The Lord will give you compassion if you ask for it.
There will be others who can help you in helping those in need.
The Lord will repay you for your efforts.
The prayer in the moment and quick glance in the scriptures will not be enough.
It is a human characteristic to become hardened to the pain of others.
All of us are blessed with responsibility for others. To hold the priesthood of God is to be held responsible by God for the eternal lives of His children. That is real, that is wonderful, and at times that can feel overwhelming.
There are elders quorum presidents listening tonight who know what I mean. Here is what happened to one of you. It has likely happened to many of you—and more than once. The details may vary, but the situation is the same.
An elder you do not know well asked for your help. He had just found out that he had to move his wife and young baby boy today from the apartment where they have been living to another one nearby.
He and his wife had already asked a friend if they could borrow a truck for the day to move their household and personal belongings. The friend loaned them the truck. The young father began to load all they owned into the truck, but in the first few minutes, he hurt his back. The friend who loaned the truck was too busy to help. The young father felt desperate. He thought of you, his elders quorum president.
By the time he asked for help, it was early afternoon. It was the day of an evening Church meeting. You had already promised to help your wife with household projects that day. Your children had asked you to do something with them, but you hadn’t gotten to it yet.
You also knew that the members of your quorum, particularly the most faithful, the ones you usually called on to help, were likely to be in the same time bind that you were in.
The Lord knew you would have such days when He called you to this position, so He gave you a story to encourage you. It is a parable for overloaded priesthood holders. We sometimes call it the story of the good Samaritan. But it is really the story for a great priesthood bearer in these busy, difficult last days.
The story is a perfect fit for the overtaxed priesthood servant. Just remember that you are the Samaritan and not the priest or the Levite who passed by the wounded man.
We are not told in the scriptures why the Samaritan was traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. It is not likely that he was taking a stroll alone since he must have known that robbers waited for the unwary. He was on a serious journey, and as was customary, he had with him a beast of burden as well as oil and wine.
You and the priesthood bearers you are called to lead can have at least three assurances. First, the Lord will give you, if you ask, the feelings of compassion He feels for those in need. Second, He will provide others, like the innkeeper, to join with you in your service. And third, the Lord, like the good Samaritan, will more than recompense all who join in giving help to those in need.
Maybe I need to look for others to help and to ask for feelings of compassion for those I an called to visit who seen to have no needs.
You may well have been inspired not to ask someone to help load and then unload that truck. As a leader you know your quorum members and their families well. The Lord knows them perfectly.
I probably fall in that camp lately.
The Lord knows who will be blessed by being asked to help and whose family will be blessed by not being asked. That is the revelation you can expect to come to you as you lead in the priesthood.
There is no way that I can find out whether the bishop prayed to know which priest would be blessed by going with him on those visits. He may well have taken other priests with him many times. But the Lord knew I would someday be a bishop inviting those whose faith had grown cold to come back to the warmth of the gospel. The Lord knew I would someday be charged with the priesthood responsibility for hundreds and even thousands of Heavenly Father’s children who were in desperate temporal need.
You young men cannot know what acts of priesthood service the Lord is preparing you to give. But the greater challenge for every priesthood holder is to give spiritual help. All of us have that charge. It comes with being a member of a quorum. It comes with being a member of a family. If the faith of anyone in your quorum or your family is attacked by Satan, you will feel compassion. Much like the service and mercy given by the Samaritan, you will also minister to them with healing balm for their wounds in their time of need.
As a quorum member, as a home teacher, and as a missionary, you cannot help people repair spiritual damage unless your own faith is vibrant. That means far more than reading the scriptures regularly and praying over them. The prayer in the moment and quick glances in the scriptures are not preparation enough.
I know I’m still solid but I wonder if my faith can be described as vibrant.
I know from experience that you can get the assurance of truth from the Spirit because it has come to me. You and I must have that assurance before the Lord puts us in the way of a traveler we love who has been wounded by the enemies of truth.
There is another preparation we must make. It is a human characteristic to become hardened to the pains of others. That is one of the reasons why the Savior went to such lengths to tell of His Atonement and of His taking upon Himself the pains and sorrows of all of our Heavenly Father’s children that He might know how to succor them.
Even the best of Heavenly Father’s mortal priesthood holders do not rise to that standard of compassion easily. Our human tendency is to be impatient with the person who cannot see the truth that is so plain to us. We must be careful that our impatience is not interpreted as condemnation or rejection.
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