In God We Trust

Corey and I spoke in Church yesterday. Here's a copy of my talk

"IN GOD WE TRUST"

I love the last verse of the Star Spangled Banner ~ it reads:

Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust!"

We will be a nation under God as each of us as individual citizens and people learn through our daily experiences and trials to cleave to God and put our complete trust in Him. In beginning my remarks on Trust in God, I'd like to share with you an experience I had that has helped me remember God's goodness to me...

Corey finished graduate school at BYU two years ago. At a Stake Conference we attended during our time there, a newly called Stake Presidency and their wives were invited to share their testimonies. As part of one of the wive's testimonies, she said "I know I married the right person." As she said that, I was impressed that I should remember God goodness in hearing my prayers and giving me the right person. I also realized that my marriage is a part of my testimony of the Gospel. I know God answered my prayers in giving Corey to me.

For I did pray, long and hard, to have him. Corey and I met at the beginning of 7th grade in a HomeEc class. I knew at that time that he was the kind of man (boy) that I wanted to marry. I don't have proof of that until the 9th grade, where I wrote in my journal that I wanted to marry him... or... someone exactly like him. Through Jr. High and High School I spent my freetime calculating my plan of attack. I took up rollerhockey, joined the chess club, science club, asked him to Prom dances, took AP courses, memorized his class schedule and found out his locker combination and did everything else I could in effort to be in the same room or hallway as him. ...and, although marriage was far off, I prayed to God at that time and on into my college years and asked God to let me marry him ...and it was then, in college - after he entered the "find your companion" atmosphere of BYU - that he finally began to come around and thought he might like to date me.

I'm forever grateful to BYU's dating and courtship environment that finally after 6 years helped Corey relent and give me a chance at winning his affection. It was a little harder at that time cause we were going to college at different schools, but lucky for us, that year of 1994 was the year our colleges began to use EMAIL. So we have a good record of our very first email messages to each other and officially started dating. On February 19, 1995, we had our first kiss. After I returned home that night, I got out a 5 year calendar and after calculating the time that serving missions would separate, I WROTE DOWN in my journal that night that I would marry him in exactly four years on February 19, 1999, which was a Friday, so it would work out good. He left for his mission to Santiago Chile, and I served a Spanish speaking mission in Tempe Arizona, and I flew down to my mission the same week his parent's flew to Chile to pick him up from his mission. So we missed each other by a few days and a couple thousand miles, but it would turn out to be 3 and a half years of letter writing before we saw each other again. Two months after I got home from my mission, we were married...(just like I had written in my journal...) on February 19, 1999, the day of the 4 year anniversary of our first kiss. So right now I want to testify of the importance of writing in your journal and writing down your goals!

So I did pray to marry Corey, but during one difficult time on my mission, when he was an RM, dating, at BYU, I felt I needed to be willing to consider the possibility of him not marrying me. I remember asking God to take away my concerns about home and help me to focus more on the work. ...And in a small way of turning my will over to the Lord, I told him I was willing to sacrifice what I wanted most for what God wanted. Looking back, that my prayers were eventually answered in the way I wanted, but at that time going forward, when I did not know what the future would hold, I had to exercise faith and learn to TRUST IN GOD and his timing.

I testify that we can turn our lives over to God, and he will not give us a stone when we ask for bread. As the Savior taught, "If we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask him.

But we are often times challenged to endure, to trust in God and his timing. I love the hymn "Come thou font of Every blessing, particularly where it sings "Prone to Wander, Lord I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, o take a seal it, Seal it for thy courts above." I have felt the spirit testify to me strongly at times that the Gospel is true and at those times I pray for God to help me remember how wonderful it feels and to burn those memories into my heart. But I know it will only be a short time before I am struggling again and am having a hard time feeling His Spirit close to me guiding me. That is a natural pattern in this fallen world where the natural man in us is prone to wander and forget the God we love.

I'd like to speak on 3 ways we can show God that we trust him: Through PATIENCE, GRATITUDE, and ENDURANCE

First - PATIENCE

Patience is tied very closely to trust in our Heavenly Father. Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught that "when we are unduly impatient, we are suggesting that we know what is best—better than does God. Or, at least, we are asserting that our timetable is better than His" ("Patience," Ensign, Oct. 1980, 28).

We can grow in faith only if we are willing to wait patiently for God's purposes and patterns to unfold in our lives, on His timetable.

When we lived near DC two years ago, we traveled to Yorktown for the 225th anniversary of the Siege at Yorktown, which in 1781 was the last major battle of the Revolutionary War campaign that eventually secured America's victory. That battle was fought in 1781, but it was not for two more years that the war formally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. During those two years, the future still was uncertain, and they endured with patience and trust in God.

A 2nd way to show God we trust him is to be Grateful. I love the Thanksgiving holiday. It became very special to me when I first read the Thanksgiving Proclamation that George Washington issued in October 1789. It states:

It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and to acknowledge with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

The proclamation continues by recognizing God as that "great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be;" I know that God is good and am so grateful for this free nation that he established for us.

A third way to show our Trust is through enduring to the end.

Elder Eyring said "the test a loving God has set before us is not to see if we can endure difficulty, it is to see if we can endure it well. We pass the test by showing that we remember him and the commandments he gave us. And to endure well those commandments whatever the opposition, whatever the temptation, and whatever the tumult around us." (April 2004)

Difficult circumstances surround us that are consistent with prophesy about the last days which surround us in these last days, we must never let fear divert us from faithful living. There have always been questions about the future.

Every person in every era has had to walk by faith into what has always been some uncertainty—starting with Adam and Eve in those first tremulous steps out of the Garden of Eden to Moses, Lehi, and Brigham Young, each leaving their homes for the desert and wilderness. But that is all right - this is the plan. Just press forward. Like those pioneers, you do have to keep moving—one step and then another and then the next. That is how tasks are accomplished, that is how goals are achieved, and that is how frontiers are conquered.

Elder Holland
"God expects you to have enough faith and determination and enough trust in Him to keep moving, keep living, keep rejoicing. In fact, He expects you not simply to face the future (that sounds pretty grim and stoic); He expects you to embrace and shape the future—to love it and rejoice in it and delight in your opportunities."

"God is anxiously waiting for the chance to answer your prayers and fulfill your dreams, just as He always has. But He can't if you don't pray, and He can't if you don't dream. In short, He can't if you don't believe."

George Washington called the founding of the United States a miracle, and I think he would know. He was more aware than anyone of all the problems and difficulties America faced. Yet he pressed forward. Also, as we look back upon the founding of this country from the privileged perspective of the present, it can read with the charm of a great adventure story with a happy ending for the American Side, but this is not a version that Washington would have recognized or endorsed. "Hindsight History" glides smoothly toward reordained conclusions, but for Washington and the founders, they traveled a bumpy road toward an uncertain destination.

I read 1776 by David McCollough. That book made me feel like I was in the midst of that terrible, miraculous year. It is amazing to read how close we came to failure. And inspiring to read of the courage and perseverence in the face of such desperation.

When we lived in Virginia, I was able to visit the Brandywine Battlefield in Pennsylvania. The US lost this battle in 1777, Perhaps they doubted God's support for them and felt abandoned. There is a story that proves that even though they lost, God was there:

Patrick Fergueson was a soldier for the British. The muskets most of the soldiery used in the Revolutionary war were guns that did not shoot straight - the balls would bounce of the sides of the barrel as they were shot out, but Fergueson was an excellent rifleman and designed his own breechloading rifle that had amazing accuracy. At the battle of Brandywine, he had in target an American officer, but decided to not pull the trigger because it was ungentlemanly to shoot a man in the back of the head. He later learned that this man was George Washington, but said even knowing that he still would not have shot.

So they were in the third year of the Revolutionary War, they lost that battle, and it might seem like God wasn't helping them? But God was there, and protected Washington, the only truly indispensible figure in the founding of this nation.

--------(That was all of the talk that I gave, I cut it short to make sure Corey had enough time for all his talk, which he had read to me at home and I thought it was great. But if I had finished, here's the rest of what I would have said, and ended it with my testimony of how God has blessed America.)-------

Perhaps we rationalized - Well, those were the Founders, God says he raised them up for that purpose. But there's nothing too incredible or important going on here right now or in my life, that's why I'm just another average person." Well, I think the Founders and God may have more faith in us that we have in ourselves. What are we capable of accomplishing?

"When one young man tried to congratulate (John Adams) for belonging to a truly heroic generation, Adams felt obliged to correct him: "I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers, meaning those concerned with the direction of public affiars," he cautioned, "but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are."

Elder Maxwell
"When in situations of stress we wonder if there is any more in us to give, we can be comforted to know that God, who knows our capacity perfectly, placed us here to succeed. No one was foreordained to fail or to be wicked. When we have been weighed and found wanting, let us remember that we were measured before and we were found equal to our tasks; and, therefore, let us continue, but with a more determined discipleship. When we feel overwhelmed, let us recall the assurance that God will not overprogram us; he will not press upon us more than we can bear (D&C 50:40)." ("Meeting the Challenges of Today," in Devotional Speeches of the Year, Provo: Brigham Young University, 1978, p. 156.)

President Benson
"A few years ago, we knew our Elder Brother and our Father in heaven well. We rejoiced at the upcoming opportunity for earth life that could make it possible for us to have a fullness of joy like they had. We could hardly wait to demonstrate to our Father and our Brother, the Lord, how much we loved them and how we would be obedient to them in spite of the earthly opposition of the evil one.

And now we're here—our memories are veiled—and we're showing God and ourselves what we can do. And nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father and how familiar his face is to us. And then, as President Brigham Young said, we're going to wonder why we were so stupid in the flesh.

God loves us. He's watching us, he wants us to succeed, and we'll know someday that he has not left one thing undone for the eternal welfare of each of us. If we only knew it, there are heavenly hosts pulling for us—friends in heaven that we can't remember now, who yearn for our victory. This is our day to show what we can do—what life and sacrifice we can daily, hourly, instantly bring to God. If we give our all, we will get his all from the greatest of all.