In the First Place Ye Shall Pray

In the most recent general conference, Elder Taylor G. Godoy encouraged us to seek the Lord’s help through prayer above all other sources of aid. He said, “We need to remember that calling is a matter of faith and action—faith to recognize that we have a Heavenly Father who answers our prayers according to His infinite wisdom, and then action consistent with what we asked for.” He then gave us these specific instructions: 

·        Always think of the Lord as your first option for help.

·        Call, don’t fall. Turn to God in sincere prayer.

·        After praying, do all you can to obtain the blessings you prayed for.

·        Humble yourselves to accept the answer in His time and His way.

·        Don’t stop! Keep moving forward on the covenant path while you wait for an answer. 

This simple counsel can indeed be easy to forget when the pressures of a difficult moment mount and we are seeking for solutions to our challenges. Instead of running first to try to fix the issue ourselves, we should first seek in prayer for His help and guidance. And then we should run to try to fix it. This advice matches the somewhat comical story he told from his own life. He and his fiancée were trying to get married civilly before their sealing in the temple, something that had to take place for the temple ceremony. Three days before the scheduled appointment at the temple they were told they couldn’t get married because of a strike. They prayed and then went to work, finding a mayor in a small town who was an acquaintance who miraculously told them he could marry them if they had the required document by noon the next day.

Elder Godoy recounted what happened after that: “The next day, we moved to the small town and went to the police station to request the required document. To our surprise, the officer said that he would not give it to us because many young couples had been running away from their families to get married secretly in that town, which of course was not our case. Again, fear and sadness overtook us. I remember how I silently called out to my Heavenly Father so as not to fall. I received a clear impression in my mind, repeatedly saying, ‘Temple recommend, temple recommend.’ I immediately took out my temple recommend and handed it to the officer, to my fiancée’s bewilderment.” He continued the story, “What a surprise we had when we heard the officer say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you are from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? I know your church well.’ He immediately began to prepare the document. We were even more surprised when the officer left the station without saying anything. Fifty minutes passed, and he did not return. It was already 11:55 in the morning, and we had only until noon to deliver the papers. Suddenly he appeared with a beautiful puppy and told us it was a wedding gift and gave it to us along with the document.” With only five minutes, they ran to the mayor’s office with the document and puppy in hand, but the secretary told them it was too late. Praying again, another miracle happened: “The secretary said to us, ‘What a beautiful dog you have. Where could I find one like that for my son?’ ‘It is for you,’ we immediately replied. The secretary looked at us with surprise and said, ‘OK, let’s go to the office and make the arrangements.’” They were indeed married in the Peru Temple two years later. This story highlights that we need both the power of prayer and the power of our own two legs to get up and allow God to work miracles in our lives. We cannot expect great miracles in our lives and be like Oliver Cowdery who was told by the Lord, “You have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me” (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7). We must ask, and then we must also take great thought to find the solutions to our problems. As President Nelson remarked, “The Lord likes effort.” But that doesn’t discount the miracle as seen in this story—without that miraculous dog and hearts opened to them, they would not have been able to get married as they hoped. Their actions gave the Lord something to work with so that He could provide the miracle. The miracle is always His.

I love Nephi’s counsel about prayer towards the end of his words. He said this: “But behold, I say unto you that ye must pray always, and not faint; that ye must not perform any thing unto the Lord save in the first place ye shall pray unto the Father in the name of Christ, that he will consecrate thy performance unto thee, that thy performance may be for the welfare of thy soul” (2 Nephi 32:9). Before we do anything of importance in our lives, we should first pray to the Father in the name of Jesus for His help and consecrated blessings. Then we must go about that “performance” and seek to make it happen with His help. It reminds me of a time on my mission when my companion and I were praying fervently for help in finding someone we could teach and baptize—it had been a long time in that area since there had been people to teach—and then we got up from our planning session at the church and drove away to try to do something. We stopped the car to talk to people standing at a bus stop who turned out to be quite uninterested in our message, but since we were still talking to them when the bus came, we got on it with them and left our car behind. It was on that bus that we found a lady from Cape Verde sitting down, and upon approaching her she immediately gave us her address for a visit. We visited her later, taught her the gospel, and within three weeks she was baptized. Her mother had already found the restored Church back in her home country and she did not know how to find it in France. The Lord had provided a miracle when we were willing to do our best to try to make something happen. We could have prayed all day in that church and never would have found her. But consecrating our “performance” unto Him and getting to work in our own meager way, He brought great joy into the life of this faithful woman. As Elder Godoy summarized, “Praying—calling—can be a sign of our hope. But taking action after praying is a sign that our faith is real—faith that is tested in moments of pain, fear, or disappointment.”