I gave this talk in my ward on July 24, 2016. I also gave it in a former ward, um, a few years ago.  Several people have requested copies. It’s easiest for me to just post it here:

 

If You’re a Scrub Pine, Be a Good Scrub Pine

 

 

I’m going to explain how to grow a forest.

Let’s start with a rock.  Make it a big one, maybe something like the craggy side of a mountain.  There isn’t any soil on this big rock, so nothing can grow there, unless a little fungus and a little algae land together on the surface.  Then you get a plant called a lichen.  We’ve probably all seen them.  They are like a stain or a spot on the rock.

The lichen will change the rock.   It accumulates nutrients and softens the surface.  Then, when it dies, the rock has become an ideal place for a little moss to take hold, or maybe a fern.  There’s a lot of sunlight here, a lot of nutrients and water, and not a lot of competition from other plants.  So the mosses and ferns grow and when they die, you now have enough organic matter to support grass, which will probably be followed by shrubs and bushes.

When the shrubs and bushes die, they add their leaves and woody stems to the soil in which they grew and now you will get some scrub pine.

Now, you’ve got a young forest going and as the soil builds, maples and oaks will take root and grow.  Now the forest is a shady place.  The original plants—the lichens and the ferns—won’t thrive here, but the maples and the oaks do well, growing under the canopy of their parent trees.  Now you have the kind of forest that I love to see when I drive down a highway.

This process is called “forest succession.”  Of course, it takes a long time.   What makes it work, among other things, is that each generation of plants lives out the measure of its creation, then leaves something behind to nourish the next generations.  Each takes its place in the order of things.

How do you grow a people?

I have often thought that that when people gives speeches in church about the pioneers, they are telling me that I should compare myself to them, asking myself, Am I as tough and as dedicated?  Could I have done what they had to do?

But I was not born into lichen-on-a-rock circumstances.  I have not been chased out of my home.  I have not been called to walk across a continent.  I don’t live in a desert, isolated from the rest of the nation.  I don’t have to travel for days to get to a temple.  My husband has not had to leave our home to serve a mission because my son and, soon, a daughter, were available to do that.

Here are the circumstances I live in:   I live in a city surrounded by people from many nations, people who belong to many religions.  I can go to the temple and, in the same day, come home and clean the bathroom, attack the ironing pile and make a five-course Sunday dinner.  When I was a teenager, we always called it a “temple excursion” because it meant sleeping on a bus.  For some of you, it meant traveling for days.

Here are some more of the circumstances I live in:  Some of my fellow Saints have made a name for themselves in politics, sports, the arts.  I can buy clothes that fit the standards I have been taught because some Latter-day Saints are in a position to design, manufacture and market these clothes.

Is it a bad thing that I’m not acting like a pioneer, dressing like a pioneer, eating like a pioneer?  No.  I’ve been born into a different stage in this succession.  We all have.  We arrived in this life as the people best adapted to the circumstances that exist today.

So what are we supposed to accomplish at this stage of the succession?

First, we need to show what I would call a “religious patriotism.”  My definition of patriotism recognizes its root, which traces back to the Greek “patria,” the same root for the word “patriarch.”  To me, the word means having a due regard for what my fathers and mothers built.  By that, I don’t just mean the fathers and mothers that I’m related to, but all the people that have come before me.

In a civic sense, we travel on roads and bridges that we never built.  We benefit from medicines that we never developed.   We know how to get stains out of the laundry, how to keep fleas off the cat, how to avoid a sunburn and how to seal an envelope because somebody else already figured these things out.

In a religious sense, we refer to scriptures recorded and preserved by someone else.  We have rules about dating because somebody already saw what worked best and what failed.  We have songs because somebody wrote them, inspirational quotes because somebody said them and blessings because somebody prayed for them.

From those who have gone before, we learn how to be and what to do.

I learned something valuable from my father.  If you asked him to talk about his spiritual experiences, you would not get a soft-spoken, teary story from him.  My sister joked that his testimony might just as well be, “The gospel’s true.  Live it.”  Dry as jerky.  But that’s exactly how he lived.  Sabbath day?  Keep it.  Word of Wisdom?  Live it.  Attend the temple.  Pay your tithing.  Show up at your meetings.

And yet, he mixed well with people in the community.  Our town was about 10% LDS.  If you went to the store, you would probably see another church member at the store.  But mostly we shopped and played and went to school with people of other faiths.

My father had a small business.  His customers, his suppliers, his associates down at the Kiwanis Club were generally people of the world.  But he formed good friendships with them.  He took them exactly as they were and never held them up to the measuring stick by which he judged himself.

Sometimes it’s hard to do both—to live the standards that go with our covenants and to associate amicably with those who don’t.  But I know it’s possible because I saw him do it.

I learned something valuable from my mother.  When I was a senior in high school, the bishop asked to talk to her.  She must have had an inkling of what he wanted because she said, “I don’t want to talk to the bishop.”  When she returned from their visit, she said, “I don’t want to be Relief Society president.”  But she did it.  She did it well, according to her own talents.  She survived it.  I know it’s possible because I saw her do it.  I don’t want to be Relief Society president either, but I can perform my own callings, even the ones that scare me because, first, I saw her receive divine help and, second, I have experienced the same kind of help for myself.

Looking back ultimately points to our Father in Heaven.  When Nephi and his brothers camped by the sea in the land of Bountiful, Nephi was commanded to build a ship.  His brothers mocked his building skills and refused to help.  Nephi reminded them that their people had always relied on God.  “Do ye believe that our fathers, who were the children of Israel, would have been led away out of the hands of the Egyptians if they had not hearkened unto the words of the Lord?”  He reminded them that God had parted the Red Sea, fed the Israelites with manna, brought water out of a rock and saved them from the flying serpents.

We’ve talked about appreciating the soil in which we have grown.  The other thing we need to accomplish is leave something for those that come after. And I’ve learned about that from people right here in church.

This is the third time we’ve lived in here in Indianapolis. We’ve been in Indiana long enough to not only know many people, but to know who they’re related to.

Attending a ward on this side of the country, I expected to meet two kinds of people. I expected to find members who moved in from elsewhere, probably from the West. These are people like me, members of the church their whole lives, people with pioneer ancestry.

I also expected to meet people native to the area, generally 1st- or 2nd-generation church members. Together, these two groups make a good combination, each contributing something that strengthens the whole.

What surprised me, here in Indianapolis, was finding native members whose large extended families have been in the church for—some of them–five generations by now. They each trace their history back to a matriarch, somebody about the age of Sister Thelma Stephenson who joined the church on her own, who had a husband that didn’t join.  But these women came, every Sunday.

What’s more, they brought their children, on their own, and you should know that some of these women had nine, even thirteen children.

They were stubborn about their church membership.  But their children caught on, married, had many more children and, by the time we arrived in Indianapolis, there were two strong stakes, the backbone of which people from these families.  What started out as a lot of lonely and tough Sundays of driving a large family to a meeting in a cramped church building bought from some other denomination turned into stake dances and girls’ camps filled with cousins.

What I learn from these families is to lift where you stand. Be a scrub pine, but be a good scrub pine, one that makes way for the oaks and the maples that will take your place when you’re gone.

Some of us here today are growing in rich gospel soil made softer by  our ancestors.  But others among us are working through their own personal lichen-on-a-rock stage.  They are trying to put down roots and form new habits.  We can all look at those coming along behind us and say, “Let’s walk beside each other and learn together.”

My husband John joined the church at age twenty. Then he promptly slipped back into the shadows. But ward members reached out to him. They invited him into their homes. They fed him bran muffins. They tried to start romances.

Our bishop’s parents played a major role, always in the front row of his cheering section, always showing him their interest and their love, even today.

Fortunately, none of the romances worked out and I got him. So these people blessed not only his life but mine. I got a good husband. My children got a good father.

We’re here to save not only ourselves, but each other.

We’re here to save our children and grandchildren.

Before Lehi died, he gathered his family together and blessed them.  Among his final words, he said, “And I desire that ye should remember to observe the statutes and the judgments of the Lord; behold this hath been the anxiety of my soul from the beginning.

“My heart hath been weighed down with sorrow from time to time, for I have feared, lest for the hardness of your hearts the Lord your God should come out in the fulness of his wrath upon you, that ye be cut off and destroyed forever. . . .

“And now, that my soul might have joy in you, and that my heart might leave this world with gladness because of you, that I might not be brought down with grief and sorrow to the grave, arise from the dust, my sons, and be men, and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity.”   (2 Ne 1:16, 17, 21)

The last thing he did for his sons was to point them towards God.  If he could just be sure they would listen to Him, he could be sure things would go well for them.

What should we leave those that follow behind us?  The same message:  Follow the Savior.  Follow the people the follow the Savior.  Follow the prophet.  We can’t give our children every piece of advice they will ever need, but if we point them in the right direction, they can hear what they need to hear when they need to hear it.  They can receive sufficient instruction to save themselves as well as help the next generation start out well.

What will their particular challenges be?  We don’t know.  We know the big picture, just not in detail.  The lichens, the grasses and the maple saplings don’t know the details either.  They just live out their lives, doing what their Creator made them to do.

My favorite Primary song sums it up pretty well:

“What does the Father ask of us?

What do the scriptures say?

Have faith, have hope.  Live like his son.

Help others on their way.”