General Conference Favorites

I joined a Feel Great in 8 Challenge that started this past Monday.  It's an 8 week challenge to help you improve physically along with some spiritual elements for improvement as well.  You get points for eating the right foods, drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, among other things.  You lose points for eating junk food or going over your daily calorie goal.  I really like the challenge, but it IS challenging to track everything.  Really challenging.  I'm not even coming close to the  perfection level I was shooting for, but I'm learning and hoping to improve my score each week.  As part of the challenge, you set a personal goal you want to accomplish in the 8 weeks.  My personal goal was to blog weekly for 8 weeks.  The challenge week runs Mon.-Sun. which makes this the last night of the first week and my last night to achieve my goal!  So here I am. :)

I have been reading many of the talks from the most recent General Conference.  I have felt so inspired and uplifted from these talks and have been wanting to write about them. Unfortunately, it is late and I need to get to bed, so I'm just going to post links for my three favorites (just click on the title to read) and limit myself to one quote from each (very hard to do).  Hopefully sometime I can come back and share some of my thoughts on why these particular talks meant so much to me.

1.  Parents: The Prime Gospel Teachers of Their Children, by Tad R. Callister

"We might all ask ourselves: do our children receive our best spiritual, intellectual, and creative efforts, or do they receive our leftover time and talents, after we have given our all to our Church calling or professional pursuits? In the life to come, I do not know if titles such as bishop or Relief Society president will survive, but I do know that the titles of husband and wife, father and mother, will continue and be revered, worlds without end. That is one reason it is so important to honor our responsibilities as parents here on earth so we can prepare for those even greater, but similar, responsibilities in the life to come.

As parents, we can proceed with the assurance God will never leave us alone. God never gives us a responsibility without offering divine aid—of that I can testify. May we in our divine role as parents, and in partnership with God, become the prime gospel teachers and examples for our children, I so pray in the name of Jesus Christ, amen."

2.  Approaching the Throne of God with Confidence, by Elder Jorg Klebingat

"Brothers and sisters, my counsel to this sister missionary is my counsel to you: acknowledge and face your weaknesses, but don’t be immobilized by them, because some of them will be your companions until you depart this earth life. No matter what your current status, the very moment you voluntarily choose honest, joyful, daily repentance by striving to simply do and be your very best, the Savior’s Atonement envelops and follows you, as it were, wherever you go. Living in this manner, you can truly “always retain a remission of your sins” (Mosiah 4:12) every hour of every day, every second of every minute, and thus be fully clean and acceptable before God all the time."

3.  Ponder the Path of Thy Feet, by President Thomas S. Monson

"...physically walking where Jesus walked is less important than walking as He walked. Emulating His actions and following His example are far more important than trying to retrace the remnants of the trails He traversed in mortality.

We need not walk by the shores of Galilee or among the Judean hills to walk where Jesus walked. All of us can walk the path He walked when, with His words ringing in our ears, His Spirit filling our hearts, and His teachings guiding our lives, we choose to follow Him as we journey through mortality. His example lights the way. Said He, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”⁸

There is no higher end than this, that we should choose to accept His discipline and become His disciples and do His work throughout our lives. Nothing else, no other choice we make, can make of us what He can."

Okay, those were some long quotes, but I was really holding myself back.  I was tempted to cut and paste the entire talks!  I liked them all very much, but the last one is the one to read if you are only going to read one. :)