We live in a most exciting and challenging period in human history. As technology sweeps through every facet of our lives, changes are occurring so rapidly that it can be difficult for us to keep our lives in balance. To maintain some semblance of stability in our lives, it is essential that we plan for our future. I believe it is time, and perhaps with some urgency, to review the counsel we have received in dealing with our personal and family preparedness. We want to be found with oil in our lamps sufficient to endure to the end. President Spencer W. Kimball admonished us:

"In reviewing the Lord’s counsel to us on the importance of preparedness, I am impressed with the plainness of the message. The Savior made it clear that we cannot place sufficient oil in our preparedness lamps by simply avoiding evil. We must also be anxiously engaged in a positive program of preparation."

He also said: "The Lord will not translate one’s good hopes and desires and intentions into works. Each of us must do that for himself." (The Miracle of Forgiveness, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1969, p. 8).

We often consider ourselves more or less worthless and in some moods, even beyond help, and we approach the sacrament hesitantly and superficially. But worse still. We do not trust the good news. We do not trust the glad tidings. We do not trust the second opinion of the only Physician who will ever finally judge. This is the Christ. This is He who pleads with us to come boldly to the throne of Grace. He has called himself the Spirit of Truth and that spirit which he has received in fullness brings knowledge, we are taught, of things past, present, and future. Therefore, He, a Seer who transcends all seers, knows our past and our future, and whatever our present soul sicknesses, He knows who we were in the premortal spheres and he does envision our future—what we are to become in the resurrection. In contrast to that, we live in the blur of amnesia about our past and we're subject to fits of doubt and disbelief about our real potential. But hear these words of Elder George Q. Cannon: "Now," he says, "this is the truth. We humble people, we who feel ourselves sometimes so worthless—so good for nothing. We are not so worthless as we think. There is not one of us but what God's love has been expended upon. There is not one of us that He has not cared for and caressed. There is not one of us that He has not desired to save and that he has not devised means to save. There is not one of us that He has not given his angels charge concerning. We may be insignificant and contemptible in our own eyes, and even in the eyes of others, but the truth remains that we are children of God and He has actually given his angels charge concerning us and they watch over us and have us in their keeping." (Gospel Truth, comp. Jerreld L. Newquist, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1974, 1:2.)

History, by apprising the people of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

Although I was eager to worship in the Nauvoo Temple, I was even more excited to walk down Parley Street. You recall that Parley Street led to the site of the old Nauvoo Ferry, from which the early Saints began their exodus from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley. I had visited Nauvoo on other occasions and had wondered what it might have been like to walk down Parley Street in the 1840s—leaving a temporally and a spiritually secure environment—and to look back on the city and the Nauvoo Temple before crossing the Mississippi River. Now that the temple was finished, I was anxious to have that experience.

You may also recall that on June 30, 2002, during the final dedicatory service of the rebuilt Nauvoo Temple, President Gordon B. Hinckley extended a heartfelt request that those present in the temple take time upon leaving the service to walk down Parley Street. He asked that, as they did so, they think of a young pioneer family and imagine the difficulty of leaving a comfortable home and departing for an unknown destination.

I will never forget what I felt as I walked down Parley Street last summer and looked back at the temple. My heart swelled with gratitude and my eyes filled with tears as I thought about those noble pioneers. I stood near the bank of the Mississippi River for quite some time and counted my many blessings and tried to imagine what it would have been like to walk or ferry across the river into an uncertain future.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

But bear in mind that the Lord is directing this world. We are frequently reminded that conditions have been so developed in the powers of warfare that an accident or a rash move could set in operation those powers which might destroy our civilization. But let us bear in mind that this world is in the hands of God. All these things will happen only so far as they are in accordance with his plans and his purposes. And let us not waste our time and our energy and get into a nervous condition about what is going to happen to the world. That is not our sphere of responsibility. The Lord will take care of that . It remains for us to be devoted to the upbuilding of his kingdom and facing whatever conditions may come to us.

Mothers who know do less. They permit less of what will not bear good fruit eternally. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less activity that draws their children away from their home. Mothers who know are willing to live on less and consume less of the world's goods in order to spend more time with their children—more time eating together, more time working together, more time reading together, more time talking, laughing, singing, and exemplifying. These mothers choose carefully and do not try to choose it all. Their goal is to prepare a rising generation of children who will take the gospel of Jesus Christ into the entire world. Their goal is to prepare future fathers and mothers who will be builders of the Lord's kingdom for the next 50 years.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

Exactly twenty years ago last fall I stood on the famous white cliffs of Dover overlooking the English Channel, the very channel which twenty years before that ran as the only barrier between Hitler and England's fall. In 1962 my mission was concluding, and I was concerned. My future seemed very dim and difficult. My parents were then serving a mission also, which meant I was going home to live I-did-not-quite-know-where and to pay my way I-did-not-quite-know-how. I had completed only one year of college, and I had no idea what to major in or where to seek my career. I knew I needed three more years for a baccalaureate degree and had the vague awareness that graduate school of some kind inevitably loomed up behind that.

I knew tuitions were high and jobs were scarce. And I knew there was an alarmingly wider war spreading in Southeast Asia, which could require my military service. I hoped to marry but wondered when--or if--that could be, at least under all these circumstances. My educational hopes seemed like a never-ending path into the unknown, and I had hardly begun.

So before heading home I stood one last time on the cliffs of the country I had come to love so much,

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle . . .

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war. [Richard II, act 2, scene 1, lines 40, 43­44]

And there I read again,

We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. What is our aim? . . . Victory--victory at all costs; victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be. . . .

Conquer we must; as conquer we shall. . . . We shall never surrender.

Blood? Toil? Tears? Sweat? Well, I figured I had as much of those as anyone, so I headed home to try. I was, in the parlance of the day, going to give it "my best shot," however feeble that might prove to be. Now at the same time in your life, I ask you to do the same.

But how, you ask, do you get this glimpse of the future that helps you to hang on? Well, for me that is one of the great gifts of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not insignificant that early in this life Joseph Smith was taught this lesson three times in the same night and once again the next morning. Moroni said, quoting the Lord verbatim as recorded by the prophet Joel:

I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:

And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids of those days will I pour out my spirit. [Joel 2:28­29]

Dreaming dreams and seeing visions. The Lord's spirit upon all flesh--sons and daughters, old and young, servants and handmaidens. I may be wrong, but I can't imagine an Old Testament verse of any kind that could have helped this boy prophet more. He is being called into the battle of his life, for life itself, or at least for its real meaning and purpose. He will be driven and hunted and hounded. His enemies will rail and ridicule. He will see his children die and his land lost and his marriage tremble. He will languish in prison through a Missouri winter, and he will cry out toward the vault of heaven, "O God, where art thou? . . . How long. . . .O Lord, how long?" (D&C 121:1­3). Finally he would walk the streets of his own city uncertain who, except for a precious few, were really friend or actually foe. And all that toil and trouble, pain and perspiration would end maliciously at Carthage--when there simply were finally more foes than friends. Felled by balls fired from the door of the jail inside and one coming through the window from outside, he fell dead into the hands of his murderers--thirty-eight years of age.

If all this and so much more was to face the Prophet in such a troubled lifetime, and if he finally knew what fate awaited him in Carthage, as he surely did, why didn't he just quit somewhere along the way? Who needs it? Who needs the abuse and the persecution and the despair and death? It doesn't sound fun to me, so why not just zip shut the cover of your Triple Combination, hand in your Articles of Faith cards, and go home?

Why not? For the simple reason that he had dreamed dreams and seen visions. Through the blood and the toil and the tears and the sweat, he had seen the redemption of Israel. It was out there somewhere--dimly, distantly--but it was there. So he kept his shoulder to the wheel until God said his work was finished.