e.rhondeau//farewell // june 28 2009

Excerpt from talk:

The night before opening my call, I dreamt I stopped in at the BYU Bookstore to pick up a class-required Mission Prep manual. It's a slim volume, only a few dollars and all of sixty pages, yet by the time I arrived home the book was the size of a small elephant. This development, however, didn't seem to phase my dream-self until I opened the package and evaluated its contents, stunned. The thing was packed. I began pulling out skirts, shirts, dresses and shoes as well as books binders, notes and charts until things began to get even more metaphorical and I was reaching at slamming doors and absent investigators, difficult companions and alarm clocks set to six a.m. Panicked, I shoved everything back into the box and raced back to the bookstore.

The girl at the register listened politely to my predicament, but then informed me that a return was impossible. "But this wasn't what I asked for!" I explained frantically. "This isn't what I expected!" She smiled apologetically but simply pointed behind me to the box which, while now the size of a 4-door sedan, was also completely transparent.

Turns out my subconscious isn't all that subtle---I awoke to the sheer terror of it all: what on earth have I gotten myself into? The question was heightened that morning by the uncertainty of a future outlined in a white envelope, but I think quite a lot of us field the same panic every day, forgetting the counsel in Doctrine and Covenants 38:30:if ye are prepared ye shall not fear. And still this scripture might only bring about more questions. What does it mean, to be prepared? To be ready, to be strong? And what, in the end, are we preparing for? There are any number of spiritual surprises that strive to shake us. Yet these great things are made up of the small and simple, and the preparation I would like to talk about this morning is in the day to day baby steps of living; the steps that daily bring us closer to God and prepare us to become as followers of Christ.

In my very limited experience, I have found that this preparation is in knowing, doing, and being. First, we must seek to KNOW. This could easily be a list of the usual: go to church, read your scriptures, say your prayers. We know these constants and strive to live by them--- and yet by knowing these foundational principles, we are held to a higher task. To truly be prepared, we must actively search out truth, or as the prophet Joseph Smith said,

"[thy mind] must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity---thou must commune with God."