Finally: My Homecoming Talk

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.