Lasting Discipleship
We can find spiritual confidence and peace as we nurture holy habits and righteous routines that can sustain and fuel the fires of our faith.
During this past summer, over 200,000 of our young people all over the world grew in faith at one of the hundreds of week long sessions of For the Strength of Youth, or FSY, conferences. Coming out of pandemic isolation, for many it was an act of faith in the Lord to even attend. Many of the young participants seem to follow a similar upward arc toward deeper conversion. At the end of their week, I liked to ask them, “So, how’s it been?” They sometimes said something like this: “Well, on Monday I was so annoyed with my mother because she made me come and do this. And I didn’t know anybody. And I didn’t think it was for me. And I wouldn’t have any friends. … But now it’s Friday, and I just want to stay here. I just want to feel the Spirit in my life. I want to live like this.”
They each have their own stories to tell of moments of clarity and of spiritual gifts washing through them and carrying them along that arc of growth. I too was changed by this summer of FSY as I have seen the Spirit of God relentlessly responding to the righteous desires of the individual hearts of these young multitudes who individually found the courage to trust Him with a week in His keeping. Like brightly hulled steel ships at sea, we live in a spiritually corrosive environment where the most gleaming convictions must be mindfully maintained or they can become etched, then corrode, and then crumble away.
What Kinds of Things Can We Do to Maintain the Fire of Our Convictions?
Experiences like FSY conferences, camps, sacrament meetings, and missions can help to burnish our testimonies, taking us through arcs of growth and spiritual discovery to places of relative peace. But what must we do to stay there and continue to “press forward with a steadfastness in Christ” (2 Nephi 31:20) rather than slipping backward? We must continue to do those things that brought us there in the first place, like praying often, drenching ourselves in scripture, and serving sincerely. For some of us, it may require an exercise of trusting in the Lord even to attend sacrament meeting. But once we are there, the healing influence of the Lord’s sacrament, infusions of gospel principles, and the nurture of the Church community can send us home on higher ground.
Where Does the Power in Gathering Together in Person Come From?
At FSY, a couple of hundred thousand and more of our youth came to better know the Savior by using a simple formula of coming together where two or more of them were gathered in His name (see Matthew 18:20), engaging the gospel and the scriptures, singing together, praying together, and finding peace in Christ. This is a powerful prescription for spiritual awakening.
This far-flung band of brothers and sisters has now gone home to determine what it means to still “trust in the Lord” (Proverbs 3:5; 2022 youth theme) when swept up in the cacophony of a rambunctious world. It is one thing to “hear Him” (Joseph Smith—History 1:17) in a quiet place of contemplation with scriptures wide open. But it is quite another thing to carry our discipleship into this mortal flurry of distractions, where we must strive to “hear Him” even through the blur of self-concern and faltering confidence. Let there be no doubt: it is the very stuff of heroes displayed by our youth when they set their hearts and minds to standing upright against the shifting moral tectonics of our time. (Continued with “What Can Families Do at Home to Build on the Momentum Created at Church Activities?” (For President Lund’s complete talk, click: “Lasting Discipleship”.)
