This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 452nd week, and we’re covering the Sunday morning session of the April 2006 General Conference.
I started the General Conference Odyssey back in 2015, and now it’s 2024. That makes this pretty much the longest project I’ve ever worked on in my life. Back when we got started, we were covering General Conference talks from the 1970s, before I was born. Now we’re covering 2006, which is a few years after my mission and for the most part with the General Authorities that I feel like I grew up with, especially President Hinckley.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that I remember these talks. I don’t. I never had a faith crisis or anything like that (not about the Church, anyway), but in the years after my mission I was pretty uninterested in General Conference in particular. While I was on my mission, I would devour the General Conference talks when they came out in the Ensign (as it was called back in the day). Some of it was that I was desperate for anything to read, of course. I’m the kind of person who reads compulsively, up to and including a cereal box if that’s all I’ve got handy. My whole family is like that, pretty much. We’re book people.
But there was more going on than that. I really cared about spiritual things in a deep way on my mission, and so I invested myself in the talks. Before my mission, I’d always watch General Conference with my family on TV, but most of us would inevitably fall asleep, definitely including myself, and it felt like they were always just saying the same things. After my mission, at least for a few years, that’s what I went back to. But during my mission? During my mission I could read the talks and get epiphanies.
It’s like (then) Elder Oaks said in his talk All Men Everywhere in this session: “What we get from a book—especially a sacred text—is mostly dependent on what we take to its reading.”
So I wish that I had memories of listening to these talks back when I was a newlywed and could contrast them with how I feel about them now as a middle-aged dad, but the truth is: if I listened to them at all I have no memory at all. And I’m pretty sure that I would remember, because a talk like President Hinckley’s Seek Ye the Kingdom of God is not one that I would forget.
The talk is unusually personal. It’s not as profoundly forceful as Elder Holland’s talk, Motions of a Hidden Fire, from the most recent General Conference in April 2024, but it’s still much more personal than what we usually get in General Conference.
“When a man reaches my age, he pauses now and again to reflect on what has led him to his present status in life,” he begins. Then continues:
I feel to indulge upon your time in what might be regarded as a selfish manner. I do so because the life of the President of the Church really belongs to the entire Church. He has very little privacy and no secrets. My talk this morning will be different from any, I think, previously heard in the general conferences of the Church.
President Hinckley also shared some journal entries that he had written 40 years before, including this one:
A man must get his satisfaction from his work each day, must recognize that his family may remember him, that he may count with the Lord, but beyond that, small will be his monument among the coming generations.
“And so it goes,” he said next, unconsciously (I’m pretty sure) referencing Kurt Vonnegut.
I’ve thought about that quote a lot since reading it. “A man must get his satisfaction from his work each day.” All the kids want to be influencers these days. It seems like everyone wants to be famous. I, myself, still have dreams of writing stories that a whole lot of people will read and love. Well, you can’t depend on that, because most such dreams don’t come true, and even when they do, fame and recognition are fleeting. Most writers don’t publish anything. Most published books fail. And even among the small cadre of elite writers who manage to eek a career out of it… how many are still being read once they’re gone and not putting out new books? Even if you make it, “small will be [your] monument among the coming generations.”
On the other hand, President Hinckley also shared a quote from his patriarchal blessing: “The nations of the earth shall hear thy voice and be brought to a knowledge of the truth by the wonderful testimony which thou shalt bear.” After his mission to England, he made stops in Berlin and Paris, bearing his testimony in the great European capitals. Then he thought to himself: “I had borne my testimony in these great capitals of the world and had fulfilled that part of my blessing.”
But the Lord’s intended fulfillment of his promises was so much grander than that.
That proved to be a mere scratching of the surface. Since then I have lifted my voice on every continent, in cities large and small, all up and down from north to south and east to west across this broad world—from Cape Town to Stockholm, from Moscow to Tokyo to Montreal, in every great capital of the world. It is all a miracle.
One of the bedrock, fundamental rules of this fallen world is that status is a zero-sum game. You don’t get prestige without taking it from someone else. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. According to the logic of this world, only a miniscule handful of people ever really make it. There are only about 1,700 NFL players at a time, compared to over eighty thousand who play in college compared to over a million who play in high school (FootballFoundation.org). TL;DR – you’re probably not going to make it, and if you do it’s because you took it from someone else.
But I don’t believe God plays zero-sum games. Just as He had a grander vision for President Hinckley’s life than young Gorden had, I believe that God has grander visions for all of us than we have. I believe that the lives of the saints are millions of untold, private epics of grandeur and beauty that we only catch the barest glimpses of in this life. I believe that all disciples of Christ will find that the story of their life, once the Master is done with it, far surpasses anything they could have conceived. And nobody’s success on this eternal stage will ever diminish or come at the expense of anyone else’s.
No life lived in service and discipleship can be a failure.