Pick Me Up - Speech

Will watched this devotional a few weeks ago on campus and recommended it. I finally listened to it the other day while riding my bike. It boosted my spirits, and I wanted to share it. Here are a few tidbits of it, if you want to listen/read/watch all of it, just click on the link below.

“Remember Lot’s Wife” Jeffrey R. Holland


The start of a new year is the traditional time to take stock of our lives and see where we are going, measured against the backdrop of where we have been. I don’t want to talk to you about New Year’s resolutions, because you only made five of them and you have already broken four. (I give that remaining one just another week.) But I do want to talk to you about the past and the future, not so much in terms of New Year’s commitments per se, but more with an eye toward any time of transition and change in your lives—and those moments come virtually every day of our lives.

As a scriptural theme for this discussion, I have chosen the second-shortest verse in all of holy scripture. It is Luke 17:32, where the Savior cautions,

“Remember Lot’s wife.”

Hmmm.
What did He mean by such an enigmatic little phrase?
To find out, I suppose we need to do as He suggested.
Let’s recall who wife was.

Surely, surely, with the Lord’s counsel “look not behind thee” ringing clearly in her ears, Lot’s wife, the record says, “looked back,” and she was turned into a pillar of salt.

In the time we have this morning, I am not going to talk to you about the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, nor of the comparison the Lord Himself has made to those days and our own time. I am not even going to talk about obedience and disobedience.
I just want to talk to you for a few minutes about looking back and looking ahead.

So, if history is this important—and it surely is—

what did Lot's wife do that was so wrong?

As something of a student of history, I have thought about that and offer this as a partial answer. Apparently what was wrong with Lot’s wife was that she wasn’t just looking back; in her heart she wanted to go back. It would appear that even before they were past the city limits,she was already missing what Sodom and Gomorrah had offered her.

As Elder Maxwell once said, such people know they should have their primary residence in Zion, but they still hope to keep a summer cottage in Babylon.

It is possible that Lot’s wife looked back with resentment toward the Lord for what He was asking her to leave behind. We certainly know that Laman and Lemuel were resentful when Lehi and his family were commanded to leave Jerusalem. So it isn’t just that she looked back;
she looked back longingly.
In short,
her attachment to the past
outweighed her confidence in the future.

That, apparently, was at least part of her sin.

So, as a new year starts and we try to benefit from a proper view of what has gone before,

I plead with you not to dwell on days now gone,
nor to yearn vainly for yesterdays,
however good those yesterdays may have been.

The past is to be learned from but not lived in.

We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced,then we look ahead, we remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. Faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives.

So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say that she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she already had.

Apparently she thought—fatally, as it turned out—that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as those moments she was leaving behind.

To yearn to go back to a world that cannot be lived in now;
to be perennially dissatisfied with present circumstances
and have only dismal views of the future;
to miss the here-and-now-and-tomorrow
because we are so trapped in the there-and-then-and-yesterday—
these are some of the sins,
if we may call them that, of both Lot's wife and old Mr. Cheevy.

(Now, as a passing comment, I don’t know whether Lot's wife, like Miniver, was a drinker, but if she was, she certainly ended up with plenty of salt for her pretzels.)

One of my favorite books of the New Testament is Paul’s too-seldom-read letter to the Philippians. After reviewing the very privileged and rewarding life of his early years—his birthright, his education, his standing in the Jewish community—Paul says that all of that was nothing (“dung” he calls it) compared to his conversion to Christianity. He says, and I paraphrase:

“I have stopped rhapsodizing about ‘the good old days’
and now eagerly look toward the future
‘that I may apprehend that for which Christ apprehended me.’”

Then comes this verse:
This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. [Philippians 3:13–14]

No Lot’s wife here. No looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah here. Paul knows it is out there in the future, up ahead wherever heaven is taking us where we will win “the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

A t this point, let me pause and add a lesson that applies both in your own life and also in the lives of others.

There is something in us, at least in too many of us, that particularly fails to forgive and forget earlier mistakes in life—either mistakes we ourselves have made or the mistakes of others.

That is not good.

It is not Christian.

It stands in terrible opposition to
the grandeur and majesty of the Atonement of Christ.

To be tied to earlier mistakes—our own or other people’s—is the worst kind of wallowing in the past from which we are called to cease and desist.

I was told once of a young man who for many years was more or less the brunt of every joke in his school. He had some disadvantages, and it was easy for his peers to tease him. Later in his life he moved away from his community.

He eventually joined the army and had some successful experiences there in getting an education and generally stepping away from his past. Above all, as many in the military do, he discovered the beauty and majesty of the Church and became very active and happy in it.

Then, after several years, he came back to the town of his youth. Most of his generation had moved on, but not all. Apparently when he returned quite successful and quite reborn, the same old mind-set that had existed before was still there, waiting for his return. To the people in his hometown he was still just old “so and so”—you remember the guy who had the problem, that idiosyncrasy, this quirky nature, and did such and such and such and such. And wasn’t it all just hilarious?

Well, you know what happened. Little by little this man’s Pauline effort to leave that which was behind and grasp the prize that God had laid before him was gradually diminished until he died about the way he had lived in his youth. He came full circle: again inactive and unhappy and the brunt of a new generation of jokes. Yet he had had that one bright, beautiful midlife moment when he had been able to rise above his past and truly see who he was and what he could become.

Too bad, too sad,
that he was again to be surrounded
by a whole batch of Lot’s wives,
those who thought his past
was more interesting than his future.

Yes, they managed to rip out of his grasp that for which Christ had grasped him. And he died even more sadly than Miniver Cheevy, though as far as I know the story, through absolutely no fault of his own.

That happens in marriages, too, and in other relationships we have. I can’t tell you the number of couples I have counseled who, when they are deeply hurt or even just deeply stressed, reach farther and farther into the past to find yet a bigger brick to throw through the window “pain” of their marriage.

When something is over and done with,
when it has been repented of
as fully as it can be repented of,
when life has moved on
as it should
and a lot of other wonderfully good things
have happened since then,
it is not right to go back
and open up some ancient wound
that the Son of God Himself died trying to heal.

Let people repent.

Let people grow.

Believe that people can change and improve.

Is that faith? Yes!
Is that hope? Is it charity?
Above all, it is charity, the pure love of Christ.

If something is buried in the past, leave it buried. Don’t keep going back with your little sand pail and beach shovel to dig it up, wave it around, and then throw it at someone, saying, “Hey! Do you remember this?” Splat!

Well, guess what? That is probably going to result in some ugly morsel being dug up out of your landfill with the reply, “Yeah, I remember it. Do you remember this?” Splat.

And soon enough everyone comes out of that exchange dirty and muddy and unhappy and hurt, when what God, our Father in Heaven, pleads for is cleanliness and kindness and happiness and healing.

Such dwelling on past lives, including past mistakes, is just not right! It is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is worse than Miniver Cheevy, and in some ways worse than Lot’s wife, because at least there he and she were only destroying themselves. In these cases of marriage
and family and wards and apartments and neighborhoods, we can end up destroying so many, many others.

Perhaps at this beginning of a new year there is no greater requirement for us than to do as the Lord Himself said He does: “Behold, he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more” (D&C 58:42).

The proviso, of course, is that repentance has to be sincere, but when it is and when honest

effort is being made to progress,
we are guilty of the greater sin if we keep remembering
and recalling and rebashing someone with their earlier mistakes
—and that “someone” might be ourselves.

We can be so hard on ourselves,
often much more so than with others!

Now, like the Anti-Nephi-Lehies of the Book of Mormon, bury your weapons of war, and leave them buried. Forgive, and do that which is harder than to forgive: Forget. And when it comes to mind again, forget it again.

You can remember just enough to avoid repeating the mistake, but then put the rest of it all on the dung heap Paul spoke of to those Philippians. Dismiss the destructive and keep dismissing it until the beauty of the Atonement of Christ has revealed to you your bright future and the bright future of your family and your friends and your neighbors.

God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go.

That is the thing Lot’s wife didn’t get—and neither did Laman and Lemuel and a host of others in the scriptures.
This is an important matter to consider at the start of a new year—and every day ought to be the start of a new year and a new life. Such is the wonder of faith and repentance and the miracle of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

To all such of every generation, I call out, “Remember Lot’s wife.” Faith is for the future. Faith builds on the past but never longs to stay there. Faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ truly is the “high priest of good things to come.”

My young brothers and sisters, I pray you will have a wonderful semester, a wonderful
new year, and a wonderful life all filled with faith and hope and charity. Keep your eyes on your dreams, however distant and far away. Live to see the miracles of repentance and forgiveness, of trust and divine love that will transform your life today, tomorrow, and forever. That is a New Year’s resolution I ask you to keep, and I leave a blessing on you—every one of you—to be able to do so and to be happy, in the name of Him who makes it all possible, even the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.