From Elder Henry B. Eyring’s book with the above title….
When I was president of Ricks College years ago, I remember having a man who was my priesthood leader come to my house each month to interview me about my home teaching. He brought with him a notebook in which he wrote notes. He recorded not only my report as a home teacher, but my observations about the gospel and life as well.
I remember at first being very flattered. Then he and I were visiting what was then called junior Sunday School. He was a few rows in front of me. The speaker was a little girl, no more than six or seven. . . I glanced over at the man and noticed that he had the same notebook open. As the girl spoke, he was writing with as much intensity as he had in the study of my home. I learned a lesson from him that I haven’t forgotten. He had faith that God could speak to him as clearly as a child as through the president of a college.
I watched him over the years. He kept listening, even to children and novices called to teach him. He lived the commandments, he seemed to grow in wisdom, and he served for a time as a Bishop. Tragedies of both illness and sin came to his family. Many years have gone by now. I don’t know all the facts, but the facts I do know tell me that all his children have come back to productive, happy lives through the blessings of heaven, the power of the Atonement, and the ministrations of that humble father. Those miracles came, I believe in large part, because he could hear the voice of God in words of the weak and the simple.
I doubt that what he wrote in the pages of that binder over those many years held the secrets he needed to help his children. He may not even have kept the notes. But he practiced listening and he learned to hear. And so when he was desperate, as you and I will someday be desperate, he could hear through the voice of the Spirit the voice of comfort, direction, and then peace.
If you and I are going to live up to the glorious promises of the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, I think we will have to learn how to have the everyday faith of my friend with the notebook. You remember verses 20 through 22 of that first section: “But that every man might speak in the name of God, the Lord, even the Savior of the World; that faith must also increase in the earth; and mine everlasting covenant might be established.”
And you have often heard verse 38 quoted. It is the next to last verse in the section. It is the way the Lord chooses to end his preface to his Doctrine and Covenants. He ways, “What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice of the voice of my servants, it is the same.” ~Henry B. Eyring, (of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), To Draw Closer to God, Deseret Book Company, 1997) p.12-13 (continued)
