Potential
Being in the Elders Quorum presidency for my ward, I had the opportunity to attend our Stake Priesthood leadership meeting a couple weeks ago. What was really special about this was that Elder Russell M. Nelson was there. We were getting a new stake presidency and he and Elder Gibbons came to make that change.
It was an amazing meeting. Elder Gibbons taught us first, and he was very good. Then Elder Nelson stood up and told us he didn’t know why he was assigned to come to our stake, we were doing jus fine. Then he said that the chance of having a member of the Quorum of the Twelve coming to your stake conference is getting so rare that he just wanted to give us a chance to aks him questions. Wow.
The first question he answered was how to find balance in life. He said he was still trying to figure that out himself, but then gave a good lesson on giving your career its due, putting family first, and all that good stuff. The next question actually ended up being the last. A young mens leader stood and asked, “How do you get a young man to see his potential?” Elder Nelson quickly quipped, “It’s for you the old man to see your potential!” But really, he assured us, this was a wonderful and insightful question. It must have been, because he spent the next 45 minutes answering it. He took us through all kinds of scriptures, shared stories from his service as an apostle, and spared nothing to make sure we understood our potential. It was amazing and I furiously took notes as I tried to drink it all in. Eventually he looked up at the clock and said, “Well, there was a long answer to a short question for you. You have more questions you would like to ask, and there is a lot more I could say, but we better end now …” As we sang the closing song the message that I had been totally unaware of my potential, and had allowed myself to be caught up in all kinds of little, inconsequential things, flooded me. It was powerfull and I still can’t get over it. And that’s a good thing.
Today was fast sunday and my turn to teach the Elders Quorum lesson. I didn’t think I could do any justice to it, but I couldn’t think of teaching anything other than Elder Nelson’s lesson on potential. I was able to find a couple past talks of Elder Nelson’s where he said almost exactly the same things he told us, which greatly helped to fill in where my notes were lacking. I studied lots and tried to boil it all down, and I think it went pretty well today. You can see my rough lesson notes if you like (html version too). They might not make complete sense to anyone other than me, but who knows.
(Now, don’t think I spent a whole lot of time making those lesson notes all pretty and cross referenced, and doing the conversions to html and pdf. I used a great tool called LaTeX to type them up and generate the different forms of output. It’s an ancient computer program that’s awesome for that kind of thing, and I think everyone should use it.)
Posted by Bryan on May 7, 2006
