You don’t have to wear the badge to bear His name.
Your discipleship isn’t just a slogan on a t-shirt.
Like brightly hulled steel ships at sea, we live in a spiritually corrosive environment where the most gleaming convictions must be mindfully maintained or they can become etched, then corrode, and then crumble away.
Experiences like FSY conferences, camps, sacrament meetings, and missions can help to burnish our testimonies, taking us through arcs of growth and spiritual discovery to places of relative peace. But what must we do to stay there and continue to “press forward with a steadfastness in Christ” rather than slipping backward? We must continue to do those things that brought us there in the first place, like praying often, drenching ourselves in scripture, and serving sincerely.
I just realized why it is so challenging to bring our kids back to church at this stage—why they fight it so much. When reading young children they will generally follow where their parents lead and become acclimated to that. This builds habit even when it doesn’t build testimony. When children get a little older they will not push to hard against what is already habit but they will push against change, especially change that takes some thought. If they have contradictory examples they will push harder still against change. Aside from building habits before they learn to actively fight back the easiest path for someone to come to the gospel comes after after recognizing the deficiencies of living without the gospel. Right now all the hardship our children have ever faced comes, as they see it, because of the gospel or despite it. “What’s the point of church if it doesn’t fix any of this?” is the most faithful conclusion they can come to—and that’s no more logical than “life is easier without reading scriptures, saying prayers, and getting dressed up every week to go where I am bored and supposed to not be rowdy.”
At this stage we are trying to build habits and help them practice faith-building patterns with all of the headwinds and none of the tailwinds.
Let there be no doubt: it is the very stuff of heroes displayed by our youth when they set their hearts and minds to standing upright against the shifting moral tectonics of our time.
One night I was tasked with arranging cookies in the foyer while my wife was conducting a fireside in the chapel for parents and their daughters preparing to attend Young Women camp the next week. After explaining where to be and what to bring, she said, “Now, Tuesday morning when you drop your sweet girls off at the bus, you hug them tight. And you kiss them goodbye—because they are not coming back.”
I heard someone gasp, then realized it was me. “Not coming back?”
But then she continued: “When you drop off those Tuesday-morning girls, they will leave behind the distractions of lesser things and spend a week together learning and growing and trusting in the Lord. We will pray together and sing and cook and serve together and share testimonies together and do the things that allow us to feel Heavenly Father’s Spirit, all week long, until it soaks all the way into our bones. And on Saturday, those girls that you see getting off that bus will not be the ones you dropped off on Tuesday. They will be new creatures. And if you help them continue from that higher plane, they will astonish you. They will continue to change and to grow. And so will your family.”
I sincerely hope that FSY soaks into Enoch this summer. I need to do everything I can to avoid building his antagonism—his instinct to fight against authority and structure—beforehand so that it can soak into his bones. I’m grateful that he was interested in going when we signed up.
The stalwart youth of Zion are voyaging through stunning times. Finding joy in this world of prophesied disruption without becoming part of that world, with its blind spot toward holiness, is their particular charge.
{A} missionary who was boarding a plane home…introduced himself and asked, “President Lund, what do I do now? What do I do to remain strong?”
Well, this is the same question that is on the minds of our youth when they leave FSY conferences, youth camps, and temple trips and anytime they feel the powers of heaven: “How can loving God turn into lasting discipleship?”
I felt an upwelling of love for this clear-eyed missionary serving the last hours of his mission, and in that momentary stillness of the Spirit, I heard my voice crack as I said simply, “You don’t have to wear the badge to bear His name.”
I wanted to put my hands on his shoulders and say, “Here’s what you do. You go home, and you just be this. You are so good you almost glow in the dark. Your mission discipline and sacrifices have made you a magnificent son of God. Keep doing at home what has worked so powerfully for you here. You have learned to pray and to whom you pray and the language of prayer. You have studied His words and come to love the Savior by trying to be like Him. You have loved Heavenly Father like He loved His Father, served others like He served others, and lived the commandments like He lived them—and when you didn’t, you have repented. Your discipleship isn’t just a slogan on a T-shirt—it has become a part of your life purposefully lived for others. So you go home, and you do that. Be that. Carry this spiritual momentum into the rest of your life.”
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