Henry B. Eyring wrote: “. . . . Someone we love may not have accepted our attempts to nourish their faith. We know from painful experience that God respects the choice of his children not to be nourished. Yet this is a time to feel renewed optimism and hope that our power to nourish will be increased.
The Lord through His living prophet has told us that He will preserve the bounteous harvest of new converts entering the waters of baptism across the earth. And the Lord will do it through us. So we can have confidence that by doing simple things, things that even a child can do, we will soon be granted greater power to nourish tender faith.
The place to start is with our own hearts. What we want with all our hearts will determine in large degree whether we can claim our right to the companionship of the Holy Ghost, without which there can be no spiritual nourishing. We can begin today to try to see those we are to nourish as our Heavenly Father sees them and so feel some of what He feels for them.
Those new members of the Church are His Children. He has known them and they have known Him in the world before this one. His purpose and that of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is to have them return to them and to give them eternal life if only they will choose it. He has led and sustained His missionaries by the Holy Ghost to find and teach and baptize them. He allowed His Son to pay the price of their sins. Our Father and Savior see those converts as tender lambs, purchased with a price we cannot fathom.
A mortal parent may appreciate, in a small way, the feelings of a loving Heavenly Father. When our children come or the age when they must leave our direct care we feel anxiety for their safety and concern that those who are to help them will not fail them. We can feel at least some of the Father’s and the Savior’s love for the new members of the Church and the trust they place in us to nourish.
Those feelings in our hearts for the new members will go far to qualify us for the help of the Spirit and thus overcome the fears which may deter us from our sacred responsibility. It is wise to feel that our own skills are inadequate to meet the charge we have to nourish the faith of others. Our own abilities, however great, will not be enough. But that realistic view of our limitations creates a humility which can lead to dependence on the Spirit and thus to power.
Brigham Young told us to have courage despite our weaknesses. He did it in this language that seems so much like him:
“In addressing a congregation, though the speaker be unable to say more than half a dozen sentences, and those awkwardly constructed, if his heart is pure before God, those few broken sentences are of more value than the greatest eloquence without he Spirit of the Lord and of more real worth in the sight of God, angels, and all good men. In praying, though a persons words be few and awkwardly expressed, if the heart is pure before God, that prayer will avail more than the eloquence of a Cicero. What does the Lord, the Father of us all, care about our mode of expression? The simple honest heart is of more avail with the Lord than all the pomp, pride, splendor and eloquence produced by men. When He looks upon a heart full of sincerity, integrity and child-like simplicity he sees a principle that will endure forever—“That is the spirit of my own kingdom—the spirit I have given to my children.”(Discourses of Brigham Young, sel. John A. Widtsoe [Salt Lake City; Deseret Book Co., 1954], 169.)
From President Henry B. Eyring’s book, “Because He First Loved Us” p.184-86, Deseret Book 2002
