Keep the Shore In Mind

To my daughter, 

                Today in Sacrament Meeting someone told the story of Florence Chadwick. She was an incredible swimmer from California, and in 1952 she attempted to swim the 26 miles from Catalina Island to the coast of California without any special gear—not even a wetsuit. The day she swam was very foggy and cold, and after fifteen hours she told her mom who was in one of the boats next to her that she couldn’t make it. Her mother encouraged her on, and she swam for one more hour. At that point she gave up, not knowing that she was only one mile away from the coast because she couldn’t see it. Two months later, though, she tried again, and this time she made it even though it was foggy again. When asked how she succeeded, she said that she kept a mental image of the shore while she swam. What an incredible feat! To swim for that long is pretty amazing, and her story reminds me of a scripture in the Old Testament: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). Because she had a vision of where she was headed, when it got hard she was able to keep swimming because she had in her mind the end goal. She kept the coastline in her mind the whole time and indeed did not perish.

And so it is for us spiritually: if we have a true vision of the blessings the Lord has for us and who we can become, we can overcome the challenges along the way that we might face. This is what the Lord did for Abraham. Abraham faced many difficulties in his life including his father trying to kill him, roaming the wilderness without a home, not being able to have children for a long time, having contention within his own family, and being asked to sacrifice his own son (which gratefully he didn’t have to do). To help him with those—and surely many more—challenges the Lord equipped him with a vision of what he and his posterity would do: “My hand shall be over thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee above measure, and make thy name great among all nations, and thou shalt be a blessing unto thy seed after thee, that in their hands they shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations; And I will bless them through thy name; for as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name, and shall be accounted thy seed, and shall rise up and bless thee, as their father;… and in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal” (Abraham 2:8-11). What a promise from the Lord! The Lord indeed watched over Abraham and gave him a vast posterity of which we are included. He was promised that those descendants would help take the gospel to all the world and help bring salvation and life eternal to many. And we have the privilege of helping fulfill that vision in our own day.

                I know that the Lord has many great things in store for you during your life if you will stay faithful to His plan and make and keep covenants with Him. In addition to helping take the gospel to others as a part of Abraham’s seed—through word and deed—you have unique gifts and talents that the Lord will use to help bless others. Through your goodness and desire to do what is right you will be able to help many people in your life. But, like Florence Chadwick, you will face difficult trials and sometimes perhaps feel like you are in a fog and unable to see where you are going. But always keep a vision of God’s plan for you—ultimately culminating in eternal life with Him and the Savior and your family—and you will be able to overcome any challenge.  

Love,

Dad