endure with good cheer the many opportunities we have. We need to endure, or never stop, in recognising blessings just as much as we need to endure through trials.
In his conference talk last April Elder Holland said that “We should honour the Saviours declaration to be of good cheer.” He said “indeed it seems to me we may be more guilty of breaking that commandment than almost any other.”
To obey the Saviours command that we be of good cheer, we first need faith in Christ. The command to be of good cheer is found more than once in the scriptures, but in John 16:33 the Saviour says: “In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” It is our faith in Jesus Christ having overcome the world that will allow us to be of good cheer.”
Neal A Maxwell wrote that “There are important gradations as between types of blessings. One type-very real and much appreciated-is tied to temporal and passing conditions. We might call these operational revelations-how to build an ark, or how to illuminate barges, for example. These are remarkable blessings which respond to urgent needs, but they cannot compare to the illuminating revelations from Jesus concerning what we must do to be more like Him. That type of blessing is tied to the eternal conditions. Both types are needed. Both are to be remembered.” Then in referring to the praises that we offer to Heavenly Father when sought for blessings are received he went on to say “Transcending all such praise should be our everlasting praise to God for His plan of happiness – for making us the very centre of his work and purposes.”
When we have faith in Jesus Christ we are able to recognise blessings that otherwise might go unnoticed. And we can ignore the noise of the world that tells us to check first what our neighbour has, before deciding on the value of our own blessings.
We need to endure in being grateful, for the beauty of the earth, for the gospel, for our families, for the plan of salvation, for personal revelation and on and on it goes. When we endure in gratitude, our faith in Jesus Christ will increase and we will be of good cheer.
Faith in Jesus Christ helps us to appreciate more his workmanship here on the earth.
My extended family lived for a hundred years or so on cattle properties in central Queensland. One of my little cousins was about 3 and a half when she first saw the beach. I remember watching her with my mum and my aunt – it was the cutest thing – she was thrilled and delighted by the beach then headed up the sand to get a cup so she could drink the clear water. Now we probably all go the beach fairly often – and it is no less beautiful than when my cousin saw it for the first time – but we don’t always get the same joy from the beach.
Maybe the hardest part of enduring is making sure that we continue to get delight or joy from the many blessings that we sometimes call simple.
Ezra Taft Benson, a former prophet, wrote that ‘who does Gods work will get Gods pay.’
As always the world provides a counterfeit. The world would have us believe that we can tell the beloved of God by their pleasant, prosperous and easy lifestyles. As Latterday saints we know better. More often Gods pay comes in the form of healthier spiritual eyes, or of more of the things that we sing about ‘more holiness give me, more gratitude give me, more purity give me.’
Healthier spiritual eyes will show us more clearly the blessings of the gospel and we will remember them just as we did when we first discovered them – and look for more. We will remember our spouses and our children with the same depth of gratitude and wonder that we had when we first met.
Sometimes the blessings of the gospel become a little like air. We need it, but we don’t really notice it. If we are immersed in an LDS lifestyle we may fail to recognise all the good it is doing for us. My friend Bettina is not a member of our church. She is a social worker who works with teenage parents. We were discussing the importance of community. She said ‘you have always had a strong community and it shows in your family and your marriage and your children.’ Bettina saw that our ongoing involvement in the church had benefited our family in many ways. And she is right –we are a better family than we would have been without the gospel – Bettina knows our family fairly well – so she is well aware that we mess lots of stuff up, but she could see the benefits of the gospel. If we do not also endure in seeing the good that comes of living the gospel we may too easily put it aside. It is not only tribulation that we must endure – we must also endure the blessings of the gospel, and we must endure in gratitude not because these are hard or unpleasant things to do, but because they really do bring us closer to God and lead to our sanctification, and to joy while we live on the earth.
The unwise servant in the parable of the talents hid his one talent or opportunity and failed to magnify it. The master rebuked him but to the other wise servants he said “Well done good and faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things, enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
By recognising the opportunities given to them and magnifying them, they were able to be given many more opportunities and significantly they were able to feel the joy that the master felt.
When we do all we can with the opportunities we have been given, and one of the most significant of these is surely our membership in the Kingdom of God on earth, we will be given more opportunities and we will feel the joy that the Saviour feels.
In Psalms 72:17 we read “His name shall endure forever; his name shall be continued as long as the sun; and men shall be blessed in him: all nations shall call him blessed.” This is my testimony that Jesus Christ lives and that his name will continue forever, that I have been blessed in him, and I pray that I will be able to continue to endure gratefully both the blessings and the trials that may come my way so that I may have more of the joy that He has.
Extract from Tom's letter (I had to correct the spelling and even the English is a bit slack - I think the Russian is getting to him!):
