Henry B. Eyring wrote in his book, “To Draw Closer To God”. . . “I thought of you and me. We have a problem. We live in a world where there are voices competing for our belief. They claim the authority of truth. Some are clearly lying and some are not. And you and I need to know what is true and what is not, out of far more than curiosity. We need to know. And we need to be sure.

Some of those voices—some of the loudest—tell you that the questions that matter will yield to reason. And they even warn you that those who purport to answer questions without using their rules of rational analysis are to be distrusted and even despised.

Your common sense and experience tell you something else. So does mine. Let me illustrate for you what I know about questions that matter and how they are answered by telling you about the last conversations I had with my father.

He was suffering through the end of a long struggle with bone cancer. He still weighed enough and was in such pain that it was hard work to move him from a chair to his bed. Others far more heroic than I spent the months and the days caring for him. But I took some turns on the midnight to dawn shift.

The effects of the disease had removed the powers of reason he’d used to make a mark that is still visible in science. He seemed to me almost like a child as we talked through the night. Most of his memories were of riding across the range together with his father in Old Mexico. But sometimes, even those happy pictures could not crowd from his mind the terrible pain.

One night when I was not with him and the pain seemed more than he could bear, he somehow got out of bed and on his knees beside it—I know not how. He pled with God to know why he was suffering so. And the next morning he said with quiet firmness, “I know why now. God needs brave sons.”

Now when someone tells you the questions that matter yield only to rational analysis, remember that the stunning achievements of reason over the past three hundred years have sprung from what is called the “scientific method.” I hope you’ll also remember, as I will, the scientist Henry Eyring on his knees, when the questions that really mattered yielded to the method for finding truth he’d learned as a little boy at his mother’s knee in Old Mexico. This was long before he took the train to Tuscon, and Berkeley, and Madison, and then on to Berlin and Princeton to use the scientific method to create theories that changed the scientific world. What he learned on his knees brought him peace and changed my life.

It changed my life, but reading this story today will change yours only if you know that the answer to his prayer was true. And you can only know the way he did and the way I do—by the gentle voice of the Holy Ghost speaking to your heart.

God has blessed us with sure guides of truth. Some of us have been blessed with parents who knew where to find truth. All of us can listen to the voice of a living prophet to whom God speaks the truth and asked that he tell us. The words of the prophet, and the words of scripture, are the rod which Lehi saw would lead us to the tree of life.

But many have heard those words, and read them, and still have not known that they are true. The method of knowing truth requires that both he who speaks and he who hears be guided by the Holy Ghost. You and I can only know it is the truth if we can hear the Holy Spirit confirm and expand it in our own hearts. Of all the methods of searching for the truth, that is the one you and I need most. ~ Henry B. Eyring, “To Draw Closer to God,” Deseret Book, 1997, p. 115-17.

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(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)