Your Next Step

We read a conference talk together every morning. Today is was Elder Randall K Bennett, titled “Your Next Step”. He quoted Moroni 7:33 which says, “If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me.”  He then went through three principles that will help us take our next step in our journey back to our Father in Heaven.  I believe these are true and powerful principles that will help us move forward in any worthy effort.

1. Become as a Child: When a child is learning to walk, they try and fail many times but they never give up. And because of that, they eventually learn how to walk. With childlike humility and willingness to keep trying, never giving up hope even when we fall, we can make progress toward Heavenly Father and our Savior. Our Heavenly Father rejoices in every faithful step and every effort to get back up and try again. – Elder Bennett

I believe our faithful efforts to overcome weaknesses and our efforts towards any worthy, desired outcome are steps towards becoming more like Him. And lead us back to Him. ~Shelley

2. Act with Faith: “Whenever we willingly act with faith in Jesus Christ and take another step, especially an uncomfortable step requiring change or repentance, we are blessed with strength. I testify that the Lord will guide us to – and through our next steps. He will more than match our efforts with His power if we are willing to keep trying, repenting, and moving forward with faith in our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.”  - Elder Bennett

Our devoted weekly observance of the Sabbath – a sign of our love for the Lord - carries with it a promise for our obedience. “We are promised that with devoted Sabbath day observance, the fulness of the earth will be ours.” (D&C 59:9-10, 13, 15-16)  - Elder Bennett

3. Overcome the Natural Man: “A third principle is this: we must counter the natural man’s tendency to procrastinate, to put off, or to give up. . . . faith in Heavenly Father and in Jesus Christ is a principle of action and power. If we are willing to act, we will be blessed with the strength to repent and with the strength to change.  . . We fail only if we fail to take another faithful step forward.” – Elder Bennett

Promised Blessings: “I promise that each faith-filled step will be met with help from heaven” – Elder Bennett

It’s my testimony that there is great and often untapped power available to us because of faithful keeping of covenants and commandments.  We need only the faith to ask and seek - the blessings are waiting to be given.  ~Shelley

Trust

I've been reviewing some of the classes I attended at Education Week last August, These quotes came from a class I attended about Trust.  Every day the teacher began the class with this quote: 

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.” (Quoted by David O McKay, Gospel Ideals [1953]. 187)

 Here is another quote from that class about the importance of reliability in developing relationships of trust.

“Here is a hypothetical. You are home with your children. A person you don’t want to talk to is calling on the phone or coming to the door. You are tempted to have the children tell them you are not home.

“If you do this, you are showing your children that you will lie to gain an advantage, and you are teaching them how to do the same. You are weakening their faith that they can trust you to tell the truth. You are also casting doubt on the validity of the commandment not to lie and on the prophets who taught that commandment. You are even diminishing faith in the existence of the God whose commandment it is.” (Dallin H. Oaks, BYU Address, Nov 9, 2004)

Another quote from that class:

“Our principal rarely gets into classrooms to observe or give feedback. But when we had our accreditation visit, right in front of the whole team our principal said that he gets into every classroom at least once a year, if not more, He said that most were informal, drop-in visits. We all knew that it wasn’t true. We couldn’t believe that he would come right out and lie like that! After that, I never trusted him in the same way again.” (Trust Matters – Leadership for Successful Schools;Book by Megan Tschannen-Moran)