Humility Bridges the Gap – Step 12 Carrying the Message

My Relief Society experience began back in the olden days before we began our study of the teachings of modern day prophets. We rotated between these subjects: Spiritual Living, Cultural Refinement, and Mother Education. I spent quite a few years being the Mother Education teacher. Having the opportunity to study each month about motherhood was a great blessing, but this assignment had its challenges. I taught one Sunday each month. Without fail the morning I was to teach Mother Education always turned out to be the worst “get five children ready for church and out the door without loosing the Spirit” experience of the month. By the time we were all seated in Sacrament Meeting my feelings about the joys of motherhood were definitely in question and I certainly did not feel qualified to teach a lesson on some lofty quality of good mothering. The double whammy came when the Mother Education lesson and Mother’s Day fell on the same Sunday, which it invariably did.

Every month as I went in to teach a lesson on the most important work I was involved in, I was invited by Satan to feel humiliation because my kids were kids and because I was in the process of learning how to be a great mother and hadn’t quite arrived. As I sat in Sacrament Meeting, in the light of the Spirit, my humiliation would slowly turn towards humility. The Spirit would whisper to me that my morning and my week of mothering had probably been very much like the mornings of all those I would teach. We are not so very different from each other. In that Spirit I could teach. In that Spirit I could feel the love of the Lord for those I taught. I could feel His concern. I wasn’t all wrapped up in weather or not I had mastered the subject at hand. I could share my experience, what seemed to work and what didn’t. Others felt free to share their triumphs and even their failures. There was a feeling of “We’re all in this together.” And more important, there was an atmosphere of humble testimony that none of us could do this work without the enabling power or grace of Jesus Christ.

We will be called to teach in areas where we have struggled. We can be powerful teachers if our experience has brought us past humiliation to a place of humility before the Lord and before our brothers and sisters. The experience, faith, and hope we have to offer will be genuine because it will have grown out of the fire of experience. In humility we can demonstrate the before and the after. We can stand as witnesses, not of ourselves but of the power of God to transform. That is the testimony the world waits to hear. Humility bridges the gap between the truth we teach and the truth we try to live.

By Nannette W.
Posted Friday, January 16, 2009

Copyright 2008 by Nannette W.
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