I Could Not Be Shaken

My seven-year-old son recently announced to his older brother that there would be an earthquake next year in Utah since the Salt Lake Temple will be done. Unfortunately, when they look to me to know if that is true I can neither confirm nor deny it, but my son probably got the idea from something I said about a big earthquake not happening until the Salt Lake Temple was completed. President Nelson did say this, “My dear brothers and sisters, when renovations on the Salt Lake Temple are completed, there will be no safer place during an earthquake in the Salt Lake Valley than inside that temple.” The temple will be, in a sense, unshakable, and more important than worrying about the exact timing of an earthquake here is the need to build our lives in a way that we cannot be spiritually shaken. President Nelson continued, “Likewise, whenever any kind of upheaval occurs in your life, the safest place to be spiritually is living inside your temple covenants!”

               In the most recent general conference, Elder Kelly R. Johnson also spoke about being unshakable in our faith. He told about working in his grandfather’s cherry orchard when he was young. He related, “The harvesting of cherries changed significantly when my grandfather purchased a machine called a cherry shaker. This machine grabs the trunk of the tree and shakes it, causing the cherries to fall out of the tree onto nets that are used to collect the cherries. I noticed that when the shaker would begin to shake the tree, almost all the cherries fell out of the tree within seconds. I also noticed that it didn’t matter if the tree was shaken for 10 seconds or a full minute, some cherries would not fall. They were truly unshakable.” He explained how this cherry shaker works, “Shaking cherries out of a tree is possible because of the release of ethylene. This hormone causes the layer of cells between the stem of the cherry and the tree to weaken. Therefore, the stem of a ripe cherry more easily detaches from the tree because of the weakened connection.” This reminds me of the analogy that the Savior gave to His disciples about being connected to Him: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). We must be firmly attached to him and not let the temptations (like the hormone used by the cherry shaker) and trials (like the physical shaking of the tree) weaken our attachment to Him. If we abide in Him, we can be truly unshakable even when the word seeks to pull us down.    

               Elder Johnson explained how we remain unshaken in our faith in Jesus Christ. He said, “Repenting and experiencing the blessings of the Atonement of Jesus Christ lead to unshaken faith. Unshaken faith leads to a desire to always be reconciled to God…. Brothers and sisters, I invite you to be reconciled to God through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I testify that making and keeping covenants makes our connection to the Savior strong, thereby avoiding becoming ripe for destruction. I testify that this reconciliation to God, through Jesus Christ’s Atonement, leads to unshakable faith.” Through keeping our covenants we will maintain a strong connection to Him and our faith will remain strong. Jacob in the Book of Mormon also spoke about how we can become unshakable when he wrote, “Wherefore, we search the prophets, and we have many revelations and the spirit of prophecy; and having all these witnesses we obtain a hope, and our faith becometh unshaken, insomuch that we truly can command in the name of Jesus and the very trees obey us, or the mountains, or the waves of the sea” (Jacob 4:6). As we learn to hear the voice of the Lord through revelation, searching both ancient and modern prophets, we can gain witnesses that give us unshaken faith. Then when the adversary seeks to tear down our faith, we will be able to say like Jacob, “And he had hope to shake me from the faith, notwithstanding the many revelations and the many things which I had seen concerning these things…. I had heard the voice of the Lord speaking unto me in very word, from time to time; wherefore, I could not be shaken” (Jacob 7:5). Through the revelations of the Holy Ghost we can have, like Moroni said, “a firmness unshaken, that [we] will yield to no temptation, but that [we] will serve the true and living God” (Mormon 9:28).

               According to the Working Group on Utah Earthquake Probabilities, “There is a 57% probability that the Wasatch Front region will experience at least one Magnitude (M) 6.0 or greater earthquake and a 43% probability of at least one M6.75 or greater earthquake in the next 50 years.” So hopefully that won’t come in 2027, and perhaps it will not even come in my lifetime. But what is sure is that there will be plenty of temptations and trials for all of us in the coming months and years, and we will need unshakable faith in Jesus Christ to spiritually withstand them.