Elder Holland. The Value of Personal Worthiness.
Many years ago now, long before I was called as a General
Authority, I participated as a speaker in a young adult conference. The
conference concluded with a testimony meeting in which a handsome, young
returned missionary stood up to bear his testimony. He looked good, clean, and
confident—just like a returned missionary should look.
As he began to speak, tears came to his eyes. He said he was
grateful to stand in the midst of such a terrific group of young Latter-day
Saints and to feel good about the life he was trying to lead. But that feeling
had only been possible, he said, because of an experience he had had a few
years earlier, an experience that had shaped his life forever.
He then told of coming home from a date shortly after he had
been ordained an elder at age 18. Something had happened on this date of which
he was not proud. He did not go into any details, nor should he have done so in
a public setting. To this day I do not know the nature of the incident, but it
was significant enough to him to have affected his spirit and his self-esteem.
As he sat in his car for a while in the driveway of his own
home, thinking things through and feeling genuine sorrow for whatever had
happened, his nonmember mother came running frantically from the house straight
to his car. In an instant she conveyed that this boy’s younger brother—I do not
know what the age of the younger boy was—had just fallen in the home, had hit
his head sharply and was having some kind of seizure or convulsion. The
nonmember father had immediately called 911, but it would take some time at
best for help to come.
“Come and do something,” she cried. “Isn’t there something
you do in your Church at times like this? You have their priesthood. Come and
do something.”
His mother didn’t know a lot about the Church at that point,
but she knew something of priesthood blessings. Nevertheless, on this night
when someone he loved dearly needed his faith and his strength, this young man
could not respond. Given the feelings he had just been wrestling with, and the
compromise he felt he had just made—whatever that was—he could not bring
himself to go before the Lord and ask for the blessing that was needed.
He bolted from the car and ran down the street several
hundred yards to the home of a worthy older man who had befriended him in the
ward ever since the boy’s conversion two or three years earlier. An explanation
was given, the older brother responded, and the two were back at the house
still well before the paramedics arrived. The happy ending of this story as
told in that testimony meeting was that this older man instantly gave a sweet,
powerful priesthood blessing, leaving the injured child stable and resting by
the time medical help arrived. A quick trip to the hospital and a thorough exam
there revealed no permanent damage had been done. A very fearful moment for
this family had passed.
Then the returned missionary of whom I speak said this: “No
one who has not faced what I faced that night will ever know the shame I felt
and the sorrow I bore for not feeling worthy to use my priesthood. It is an
even more painful memory for me because it was my own little brother who needed
me, and my beloved nonmember parents who were so fearful and who had a right to
expect more of me. But as I stand before you today I can promise you this,” he
said. “I am not perfect, but from that night onward I have never done anything
that would keep me from going before the Lord with confidence and asking for
His help when it is needed. Personal worthiness is a battle in this world in
which we live,” he acknowledged, “but it is a battle I am winning. I have felt
the finger of condemnation pointing at me once in my life, and I don’t intend
to feel it ever again if I can do anything about it. And, of course,” he
concluded, “I can do everything about it.” (Elder Holland, “Let Virtue Garnish
Thy Thoughts Unceasingly” From a youth fireside given on December 31, 2006.)
