Choose to Trust the Lord ~ Part Two

   Good Morning or Good Afternoon or Good Evening, 

this post should take approximately five minutes to read from start to finish.

This post focuses on June 2019 Brigham Young University (BYU) Devotional and it is called, "Choose to Trust the Lord" by Sister Michalyn Steele. This post is part two. I would like to share with you some highlights while I was reading the Devotional.

Sister Steele has mentioned the following; "Principle Number 2: “Seek Not to Counsel the Lord”

In addition to the seven generations principle of taking the long view, might I suggest a second principle that seems especially relevant to the ­successful navigation of our trials. I take this principle from Jacob’s plea to the wavering Nephites. He urged, “Seek not to counsel the Lord, but to take counsel from his hand.”

If you are like me, you are full of great ideas, hopes, and dreams about how your lives ought to go: the timing of change and the fulfillment of blessings, jobs or other experiences we might enjoy, or opportunities that we think would be a good fit and would help us to be happy. 

Indeed, we are commanded to ask the Lord for the desires of our hearts. With faith and with fasting, when appropriate we should plead with and petition the Lord for the experiences we desire. That is a very different thing than seeking to counsel the Lord or resisting His counsel. 

Seeking to counsel the Lord means to me that we adjudge our wisdom and preferences to be superior to the Lord’s. That reflects a fundamental lack of trust in His omniscience, in His omnipotence, and, more important, in His perfect love. We might suppose that if we could only persuade the Lord to do things our way, life would be much improved. We may feel frustrated by what we deem His resistance to our counsel on such matters.

... He sees the end from the beginning, “and there is not anything save he knows it.” ... Those of us who have responsibilities for your education are eager for you to develop sound critical thinking skills and judgment. Whatever your field of study, I have no doubt that you will contribute your learning and good judgment to the inevitable and daunting challenges of your families, your employers, your ­communities, and your congregations.

But no ­matter how learned we may become in whatever field, and no matter the earthly value of our ­counsel, we will never have knowledge or judgment that will exceed the Lord’s. That is why we should not seek to counsel the Lord but should seek to take counsel from His hand.

... We must not allow the great gift and blessing of our learning and education to divide us from His wisdom. Instead, we must let our learning deepen our trust in Him and multiply the gifts we have to offer to Him and His children. I have learned that He does not need to be persuaded to do good things or advised about “how to give good gifts unto [His] children.” 

While there are many settings in which He will draw upon our good judgment and learning to bless lives, we must remember that He does not need the best thinking of the wisest and brightest among us to augment His understanding. He already has all wisdom and all judgment.

... Nephite society, including the Church, was stratified and destroyed because “there became a great inequality in all the land.” What caused the inequality? In part it was because “the people began to be distinguished by ranks, according to their riches and their chances for learning.” 

The people who had money or who had “chances for learning” looked down on those who did not. Let us never misappropriate the blessing of our education as a cause to vaunt our knowledge over those who have not had the same opportunities we have had and certainly not as a reason to vaunt our wisdom over the Lord’s. 

Rather, let us humbly consecrate our gifts to the Lord. Let us serve and love His children, no matter their circumstances and even when we do not understand the Lord’s purposes. A long time ago, I was called as a missionary to the Texas Houston Mission. 

The call said that I should report to the MTC to prepare to teach the gospel in the English language. As my stake president set me apart as a missionary, I remember him saying these words: “The language the Lord would like you to learn is the language of the Spirit.”

I knew that to learn the vocabulary and grammar of the language of the Spirit, I would need to study the scriptures, identify promptings, and understand the whisperings of the Holy Ghost. I knew that it was a language I had been learning my whole life as my parents taught me to keep the commandments and to love the Lord.

I had mentors and teachers who had modeled fluency in the language of the Spirit. “To take counsel from [the Lord’s] hand,” as Jacob instructed, we must develop our own fluency in the language of the Spirit. To try to learn that language, I undertook a deep study of the Book of Mormon.

Once I had arrived at the MTC, I enjoyed learning the principles of missionary work, but I kept wondering how I might say certain phrases in Spanish. When that happened, I told myself to keep focused on the tasks at hand. But my mind kept wandering to the few Spanish phrases I knew, and I kept wondering about Spanish grammar and vocabulary.

I eventually recognized that these unbidden thoughts were the whisperings of the Spirit helping to prepare me to go to Houston, Texas, where there would be many people I would meet who would speak Spanish. So I went to the MTC bookstore and bought a copy of El Libro de Mormón and put it with my things, pleased that I had felt and recognized a prompting and sure that I would have the opportunity to share that book with someone as a missionary.

When I arrived in Houston a few weeks later, my mission president, Clark T. Thorstenson, pulled me aside at the airport. He said, “Sister Steele, the Lord has made it clear to me that He would like you to learn Spanish. I am assigning you to the Spanish-speaking program.”

I felt like the Lord had been trying to whisper it to me all along and was smiling, now that I was in on the plan too. That evening I wondered how I would ever learn Spanish, and I wished that I could go back to the MTC. Then I remembered my Libro de Mormón. I took it out and began to read. 

My study of the Book of Mormon in preparing for my mission helped me to follow along: “Yo, Nefi, nací de buenos padres.” Buenos padres? “Goodly parents”! At first I had no other books to use to study the Spanish language except for the Book of Mormon. 

But I remembered the inspired counsel of my stake president: the language the Lord wanted me to learn was the language of the Spirit. I enlisted the Spirit who, it turns out, speaks perfect Spanish to magnify my abilities and to tutor me in both the Spanish language and the language of the Spirit. Those two languages would be crucial to my missionary service.

A few months in, I had a companion from El Salvador, Hermana Seravia. She was a great missionary and senior companion. One day she said to me, “Hermana, you are doing pretty good with Spanish, but you talk too much like a Book of Mormon! We don’t really say, ‘Now behold, we rejoice to be in your home.’”

I have reflected a lot in the years since this experience about the way that calling unfolded. I know that the Lord is omniscient. Surely He knew that the people I was called to teach in Houston spoke Spanish and that I did not know Spanish when my call had been issued months earlier.

So why did the Lord send me to Texas without MTC language training? At the time, if I were to have designed the experience for myself, I would have called me to learn Spanish in the MTC. However, although I have the power of choice and autonomy in many things, I am not the primary architect of my own life experiences. 

I am called to trust that the Lord has a plan for my life, just as I know that He has a plan for yours. Both the big picture and the smaller details are within His infinite and loving calculus. ... I had to rely on the gifts and tutelage of the Spirit. I had to plead for the gift of tongues. 

I had to rely on the prayers of loved ones the power of which I could feel bringing words and phrases to my mind and loosing my tongue as I taught. The Lord foresaw that Spanish would be a great blessing in my life but that learning to trust Him and rely on Him while learning the language of the Spirit was an even more important lesson.

Sometimes we are asked to submit to ongoing ambiguity or to a grueling lesson we would prefer not to learn. Such moments provide us with the opportunity to realize one of the purposes of our mortal experience: to choose to trust Him to bless us with the experiences that we need rather than the experiences we might want."

Stay Tuned until next time.