Armed With Thy Power

In the most recent general conference, Elder Patrick Kearon taught that the Savior can offer each of us a new beginning. He said of the Savior’s ministry: “He conversed with the social outcasts, He touched the diseased and unclean, He brought comfort to the weary, He taught liberating truth, and He called sinners to repentance. To each leper, blind man, and adulterous woman; to the lame, the deaf, and the dumb; to every grieving mother, desperate father, and mourning widow; to the condemned, the shamed, and the suffering; to the dead in body and the dead in spirit, what He did was offer a new beginning.” He continued, “Everything He said and did provided a new beginning for each of those He healed, blessed, taught, and relieved of sin. He didn’t withdraw from them, and He certainly won’t withdraw from you.” Elder Kearon suggested that each of us can have a new beginning, as many times as we need, through Him. This is perhaps why God made it so each night we go to sleep and wake up for a new day. Each morning we can start new as we work to overcome our sins and weaknesses and try to be more like the Savior. Elder Kearon continued, “And our new beginning doesn’t just happen once. We tend to think that our baptism is our one shot at a new beginning. It isn’t. We don’t have just one chance. These new beginnings can happen every day! And certainly every week as we eat a small piece of bread and drink a tiny cup of water in remembrance of the gift of our perfect Saviour, who died for the express purpose of giving us as many new beginnings as we need! Jesus gives us as many new beginnings as we need.” And how do we have a new beginning each day? It is through the daily repentance that President Nelson taught us about: “Nothing is more liberating, more ennobling, or more crucial to our individual progression than is a regular, daily focus on repentance. Repentance is not an event; it is a process. It is the key to happiness and peace of mind. When coupled with faith, repentance opens our access to the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.” The Lord said to Alma, “Yea, and as often as my people repent will I forgive them their trespasses against me” (Mosiah 26:30). He can help us to improve each day as we repent and start again.

               Another powerful way for me that I can start again is to go to the house of the Lord to worship. In most temples the celestial room is on a higher level than the entrance of the temple, and that is where we find ourselves at the end of an endowment session. We symbolically go up to the presence of the Lord, but eventually we must go back down and out into the world. This could represent our initial descent into morality when the Lord sent us on earth as an infant—“innocent in the beginning”— and each time we leave the celestial room it can be a new beginning for us as we return to our daily challenges (Doctrine and Covenants 93:38). This prayer from the Prophet Joseph Smith describes what can happen to us each time we perform an endowment session: “And we ask thee, Holy Father, that thy servants may go forth from this house armed with thy power, and that thy name may be upon them, and thy glory be round about them, and thine angels have charge over them” (Doctrine and Covenants 109:22). For me as I leave the celestial room, I often feel a renewed determination, a desire to keep trying, a power within me to strive again to accomplish the small work the Lord has for me in my daily life. These words from Helaman about his efforts with his army to withstand against the Lamanites are a good description of how I feel as I leave the temple to start again: “We did take courage with our small force which we had received, and were fixed with a determination to conquer our enemies, and to maintain our lands, and our possessions, and our wives, and our children, and the cause of our liberty” (Alma 58:12). Our situation may not have changed, but as we seek Him in the temple  we can find a determination and courage to try again, to face our figurative enemies, to work once more to overcome our challenges.    

               Elder Bruce C. Hafen once told of an experience on his mission to Germany that to me suggests that we must continue to believe in new beginnings even when change seems so hard. He related, “I was assigned to work with a brand new missionary named Elder Keeler, who had just arrived fresh from converting—or so he thought—all the stewardesses on the plane from New York to Frankfurt. Within a few days of his arrival, I was called to a meeting in another city and had to leave him to work in our city with another inexperienced missionary whose companion went with me. I returned late that night. The next morning I asked him how his day had gone. He broke into a big smile and said that he had found a family who would surely join the Church. In our mission, it was rare to see anybody join the Church, let alone a whole family. I asked for more details, but he had forgotten to write down either the name or the address. All he could remember was that the family lived on the top floor of a big apartment house. ‘Oh, that’s great,’ I thought to myself as I contemplated all those flights of stairs. He also explained that he knew so little German that he had exchanged but a few words with the woman who answered the door. But he did think she wanted us to come back—and he wanted to go find her and have me talk to her that very minute.” The new Elder could not remember the right street, and Elder Hafen humored him by going to the likely area and “began climbing up and down those endless polished staircases.” When Elder Hafen finally suggested that it wasn’t worth their time to try to find this woman, he tried to communicate this, somewhat harshly, to his companion. Elder Hafen related, “His eyes filled with tears and his lower lip began to tremble. (That elder was no dummy—he recently graduated from Boalt Law School at Berkeley.) I remember it so well—he said to me through those tear-filled eyes, ‘Elder Hafen, I came on my mission to find the honest in heart. The Spirit told me that that woman is going to join the Church, and you can’t stop me from finding her.’” Elder Hafen, upset but determined to teach his new companion a lesson about the realities of missionary work, raced him up staircase after staircase until indeed they did finally find the woman. He related, “Then, at the top of a long flight of stairs, we found the apartment. She came to the door. He thrashed my ribs with his elbow and whispered loudly, ‘That’s her, elder. That’s the one. Talk to her!’ Not long ago, brothers and sisters, up on Maple Lane a few blocks from here, that woman’s husband sat in our living room. He was here for general conference because he is the bishop of the Mannheim Ward. His two boys are preparing for missions; his wife and daughters are pillars of the Church. That is a lesson I can never forget about the limitations of the skepticism and the tolerance for ambiguity that come with learning and experience. I hope that I will never be so aware of ‘reality’ that I am unresponsive to the whisperings of heaven.” I love this story because it reminds us that we must believe in the possibility of change and in miracles that can come. Even when we have tried many times in the past—like Elder Hafen who had met so much rejection already on his mission—through Jesus Christ there can be change and a new beginning in the future. But we must believe in Him and then, like this new Elder, go to work to try to make it happen. As we repent each day, partake of the sacrament each week, and seek the Lord in the temple, we can find power through Him to begin again and ultimately engage in an “effectual struggle” (Mosiah 7:18).