Welcome to Closer to Christ through General Conference, where two friends who love Jesus
Christ share our own approach to studying the most recent General Conference talks.
This is Abbey and Amy.
Let's jump into it.
Today we're talking about The Triumph of Hope by Elder Neil A. Anderson of the Quorum of
the Twelve.
This talk started out conference and it was just fantastic.
He talked about hope as a living gift, a gift that grows as we increase our faith in Jesus
Christ.
Elder Anderson promised through his servants, we will feel the guiding, directing, and comforting
influence of the Holy Ghost, and our faith will be strengthened as we listen to this
conference.
It really summed up perfectly how we felt for this conference.
Do you want to share maybe your highlight or overarching theme, how you felt over conference
weekend?
Yes.
Loved it.
Something that really stuck out to me now, this was the very last talk.
It was from President Nelson.
I love how he said, use these talks from this conference as a litmus test to judge what
is true and what is not.
I love that.
It just showed me that you know what, spending time in conference talks for that six months
really is a great place to spend your time.
It helps us to remember what truth is, like he said, and it helps us just to keep things
top of mind.
Things meaning covenants and promises and faith and hope in Jesus Christ.
I love that.
And you know, we're on the other side of conference weekend and so we're getting ready to deep
dive and to look at these like with a magnifying glass under a different lens.
And he promised, Elder Anderson promised, we will feel the guiding, directing, and comforting
influence of the Holy Ghost, and we certainly did.
We can look back and say we did.
And then like you're saying, jump clear to the end of the last Sunday session, and that
was the prophet's recommendation to us.
And so we're going to take that challenge to its fullest.
We are going to look at all of these.
We are going to use them as a litmus test of truth and see what we can gain from it.
My overarching, I'm just going to still write from the next paragraph of Elder Anderson's
talk.
And President Russell M. Nelson began conference three years ago with these words, pure revelation
for the questions in your heart will make this conference rewarding and unforgettable.
If you have not yet sought for the ministering of the Holy Ghost to help you hear what the
Lord would have you during these two days, I invite you to do so now.
Please make this conference a time of feasting on messages from the Lord through his servants.
So the two things that I love about that is that basically in that quote, he's saying
if you missed it, if you miss some piece or part of conference or you didn't have ears
to hear it, that that wasn't your last chance.
You've got plenty of time over the next course of history to go back and get what you can
from it.
And then another thing is that I said, I certainly feasted, but eating has to come to an end.
At some point you feel uncomfortable, like you have more than you can handle if you've
ever put that to the test on Thanksgiving or something.
But I certainly felt well fed over the weekend, but because of my experience from the six
months previous doing this podcast with you and enjoying each conference talk deeper on
a weekly basis, giving myself time to really comb through the words and seeing what messages
are there for me, I know that that feast didn't, it was not a one-time event.
That's going to happen for me weekly and certainly we'll be able to tackle these and be able
to get what we can from them over the next six months.
I love that.
Abby, this was the first time I didn't get to mid-conference and have that like really
sad feeling that, oh my gosh, conference is over.
Every other time I felt that.
We have totally had that conversation in our walks.
And it's like, you look so forward, it's like Christmas Eve.
Exactly.
That's the fun part of the holiday.
And this time I never had that.
I was just like riding the wave.
I was on a high, like it was, and I think just like you said, it's because we've spent
the six months going back in, taking the time and remembering that it's not just that weekend.
It spans the whole six months and we can take time to look at each of the talks.
And having the metrics that we have from the podcast, the stuff that we gather, we know
that you're here with us and you're doing that same thing.
You're showing that same commitment that you don't want conference to be a two-day event.
That was great.
We'll see in six months, like you're here with us because you have that same desire
to get all that you can out of it.
And so let us just express our gratitude that you join us for this because kind of a selfish,
I love doing the podcast for me.
I feel like I can dedicate more time.
We've kind of had this conversation.
We had a walk this week and we were like, we've seen so many blessings come from it
that we've definitely been taught through the spirit that the time that we spend podcasting
is like, I don't know what worth its weight in gold to us because we're personally growing
enough to justify any time that we put into it, but then to see that you guys have come
with us on this journey, make it even better.
Thank you for being here.
So today we are going to talk about the relationship with three common words in scripture.
Elder Anderson talks about faith, hope and charity.
Sacred and eternal hope is centered in Jesus Christ and the restored gospel and our confident
expectations of these promised blessings of righteousness.
So what about the first blessings that he discussed is our confident hope in eternal
life?
What do you have to say about that?
I love that he is going to help us understand this connection between faith, hope and charity.
If we know about eternal life, it's going to make every decision that we make in life
different, which now that I'm talking makes me think that's why the prophet asked us to
think celestial.
Right.
That's the case.
Celestial means thinking about eternal life.
And we've already discussed and I'm sure you've all had this thought in your heart.
How are you going to react in a certain situation if you're thinking celestial?
Often looks very different from what our natural man instinct is going to draw us to do.
So I want to dive into that, but I do want to say something that really, really helped
me with this talk.
I'm going to link in the show notes.
Neal A. Maxwell did a talk, 1994, brightness of hope.
My husband shared this with me.
So I listened through that and it helped me get the visual of what he was saying.
From him it says, if faith increases.
So that's the first step with do we increase our faith in something, something we have
no idea if there is or if there's going to be.
Hope will stretch correspondingly.
So you can start with faith as small as a mustard seed, but you could also have faith
as grand as a mountain.
Just as this is right from him, just as doubt, despair and desensitization go together, so
do faith, hope and charity.
The latter, however, must carefully and constantly be nurtured.
Whereas despair, like dandelions, needs little encouragement to sprout and spread.
Despair comes so naturally to the natural man.
So that's what this life is.
It's a test to see what do we let grow, weeds and dandelions in the form of doubt, despair
and desensitization, or do we let hope, faith and charity rule our lives?
And so that is the question.
That's like a beautiful garden.
Yes.
So back to the question you asked me to make a connection between how these things relate
to our eternal life.
Do we know that our Savior came to the earth, that He had His ministry, that He taught by
example and that He was crucified, that He atoned for our sins and then He was crucified
and that He laid His body down and then He picked it back up three days later?
That is the question of life.
I do believe that.
I do.
So because I believe that, I believe the promises that were made to us that we accept Jesus
Christ and we get to live eternally with Him and our heavenly parents.
And so I guess I'm kind of circling back on it.
What a joy and blessing it is to have this earth life opportunity to prove in my actions
that I believe that story to be true.
It's hearing this told through scripture and through now living prophets, testifying that
Jesus Christ came and that He atoned for our sins and made it possible to have eternal
life with Him and our heavenly parents again, if we believe that it can and should dictate
all the decisions that we make.
Absolutely.
And then when we get it wrong, that we know that was also part of the story.
There was a way His charity gets inspected.
You know what, Abby, I love that you say, you know, do we believe that that's true?
Because it is the central part of the plan, like the whole reason that we're here on earth,
there are so many things.
First of all, everything hinges on it.
And because of that, there are so many glimpses where the Spirit touches us and there are
experiences where we've learned and grown line upon line where we know this is true
because it's been instilled into our hearts after we've done all these different things.
And everything that I do points that Jesus is the Christ and that He did do what He said
He did.
Do you know what I mean?
Yes.
And then we just have to hold on to that.
Absolutely.
Like right now in this snapshot of time, I'm like, I would never deny that.
I would never want to give that up.
But that's part of that enduring testimony of Jesus Christ.
That's a great point.
What challenges, what parts of this life are going to come my way that caused me to challenge
that and re-ask that question and either get a more firm testimony in Jesus Christ or turn
away from it?
Love that.
Which he'll go into that.
So this life is a test.
We know the plan.
We know that Jesus Christ is central to that plan.
How can we prove victorious in this test?
That's a question that I thought came off of right from his words.
I love this quote from the Savior.
He said, in the world, the Savior said, ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer,
keep a brightness of hope.
I have overcome the world.
So again, we're trickling back.
Do we believe that to be true?
Do we believe that Jesus Christ overcame the world?
Yes.
We're reminded in this talk that Heavenly Father and His beloved Son have eagerly blessed
the righteous with the precious gift of hope.
And then I put hope as a gift exclamation.
That living gift, I love it.
It's such a good way to say it.
It was first given to Adam and Eve, but that same gift is offered to us.
We've come to learn to trust the plan.
The reality of eternal life is illuminated.
So it's a great reminder that the deliverer of the gift of faith, hope, and charity is
the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, and our constant companion.
So that was beautiful.
Amy, I'm going to ask you a question.
In a time of difficulty, have you ever felt the Lord's peace if you faithfully said, not
my, but thy, be done?
Not my will, but thy be done?
I have.
I'm trying to think of one that's specific.
I feel like it's happened a lot of times.
But one of them would be when we started doing this farm that we have now where we have 56
animals now.
And it kind of wasn't something I ever aspired to.
It's nothing I ever looked forward to.
But I have seen my family grow.
I have seen my own capacity grow.
Like when I look back at two years ago and we first bought our three dogs and three goats,
if you saw me on that day, I was like laying on the ground, completely overwhelmed.
Like what have we done?
And now fast forward two years and we have these, you know, 56 animals.
And I just feel like that is a very small way to show because it's like, oh, come on,
you have a bunch of animals who cares.
I understand that.
But it is a physical manifestation of what the Lord has done with me spiritually.
He has broadened my capacity.
I have capacity for more.
I have capacity for more love.
I have capacity for more because there's more love.
I also grieve when there's loss.
And it's just been a blessing in my family.
I also feel like we have my family has softened because we have animals.
That sounds kind of funny, but we used to not cry in front of each other when sad things
happened.
And now we pull our eyes out and we just, it's a healthy thing to cry when sad things
happen, you know, we just didn't do it before.
So I'm just noticing little things here and there and when those things happen, I definitely
say a quick prayer and I say, thank you, heavenly father for knowing what was best for me.
Yeah, because the initial prayer is for some direction or some growth or you don't really
know what you're asking for sometimes.
Right.
Like you just, you know, like motions of a hidden fire.
Like there's something that you want, you want to grow in some way, but you're not exactly
sure how that's going to be achieved.
And for you and your family, a lot of that has been with this stewardship that you're
having over the animals.
And you know, you started with a handful of them and that seemed overwhelming, but then
that became easy.
And then what happened?
Your capacity grew and then you were, you've been able to take on more animals and that's
not sense overwhelming.
That's a visual representation of what he's trying to say.
Faith can start in a small, simple way when you exhibit that you believe that it's more
than just faith.
At that point, you have an actual belief in him.
You carry on in actions that demonstrate that you have hope.
And then it expands past the limits of what that original faith was.
And then we demonstrate we're ready for more.
I love that.
And you know, it's so hard to articulate what we're saying, but it's like a cool little
picture and it's like, you know, like here's this dot on the paper and here's where faith
is and here's where hope is.
And it grows for me.
It's like a water color.
You know how watercolor you drop it and then like pebble in water.
Yes.
All of those things.
And also for me, Abby, as you were talking like this, this came clearly to my mind.
I've said this before that like I pray to heavenly father and let him know what my wishes,
my dreams, my desires are, my goals for my family and for myself.
And so whenever there's something that just let's say this farm or whatever we're doing,
there's a feeling that's just a nudge forward.
I pray for confirmation, but in my mind, I know that he sees the big picture.
He knows what I want and he also will help me in every single decision I make to make
that happen.
Right.
So I believe because you've chosen to include him in the process.
So I know that when he, he's like, you know what?
Sure.
I can bless you with capacity.
You want, you want animals?
Let's do it with animals.
If I'd chosen something else, he would have blessed me in that way, but animals seems
to be something that's a thing for my family.
Do you know what I mean?
So yes, I just, because I know that his will is for me to be my best and my happiest and
same with my whole family.
Then I move forward in the tiny steps when I feel it.
I love it.
This, this, this talk has become very deep and personal to me for many reasons.
But as I went to bed, considering the talk, because these, these, the physical words
posted like last night, we knew that we were podcasting today.
I went to bed thinking about the talk and like the emotion that I felt from it.
Not necessarily when I look back at the words, I'm like the notes that I have in my phone.
Well, that's an interesting thing.
The notes that I have in my phone, they're not like verbatim word for word from what
he said.
So what's in my phone is the spirit testifying to me what I got out of the talk.
And my thoughts as I came kind of to consciousness this morning, that's kind of my revelation
time or whatever.
If I go to sleep with the thought or pondering on something, I wake up and like what comes
to me is like, I don't know, confirmation or the answer to the thing that I kind of
went to bed on.
I was in tears this morning and my husband was already awake and he was like, are you
okay?
And I'm like, yeah.
And he's like, what are you crying for?
And he's like, are you sad?
Or I'm like, no, they're happy tears.
And I was just thinking of multiple experiences that he's given me.
He kind of woke up this morning with some bits and pieces of my life kind of on the
slideshow.
Like cut, it was kind of like cut in a way for me to see like, this is where your faith
was.
This is where you grew.
This is where your hope grew.
This is where your faith is now.
You know, multiple little snapshots.
And like, I don't know that there's any value in me sharing exactly what that looks like,
but I just so you're not curious.
Unfortunately, for my children, like their journey with cystic fibrosis or me becoming,
Adam and I becoming parents, knowing that we have this genetic marker for cystic fibrosis
has grown me more than anything I can think of.
Or it's the thing that I'm like, that's where he's tested my faith and giving me hope and
show me his absolute love, which is charity to me.
That's accurate, right?
Charity.
Yes.
So it's been some of the darkest times.
You know, you get a bad test result, you get some bad news.
Kimball's liver gave us trouble for a time.
Maddie cultured some pretty rotten bacteria in her lungs.
You have an idea of like, what you think the outcome is going to be.
And you have obviously hope that something better will happen.
And so you proceed, you do treatments and you listen to what the doctors say, and then
you pray about things, you make decisions.
But I guess what he showed me in this quick little screenshot was this like, I gave you
the tools necessary to get through that thing and look at what you came out on the other
side of it.
Another thing is like, thinking you were done after having one kid and just thinking that
chapter of our life needs to be closed, because I don't have faith that the next time what
would be any different and you feel guilty, like bringing these kids into a world where
you're blessing them with this health challenge, this chronic health challenge, right?
You don't really know what it's going to bring.
And so I shut that down.
But it was my patriarchal blessing.
And knowing there was a line in there that said, you know, one of my greatest blessings
will be that of, you know, having my children or whatever.
And it was multiple.
And so that was a, like, it was a, I don't know if I want to say that that was a bit
of hope.
The hope came in the line from the patriarchal blessing that I said, that's plural.
And I only have one child right now.
So there might be an opportunity for more.
But as time progressed, and we kind of got our feet under us, and life wasn't so shaky
anymore, financially, emotionally, whatever, all the things that it takes to have a child
with chronic illness.
And then Maddie asking for a sister, you know, all those things combined were just the bits
and pieces that we need to hope for a better world or hope for a future and have the faith
that Heavenly Father would support us in the things that we needed to grow our family.
Love that.
So anyway, that grew, that grew to three children.
And I thought, well, that's more than one child.
And we filled that blessing and we're going to do it.
But you know, I put my request into him.
And you know, he's like, I've got a way bigger plan for you.
And then he blessed me with a fourth child and a fifth child.
And so I got the family that I always dreamed of, but never thought that I would have.
But it didn't happen all at once.
It happened over many years with a lot of growth and struggles and challenges in between.
But anyway, that little video that I saw this morning, I guess, is that that's a weird way.
It wasn't like a vision.
I wasn't like sleeping.
Like I just, it was just kind of memories were coming to me of things that were both
joyous and sorrowful, but all weave together into this, for me, a demonstration of how
he's grown my faith and my hope and in charity.
And I don't think that he's done growing me.
I feel like my capacity is to a place where it's like, what do you want to throw at me?
I will accept it because I do love the growth on the back end of it.
So that's beautiful, Abby.
Thank you for sharing that.
You were talking earlier when we've talked about what we loved about this talk, you were
talking about the Prophet Moroni, he referenced that in this talk.
Do you want to jump into that?
I just love that part.
Anytime it talks about writing things down or ancestors or a family line, my ears are
always, my interest is piqued.
So Moroni says, I am alone.
I have not whether to go.
I make not myself known, lest they should destroy me.
And then I just love that Moroni, and we can also find peace in these words, if a man have
faith, he must need to have hope, for without faith, there cannot be any hope.
What is it that you shall hope for?
You shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection
to be raised unto life eternal.
And what I love is that his dad decided to write down the things that were most important
to him.
He wrote down his testimony of Christ, everything he said pointed to Christ and hope in him.
And I just love that because sometimes we don't have it in ourselves.
Sometimes like we've been so beat up by life that like it's just not coming to us.
And through the Spirit, through the Holy Ghost, you know, for some reason we find this passage
in family, you know, text or whatever that talks about this and it just puts wind in
our sails.
I love it.
And maybe that feels like the action item.
When you look back on your life and you find those pieces where you can recognize that
your faith was challenged, it grew, your hope expanded, you felt the love of Jesus Christ
in your life.
Take a minute to write that down for yourself, for your future self, for your posterity.
Right.
And write it in the family tree app, that white one with the little tree on it.
That's a great idea.
Because you never know when those words are going to come in so handy.
Lucky for Moroni, he had his dad's wise words to look back to.
I think we're getting to the, let me just reiterate the key to this talk.
He says, hope is a gift that grows as we increase our faith in Jesus Christ.
I love the thought that hope is not this finite amount.
It's going to be what you've got this limited amount of hope and you have to play off of
that hope.
It can expand and grow as we expand and grow in faith.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for.
We build the substance, the evidence blocks of our faith through prayer, temple covenants,
keeping the commandments, continuing feasting on the scriptures and the words of modern
day prophets, taking the sacrament, serving others and worshiping weekly with our fellow
saints.
Great list.
Do you have anything else for us, Abby, that you want to end with?
I have to strongly encourage people to read Brightness of Hope.
I'll link that because it's so helpful.
And I think it would be sad to not mention, he talks about how temples, growing number
of temples dotting the earth increases our hope.
And I just thought on that for a minute and I said, that's absolutely true.
If this was the only thing there was, you just came to earth, you had your time here
and it didn't really matter what you did.
There are people that function in that way.
That's how they operate their lives.
You and I believe that there is something more.
This life is a test and it comes with joys and sadnesses, like you couldn't even imagine.
But the fact that temples, 150 plus another 17, got a mascot on this one, another 17 have
been announced.
And it for me is every time they announce a temple, that for me is God reaffirming the
importance they place on covenants, finding places of peace, loving his children in all
lands across the earth, having equal love for his sons and daughters.
It also points toward the millennium and toward the future, which I think that's a big part
of hope is hope for the future.
It changes all of our actions.
If you don't have hope in the future, this is one thing they say kids have a way of increasing
our hope.
If we continue to have posterity in children, then we hope for a better future.
We also build a better future.
Yep.
So does gardening and so does building temples.
Exactly.
It's in that list and it makes perfect sense.
And so I love that.
I had to summarize that piece of the talk because it's like saying, if you don't think
that there's something to come, why would you care about commandments and why would you
try to keep them?
But in the opposite of that, if you do believe that there is something more to come, like
what we started this thing out with, the connection between faith, hope, charity and eternal life,
I do believe these things.
I do want to look at each of those building blocks of faith.
My time in the temple matters.
The things I'm learning in the temple matter because there's more than just this earth
life.
It helps me in this earth life, certainly brings me joy in this earth life.
And I'm not just living until I die, like, well, I'm just going to get through this and
then finally, you know, I'll be worth it.
It can be worth it right in this moment, but all of these lists, if there's nothing past
this life, then why crack your scriptures open?
But every time that we take an extra look at general conference talk or we heard something
that peaked our ears and we said, the prophet asked us to do this and we tried to do that
thing.
And we're demonstrating that we have faith in those things and those in the prophet,
in the scriptures, in keeping the commands.
We have faith in those things and it expands our hope and we demonstrate to Heavenly Father
that we get it.
We get that there is a celestial, we have a celestial level in everything that we do.
I love that, Admi.
Okay.
Any last thoughts from you?
Love the talk.
It was a great beginning to conference and it really kicked it off well.
We'll see you on the next one.
Thanks for joining us today.
See you next time.
And every time.