Learning to Know

Sister Julie B. Beck was released this weekend as General Relief Society President, the leader of the women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I remember sitting in my family room when Sister Beck gave her talk entitled Mothers who Know. I felt a call to action, an urging to be such a mother.

Perhaps my most profound memory of a Sister Beck talk, though, was from a BYU Women's Conference in 2010 entitled Choose Ye this day to Serve the Lord. I watched it in my family room, alone after everyone had gone to sleep. I was transfixed, scribbling notes furiously. Perhaps I was touched at the urgency of the message because Sister Beck was giving it just days after her father had passed away. You could see that she was grieving, but that her message was more important than her grief, than the fact that she had lost her voice, if I remember right. That talk was many things and there are many touching and tender principles taught, but the thing that struck me most that night was the pattern: to prioritize our lives by what is essential, what is necessary and what is nice to do. Her first paragraph under "essential" is:

I wrote at the top of the essential list revelation. I have to be able to know the mind and will of God. Therefore, I have to do the things in my life that put me in a position to hear His voice. Reading the scriptures then became an essential for me because the scriptures contain the mind and will of God, and by reading and studying from them, I can hear His voice and receive His guidance in all aspects of my life. I came up with a simple rule that was easy for me to keep: Every day I will spend some time in the scriptures. The accumulative power and learning of that commitment has changed my life and helped me learn daily the mind and will of God.

I am always looking for patterns, for lists, for help. This pattern from Sister Beck has been the clearest pattern for me, so essential, so tender, so pointed as to how to get where I need to be, how to get back to where I should never have left.

There are many things, many thoughts, many calls to action I will remember from Sister Beck, but that pattern, combined with the idea that knowing the mind and will of God for me, for my family was essential, was possible, was--is--empowering. It reminded my spirit that God is my Father, that He wants to teach me, to help me teach my children, His children. That this roller coaster of motherhood is not meant to be a solitary job, that I "can hear His voice and receive His guidance in all aspects of my life." Simple. powerful.