Church Talks
THE IMPORTANCE OF SERVING A MISSION WHILE IN YOUR YOUTH
[Talk by John E. Enslen at the Stake Priesthood Session of Stake Conference in Montgomery Alabama, on October 15, 2011.]
I am thankful for the special privilege of speaking to you this afternoon. I pray to properly fulfill the assignment given to me by our stake presidency whom I cheerfully sustain as the Lord’s presiding, authoritatively-appointed representatives.
I have been asked to speak about the challenge given to each young man to “be worthy to carry on the responsibilities of building the kingdom of God and preparing the world for the Second Coming of the Savior,” a phrase taken from the First Presidency’s message in the pamphlet For the Strength of Youth, [p. 3]. My assignment is to stress the importance, both to himself and the world, of a young man’s serving as a full-time missionary.
As boys sing the primary song I Hope They Call Me On A Mission, they sing these words: “I want to be a missionary and serve and help the Lord while I am in my youth.” A man is in his youth only once, and there is a limited window of opportunity for him to fulfill his sacred responsibility to serve as a full-time missionary, free of the responsibilities associated with school, work, and family.
In his most recent general conference address, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland used an analogy to the sport of football in order to make a point. I am going to follow his example, although I will be making a different analogy to emphasize a different point.
Following the conclusion of any hard-fought football game which your team lost, you can review and analyze the game in retrospect, with 20-20 hindsight, as they say. When you do so, you will generally be able to find four crucial plays that could have changed the entire outcome of the game if those four plays had gone in a different direction.
Likewise, there are four turning points in our lives—personal decisions made at crucial crossroads that have a grave and lasting impact on the subsequent course of not only our mortal lives, but also the course of our eternal lives and the lives of our posterity. There are actually moments in time when our mortal and spiritual destiny hang in the balance. I want to mention four of those moments and the nature of the decisions that make those moments monumentally important.
(1) First, your decision to retain and nourish, or forsake and abandon, your religious affiliation will have life-changing consequences. We commend you who are here for already being on the right team, and you do not need to transfer your eligibility to a different institution so as to get playing time in a non-LDS bowl.
(2) Second, your selection of, and educational preparation for, the type of temporal work that will be your life’s labor will have a profound influence on you and your family, especially economically, but also with regard to your personal satisfaction in life.
(3) Third, who, when, and where you marry will influence on a daily basis the measure of joy you will experience in mortality and beyond.
(4) Fourth, and speaking only to those who are in their youth, this decision is the most important. You young men must decide what play you are going to call when you face this crucial third and long situation. It will be the most important play of the game, and it comes in the early stages of the game of life. It will be the most important play of the game for at least two reasons:
First, your decision will likely dictate your subsequent decisions with respect to the other three matters of grave significance I have already mentioned—religious affiliation, occupation, and marriage.
Second, it will be the most important play of the game because your decisions with respect to religious affiliation, occupation, and choice of a companion are actually more correctible if you make a mistake. You have a greater window of opportunity and at least some course-correction options if you fumble in those matters.
So what is the most crucial early play of the game of life for you young men? What is the game-changing and life-changing turning point that is so vital to outcome? All of you young men are spiritually sensitive enough to know the answer to that question or you would not be here today. Of course, I am talking about your decision to worthily serve a full-time mission for the Lord while you are in your youth.
If you make the unfortunate mistake of not serving a mission while you are in your youth, there is no opportunity to be in your youth again—no make-overs, no re-dos, no slips, no rewinds, no second chances. Not even repentance will bring back an equal opportunity. Like the third down and long situation when your adversary has you backed up in the shadow of your own goal line, you have to get it right on your first attempt, or you will find yourself in a disadvantageous field position.
To the young men who have yet to serve a full-time mission, I share President Monson’s counsel from October 2010: “I repeat what prophets have long taught—that every worthy, able young man should prepare to serve a mission. Missionary service is a priesthood duty—an obligation the Lord expects of us who have been given so very much” (“As We Meet Together Again,” Liahona and Ensign, Nov. 2010, 5–6).
In the recent words of Elder Holland: “So we need young men already on the team to stay on it and stop dribbling out of bounds just when we need you to get in the game and play your hearts out!”
From my own personal observations over many years, a young missionary’s two years with a divinely-selected mission president is worth infinitely more than two years at the best Ivy League school this nation or any nation can offer.
Furthermore, there is no better training ground for husbands and fathers than the mission field. As it became apparent that our three daughters had in turn each chosen to marry a young man who had served an honorable mission, the sense of relief that fell upon Sister Enslen and me is beyond description, despite the minimal human frailties that Patrick, Bryant, and Troy may possess. Sister Enslen and I were confident that two years in Spain, two years in Spanish-speaking Miami, and two years in Russia had produced a veritable storehouse of valuable lessons imbedded within their respective characters, and time has proven our confidence to be fully justified. In addition, fathers who take advantage of the opportunity to serve a mission in their youth can talk with their own sons and daughters from a standpoint of personal knowledge about the value of serving a full time mission.
Now I want to mention that which fathers can do to help their sons make the right decisions in these matters, especially the decision to serve a full-time mission. A son’s desire to please his dad when the son is young is a powerful motivation for the son. I have been deeply saddened on more than one occasion to see a father actually discourage his son from serving a mission. Fortunately, most of the time fathers exercise their faith in the wisdom of the Lord’s plan.
Fathers, while you are still your pre-teen son’s hero, you will do well to lay the groundwork that makes the decision to serve a mission a foregone conclusion. If you talk to your pre-teen son about the hard work but overcompensating joy of missionary service, then as he matures, your discussions with your teenage son will revolve around the issue of “when,” and not the issue of “whether.”
With regard to a father’s influence over his son, last week I had the privilege of attending a meeting here in Montgomery where the speaker was the 43rd president of the United States—George W. Bush. He said that after being elected president, it fell upon him, as it had his predecessors, to decorate the oval office. There is one spot on the wall of the oval office where tradition dictates the placement of a prior president’s portrait; it is reserved for a former president who has exerted a profound influence on the current president.
After jokingly stating that he turned down Rutherford B. Hayes and Franklin Pierce, he talked about his father’s love for him. He referenced the times he had put to the maximum test his father’s unconditional love for him. Thus he chose to hang a portrait of his father in that spot.
Not all of our young men will have exemplary Latter-day Saint fathers. This truth is especially apparent here in convert land. During the drive down here today, I stopped by the Wetumpka Chapel and looked at a wall plaque that contains the names of the young men who had returned with honor following their dedicated service as full-time missionaries. Of the 15 young men who have served or are currently serving, 7 of them or 44% of them did not have an LDS father. I feel inclined to mention by name just some of these truly outstanding men of God whom I admire: Mike Story, Danny Carpenter, Riley Parish, Nathan Pattillo, Karsten Clayton, and Korey Derocher.
Although they did not have LDS fathers, they all had LDS father figures in their lives. We older brethren can be an influential surrogate parent.
Have you seen the currently-playing movie “The Help?” Perhaps we can learn a principle from the maid and housekeeper Constantine who would wrap her arms around a neglected, struggling child and say: “You is kind; you is smart; you is important.”
I know that the Lord will provide us with special opportunities to help move young men a step closer to missionary service, if we are alert to those opportunities. We can put our arm around a young man not our biological son, and say encouraging and complimentary and uplifting and confidence-building words like “You are kind; you are smart; you are important; you are a child of God; you are a child of destiny reserved to come forth in these latter-days,;and you are a part of the royal priesthood of God.”
I am the personal beneficiary of young missionaries who called the right plays in their crucial third down and long situations. They were certainly in the right place at the right time for me. From a worldly perspective, they were weak and simple beings; but they were powerful and authoritative beings from a spiritual perspective. I felt their deep and abiding love for me, and I was touched by that deep and abiding love. They had the Spirit with them, and my heart was softened and made more contrite by their concern for my eternal well-being, and I have never been the same.
May I close with these words found in Preach My Gospel, spoken by President Ezra Taft Benson, words that have application to all that we do as priesthood bearers: “The Spirit is the most important single element in this work. With the Spirit magnifying your call, you can do miracles for the Lord in the mission field. Without the Spirit, you will never succeed regardless of your talent and ability” (in Preach My Gospel, 176).
May we rely heavily upon the Spirit as we make not only the four monumental decisions of life, but the little decisions from moment-to-moment, day-to-day, that properly prepare us for the crucial third down and long situations in our lives, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.