When I was a young boy, I loved Saturday because everything I did on that day seemed like an adventure. But no matter what I did, it was always preceded by the most important thing of all—watching cartoons on television. One such Saturday morning, as I was standing by the television and flipping through channels, I discovered that the cartoon I expected to find had been replaced by a broadcast of the general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While looking at the television and lamenting that there was no cartoon, I saw a white-haired man in a suit and tie sitting in a nice chair.

There was something different about him, so I asked my oldest brother, “Who is that?”

He said, “That’s President David O. McKay; he’s a prophet.”

I remember feeling something and somehow knowing that he was a prophet. Then, because I was a cartoon-crazed young boy, I changed the channel. But I’ve never forgotten what I felt during that brief, unexpected revelatory moment. With a prophet, sometimes it only takes a moment to know.¹

Knowing by revelation that there is a living prophet on the earth changes everything.² It causes one to be uninterested in the debate about when is a prophet speaking as a prophet or whether one is ever justified in selective rejection of prophetic counsel.³ Such revealed knowledge invites one to trust the counsel of a living prophet, even if we do not fully understand it.⁴ After all, a perfect and loving Father in Heaven has chosen the pattern of revealing truth to His children through a prophet, someone who never sought such a sacred calling and who has no need of our help to be aware of his own imperfections.⁵ A prophet is someone God has personally prepared, called, corrected, inspired, rebuked, sanctified, and sustained.⁶ That is why we are never spiritually at risk in following prophetic counsel.

Whether we like it or not, all of us were chosen in some fashion in the pre-earth life to be born in these latter days. There are two realities that are associated with the latter days. The first reality is that Christ’s Church will be reestablished on the earth. The second reality is that things are going to get really challenging. The scriptures reveal that in the last days there will be “a great hailstorm sent forth to destroy the crops of the earth,”⁷ plagues,⁸ “wars and rumors of wars, and the whole earth shall be in commotion, … and iniquity shall abound.”⁹

When I was a child, those prophecies of the last days scared me and caused me to pray that the Second Coming would not come in my lifetime—with some success I might add so far. But now I pray for the opposite, even though the prophesied challenges are assured,¹⁰ because when Christ returns to reign, all of His creations will “lie down safely.”¹¹

Current conditions in the world have caused some to panic. As God’s covenant children, we do not need to chase after this or that to know how to navigate through these troubled times. We do not need to fear.¹² The doctrine and principles that we must follow to survive spiritually and endure physically are found in the words of a living prophet.¹³ That is why President M. Russell Ballard declared that “it is no small thing … to have a prophet of God in our midst.”¹⁴

For Elder Haynie’s complete talk, click ‘A Living Prophet of the Latter-days‘.