Everyone, thanks for making the trek with me. The mission is the best thing that's ever happened to me. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. It made me question my identity, my worth, my capabilities, my beliefs, and everything that's important to me. I never hurt so much, popped so many joints, cried so many tears, or ate so much weird food in my life. I've never made so many friends, discovered so many talents, or felt so much love. I never knew how much God loved me until my mission. I never knew how much He cared about my life. I never knew how well He knew me. I never knew how happy I could be.
My mission is the best thing that's ever happened to me. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. It was the happiest I've ever been, and because He was with me on my mission, I know that He'll be with me forever.
I love you all--here's my homecoming talk:
*****
Minasan, ohayou gozaimasu. Watakushi wa Sanzu Shidonii to
moshimasu. Ichinenhan de shukufuku sareta Nihon no Kobe mission de dendo kikai
o saseru itadakimashita. Kyou, watakushi wa ichiban taisetsu na mananda koto
nitsuite hanasasete itadakitai to omoimasu. Tsumari, Iesu Kirisuto no kyougi nitsuite
hanashitai to omoimasu.
Good morning, everyone, my name is Sydney Sands. I had the
wonderful opportunity to work in the Japan, Kobe mission for a year and a half.
Today, I would like to speak about the most important thing I learned on my
mission. That is, the Doctrine of Jesus Christ.
I have to say that the Japanese people are truly the most Christlike
people I’ve ever met. They have a deep love for their family and a deep respect
for those who have come before them. They are endlessly kind to guests and rush
to help any lost tourist they see. The only thing in the world that they are
missing is the Gospel. Today, I would like to tell you what I told them for one
and a half years:
God is your Loving Heavenly Father. He lives in heaven. He
has a body like ours, but his is perfect. He has two eyes. Through those two
eyes, he watches over you. God has two ears. With those ears, God listens to
your prayers. God has two arms. You can hug God. He loves you. He knew you
before you were born. You lived with him in heaven as a spirit. Because God is
our Father, he wants to give us everything that he has. In order to give us
blessings and prepare us for the blessings of eternity, he gave us a body and
sent us to earth. He gave us rules to follow to become happy, then he gave us
our agency so we could obtain that happiness.
However, we are not perfect—I am not perfect. We all do bad
things. We do things that make our hearts sad. That is called sin. Sin isn’t
just things like killing people or stealing; sin is anything that makes the
heart sad. We become sad when we sin and we become sad when others sin. The
hurt and the guilt of our sins are like dirt; they make our spirit dirty. God
is perfect. God is clean. We can’t live with God when we have dirty spirits. We
cannot make our spirits clean on our own. Sin separates us from God. Death also
separates us from God. We cannot have everything God has if we don’t have a
body. We cannot overcome death by ourselves. We will all sin, and we will all
die, thus we will all be separated from God.
How then, do we get back to Heavenly Father? Are we doomed
forever to take and fail the test of eternity?
No. Absolutely not. “For God so loved the world that He gave
His Only Begotten Son; that whoso believeth in him should not perish, but have
everlasting life.” (John 3:16) An angel described the coming of Christ: “I am
come to tell you words of great joy…For, behold…the Lord Omnipotent…shall come
down from heaven to reign among the children of men…and he shall be called
Jesus the Christ…And lo, he cometh unto his own, that salvation might come unto
the children of men; even through faith on his name…” (Mosiah 3:3, 5, 8, 9)
Christ was the perfect example. He followed His Father
exactly and showed the path to following Him, too. This path is called the
Doctrine of Christ, and has five easy steps. I would like to invite everyone
here to remember them. They are faith, repentance, baptism, receiving the Gift
of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end. Because of Jesus Christ, we will
live again; and as we live the Doctrine of Christ, we will be able to live with
our families and God in eternal happiness.
As you have noticed, the first step is faith. “Faith is not
a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith, ye hope for things
which are not seen, which are true” (Alma 32:21). Why is faith the first step?
Moroni answers this question easily: “If there be no faith among the children
of men, God can do no miracle among them…” (Ether 12:12) Do you believe perfect
forgiveness and perfect mercy to be miracles? I do. Now, faith isn’t always
easy—there are two huge obstacles to faith that everyone experiences in their
life: the first is doubts, the second, lack of obedience. Both are our choice,
and both can be overcome.
To illustrate my point, I would like to tell one of my
favorite stories. It’s about a Syrian named Naaman. Naaman is a mighty man, but
he was brought to his knees by a disease called leprosy. He heard that the
prophet Elisha was God’s chosen representative and so he went and asked Elisha
for help. When he reached the house, Elisha sent out a messenger saying, “Go
and wash in Jordan seven times…and thou shalt be clean” (2Kings 5:10). The
River Jordan was the filthiest river in the country. Naaman left, very angry,
saying “Behold, I thought, he will surely come out to me, and stand, and call
on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and
recover the leper. Are not…rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of
Israel? May I not wash in them, and be clean?” (v. 11-12)
Before he could leave, one of his servants stopped him and
said, “My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldst thou
not have done it? How much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be
clean?” (v. 13)
Sometimes, we expect gigantic solutions to our problems. We
lose faith because when we have a question or a spiritual disease, we are told
to pray, go to church, keep the commandments, and read our scriptures. Brothers
and sisters, will we not wash and be clean? God almost always chooses small and
simple ways to bring great things to pass. We don’t have to do something
extraordinary, and we may not see the extraordinary. The real test of faith is
obedience and patience, especially in the little things. If Naman had not
washed in the river, he would never be clean. However, the story ends
happily—he follows the prophet’s counsel, as we all should, and he is restored.
God keeps His promises, but he uses His way. If we are not obedient, we build a
wall between ourselves and him.
Alma talks extensively about faith. When you have a
question, he agrees that “Ye cannot know of [its] surety first…but behold, if
ye will awake and…experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith,
yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in
you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of
my words.” We need two things: Action, and desire.
There was a time on my mission when I was talking to a man
who had taken all the lessons, but had a problem with believing the Word of
Wisdom was truly a commandment from God. I asked if he had prayed to know if
it’s true. “Yes!” he said. “Did you receive an answer?” I asked. “No!” he
exclaimed. I paused and thought for a moment. Finally, I said, “If God came
down from heaven and told you that this was His commandment, would you stop
drinking?” A look of deep thought came over his face. “Hmm… that’s hard…”
God will not answer your questions if you do not ask with
real intent—that’s the difference between doubts and questions. Questions are
patient, they are trusting, they build faith. Doubts are critical, cynical and
skeptical. They allow no room for answer, because in the end, the doubter never
truly wants an answer. Please, brothers and sisters, evaluate yourself today
and decide whether you have doubts or questions. And if they are questions,
act. God will answer in his own time and in his own way. And if they are
doubts, “Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith.” (Pres. Uchdorf)
Help God answer you. Don’t block yourself from the answers
and the blessings he wants to give you, even if they’re not necessarily what
you’ve been looking for.
Becoming better, kinder, and more obedient is called
repentance, the second step. Don’t do it once a week—do it many many times a
day. Repentance is not condemnation, it is an invitation. An invitation to
become more today than you were yesterday. To see the world with fresh eyes.
Just as important as repentance is forgiveness. They are
really two sides of the same coin. You cannot truly repent if you do not
practice forgiveness. As a member, one of the most important things you can do
is thoroughly learn and apply the principles of forgiveness and repentance to
your own life. Don’t bother applying them to others. Make repentance a daily
activity. You will grow closer to God and Christ. You will find yourself more
active and capable of learning. You will discover talents within yourself and
see more easily the divine godhood in others. Pride will be quieted, hearts
will be opened. There is nothing bad that comes from repentance. It’s only
impossible when we think it is.
Satan knows that repentance is one of the most beautiful,
enriching, powerful steps of the Doctrine of Christ, so he distorts our image
of it. He says that there is no sin, so there is no need to repent. There is no
God, there is no devil. He tells us that it’s hard to change—that other people
can change, but we can’t. He tells us that evil is good, and that good is evil.
He tells us that God loves us as we are and will save us as we are. We are
safe. We will be happiest as spiritual vegetables. We don’t need to grow,
learn, or progress. That true happiness lies in doing as little work as
possible.
Brothers and sisters, Satan is a liar. He hates you. Satan
is so jealous of you because you have a body. Because of this body and the
Atonement, we can change. He can’t. He wants to convince you that you are less
than a child of God. Don’t be satisfied with a piece of moldy bread when God
has laid the feast before you.
“The first fruits of repentance is baptism…” (Moroni 8:25)
Now, why would that be?
When I received my first trainee, she and I would talk about
our pre-mission life. One day, I was telling her about myself, it occurred to
me that I remembered this person (myself), but I didn’t recognize her anymore.
That night, I realized something very important: I had been limiting myself.
I never thought I labeled myself. I believed it was only the
insecure and those concerned with others’ opinions who labeled themselves. But
I had determined things about myself that I knew was “Sydney Sands.” Sydney was
smart—she always was and she always would be. Sydney hated exercise. Sydney
didn’t like people much, either. One of Sydney’s most charming factors was how
easily she could be sarcastic.
Then I clipped on my missionary badge. Suddenly none of
those things mattered anymore. Sister Sands is smart? Go talk Japanese to that
man over there. Sister Sands hates exercise? The white handbook says you need
to exercise for thirty minutes every morning. Sister Sands doesn’t like people?
If you don’t love them, you can’t teach them.
All of the labels I had put on myself came peeling off. It
wasn’t easy— I actually truly believed that I would lose my identity if I
couldn’t be sarcastic, but I’ve ended up finding a person inside who I like
quite a bit more. I was sore every day, but I became strong. I didn’t have all
the answers, but I was humble, and because I was humble, I was filled with
love. I’ve grown. When I clipped on the name of Christ, the only thing that
mattered was following Him. And by following Him, I discovered who I really am.
I’m not done yet, and the nametag’s off, but I have good news: when you are
baptized, you take upon yourself the name of Christ. You don’t get a nametag
like I did, but His name is written upon your hearts. And every week, when you
take the sacrament, if you’ve done your daily repentance homework the week
before, all the other labels come off. The world tries every day to tell us who
we really are. It bogs us down. As we take the sacrament each week, it’s like
being baptized all over again. But it’s not just a renewal of covenants—we don’t
just go back to ground zero. Every piece of bread and every cup of water is a
stairstep into heaven. The name of Christ is the only label that will allow us
to progress infinitely.
After we take upon ourselves the name of Jesus Christ,
whether in baptism, or in after-baptismal taking of the sacrament, we receive
the Holy Ghost. I love the Holy Ghost. He is the third member of the Godhead,
and the best missionary in the world. He doesn’t have a body, so he can enter
our hearts and help us through our thoughts and our feelings. He has infinite
love and works every second of the day to bring you and every soul in the world
closer to God. The Holy Ghost comforts, guides, protects, warns, helps,
purifies and teaches us, but only when we let him. Through the Holy Ghost, our
questions are answered. Before we are baptized, we can feel him
occasionally—when we come to church, when we hold a baby, when we pray, and
when we keep the commandments. When we are baptized, he becomes our friend by
the laying on of hands by proper authority. He stays in our heart so long as we
have faith or at least a desire to believe, repent, and renew our covenants.
According to the Bible dictionary, the Holy Ghost is God’s
earnest. An earnest is a down payment. It’s a promise. When you make a really
big purchase, for instance, a house, you give an earnest to tell the person
selling that “I don’t have all the money now, but here is a little. Here is the
proof of my promise that I will pay it all.”
The Holy Ghost is God’s earnest. It’s Him saying to us, “I
know the world is hard. I know that you’re sad and that it hurts sometimes, but
it gets better. I love you, but you can’t live with me right now. I can’t give
all the blessings to you right now, but here is the proof of my promise that I
will pay it all.” As we keep the Holy Ghost with us, he makes our hearts
clean. When we repent, we return to square one. Our sins are forgiven. But as
we keep the Holy Ghost with us, we change. That is what makes baptism and the
sacrament so powerful. Because of Jesus Christ, we are justified. Because of
the Holy Ghost, we are sanctified. We cannot live with God if we do not have
both.
Finally, enduring to the end.
Enduring to the end is the lacing together of the other four steps in the
Doctrine of Christ. We endure to the end by obedience to the commandments,
faith, daily repentance, and the weekly renewing of covenants.
To talk about enduring to the
end, I’d like to tell a story that happened the last month of the mission.
I was talking to a woman about
the path to happiness. I told her that God had revealed the path to happiness,
and that struck her interest. She was like, "Eh, what is that?" I
told her that the path to living happily is called commandments, and as her
face fell, I told her that God Himself never breaks His commandments.
We described that because people,
when they keep the commandments, experience these blessings, they convert. They
understand that when they keep the commandments, they're happier because
they've lived without keeping the commandments and they understand the
difference.
The following conversation
ensued:
Her: So what you're saying is
that because they know the difference, they understand that the commandments
make them happy.
Me: *seeing where she's going
with this* Yes, that's exactly it.
Her: What that sounds like to me
is that you need to experience both ends of the spectrum.
Me: Haha... If I told you that
pounding your head on the street would make you unhappy, would you believe me?
Her: Yes.
Me: Even though you've never done
it before?
Her: No, but I've had other
experiences when I've hit my head, and that was painful.
Me: Good. We are all imperfect.
We all sin, and that makes us sad. We don't have to break every commandment to
know that sinning makes us sad. At some point, you just have to trust God.
Brothers and sisters, we don't
have to go looking for sin. All of us happen to be human, and, despite our best
efforts, end up sinning anyways. We make mistakes. And, mind--we don't have to
learn from our own experiences. We have been blessed with the scriptures,
worldwide media, and a conscience to tell what will and will not make us happy.
We don't have to kill someone to know that everyone's happier without killing
people. We don't have to tell rumors about people to know that it's good to not
tell rumors. We don't have to smoke to know that it's bad to smoke. We don't
have to reinvent the wheel every time we make a decision. A dear friend of mine
shared a favorite quote with me:
Wise men learn from experience.
Fools, from their own.
Now, there comes a point when
we're asked to make a jump, even though we don’t know the answer immediately.
At one point, we're all backed up against the wall of faith. Sometimes we don't
understand why God asked us to not drink green tea when it's one of the most
popular health supplements in America. Sometimes we think it's a bad idea. We
don't have enough money to pay tithing, we've tried a million times before to
quit smoking, and a billion other very real, very serious problems. We don't
know why God asks us to do what He asks us to do, and sometimes we don't like
it.
When that point comes, do you
shut down? Does it rule out every other commandment in the book? Is the Bible
no longer true? Is God no longer real?
Look back to the commandments you
did understand, look back on who you understand God to be. Understand who God
wants you to be, and what he knows you can be. The commandments are not to
restrict or bind us, to repress or oppress us, to halt our happiness or to
shame us.
God knows you. He knew you before
you were born. You learned to trust and to love him, and he trusted you. He
saved your spirit for billions of years, teaching you how to come back to Him.
He knew this world would be hard and dark and dirty at times, but He trusted
you. He trusts you now.
Before the earth was created, you
promised God that you would keep all His commandments because you knew that it
would make Him happy and because you knew that it would make you happy. You
knew that the commandments would point you to Christ and that Christ would
bring you home.
Everyone, I would like to offer you an invitation: Repent
and be changed. Be saved. God loves you. He has always loved you. He watches
over you day and night. He knows who you are and who you can be. He wants to
live with you forever. You are His child. At judgement day, can you imagine him
folding you in his arms, saying, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant”.
“Come unto me ye blessed, for your works have been the works of righteousness
upon the face of the earth”? Picture it in your head. Now press forward. Have
faith, repent, be baptized or renew your covenants, and receive the Holy Ghost.
And when ye have gotten into this path, “you must press forward with a
steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God
and of all man. Wherefore if ye shall press forward and endure to the end,
behold, thus saith [our] Father: Ye shall have eternal life.”
Christ lives. I know He does. I’ve testified of Him for my
whole life, and I plan to continue testifying of Him beyond the end of my days.
And because He lives again, I’ll see all the wonderful friends I made in Japan.
I’ll see them all again and I’ll understand every word. I’ll see you, and I’ll
see Him. I’m excited, but I’ll wait for just a little longer, for, like Moroni,
I have a purpose to perform in this tabernacle of clay, “to conquer the enemy
of all righteousness, and rest [my] soul in the kingdom of God.”
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
