Neal A. Maxwell wrote:
People who despise plainness are apt to despise the prophet because prophets speak plainly. People can become absorbed in sophisticated and complex things just so long before they become blind to simple things. People who are looking beyond the mark will miss seeing what they most need to see. They will finally get the desires of their heart and will be delivered over to things “they cannot understand because they desired it.” (Jacob 4:14) How important, by contrast, it is for us to desire to be taught by the Spirit so that we can understand “things as they really are and as they really will be.”
People who look beyond the mark are clearly not without sight. They can see, but it is what they choose to look at (or for) that causes a lack of vision. It might be likened to anxiously watching a traffic light two intersections away and missing an oncoming truck in our own intersection; or a basketball player taking his eyes off the basket and missing a layup because glances at a hot-dog vendor in the stands; or the blindness of the British fortifying Singapore prior to World War II with mighty guns firing only seaward as the Japanese came by land; or those who were too busy staring in search of a political liberator and missed the Messiah.
Simplicity requires plain language; and the more eroded and less precise language becomes, the less it communicates. Bureaucratic language in modern government is a classic example of this. When we don’t like to face up to hard facts, we use soft words. We do not speak of killing a baby within the womb, but about the “termination of potential life.” Words are often multiplied to cover dark deeds. (Things as They Really Are: (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1978), p. 54-5.
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