Transcript – Shima Baughman

So I have to call her Ms. Howells because she was my daughter’s teacher, so I feel like, thank you, Ms. Howells. You can’t say no to anything your teacher, your kid’s teacher asks, right? It’s like, you come speak at my conference. Yes, I will. When is it? I will be there. Waltmans, thank you so much for that. Katie, Ashley, Lois, that was so beautiful beyond. I wish, I was trying to clap, but then I’m like, clap, no clap. Okay, we’re not clapping, but I would be, I was clapping in my heart. That was beyond beautiful, and yes, that made it worth all of our while to be here, even if everything goes wrong after that. But it’s so great to see you all here.

I want to start to tell you about my high school graduation. I was seventeen years old. I was wearing white, a white dress, cap and gown, a brand new pair of white Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals. They were brand new. And they had a little bit of a heel. And I thought I looked very beautiful and grown up. I felt grown up.

So we have this large ceremony where I grew up. It’s at a track. And there’s over a thousand people in this audience and families there, your friends are there, teachers, strangers. And I had been told right before that started that I was going to receive an award. So that meant I had to go up to the stage twice. Once for the award and once later for my diploma.

So when my name was called for this award, I stood up, I smoothed my dress, I walked to the stage, shook the principal’s hand, I took the award, I smiled, and then I turned around to walk back to my seat, down this metal ramp with this hollow metallic sound that my shoes made as I walked on it, in front of a thousand people who are now all watching me walk.

About halfway down that ramp in my new white Dr. Scholl’s shoes, I lost my balance and slipped and fell. I went down hard. I cut my knee open on the metal of the ramp. I scrambled up, cause, you know, what do you do? And I finished walking back to my seat with blood running down my leg, and I was trying to pretend that I hadn’t been deeply humiliated and embarrassed in front of every single person I’ve ever met.

But the ceremony wasn’t over at that point, right? I still had to walk up and down that ramp again in these shoes I clearly didn’t know how to walk in for my diploma. So my name’s called the second time. I walk up the ramp, I shake the hand, I take the diploma, and then I have to walk down this ramp again past the thousand people that I just embarrassed myself in front of, and I was terrified. I didn’t want to fall again. I didn’t want to bleed again. So I made a decision. I would walk so carefully down that ramp that I couldn’t possibly fall. I would tiptoe. I would inch. I would crawl down the ramp if I had to.

So I did. I tiptoed down the ramp, one tiny step at a time, so slowly that I think the principal had to call three more names before I reached the bottom. And as I’m tiptoeing, already humiliated, my knee bleeding through my dress, the audience began to laugh. They were roaring, actually. A thousand people couldn’t help themselves. Ha, ha, ha, the girl with the white shoes who fell down the first time is now sneaking down the ramp like a cartoon mouse.

I want to tell you what I was thinking on that ramp, because I think every woman in this room has been there. Maybe not at a metal ramp, at a graduation maybe, but sometime. Sometime where you fell once and you didn’t want to fall again. And so instead of walking normally, you inched. You shrank yourself. You tried to manage how you appeared so that you ended up looking more strange, not less.

I wasn’t trusting my steps anymore after that fall, and the truth is I didn’t start tiptoeing on that ramp. I was tiptoeing for a long time. I had been afraid to be myself for years before I even put on my white shoes. To understand why, I have to take you back further than that graduation to where I was born.

I was born in Iran, and my family was Muslim growing up. We were Persian, my parents were both educated and very politically engaged, my mother especially. My mother’s a very brave woman, much braver than she even thinks she is, but she fought for freedom and democracy in Iran. And at the time, and even now, fighting for those things came at a very heavy cost, and she paid that cost.

My mother was imprisoned as a political prisoner in Iran for her work for the cause of religious freedom, freedom of speech, and democracy. I want you to imagine that for a moment, a young woman, and at this point a mother, she has my sister and me as little kids, ends up being sentenced to a political prison just because she dared that human beings should be free.

The conditions that she was held, and I won’t really describe in detail, but there was a time she describes where she was held in a prison called Evin, it’s infamous, and recently came in the news as the Iran protests happened again, where her captors would randomly execute a certain number of prisoners every night. And she said you could hear a pin drop as they were executing because all the people that were in the cell being held wanted to hear exactly how many of their friends were being killed at random.

What do you think she did in that prison? Well, I’ll tell you. She prayed. She had learned to pray from her mother. She didn’t have the gospel of Jesus Christ, didn’t know anything about it, but she knew there was a God, and from her cell she prayed. She prayed for her daughters, for her family that she couldn’t see.

And during this time, she had a dream that she was in America. And this confused her because she had eight more years in prison. At this point, she had already served two. She dreamed she was flying above some of the most beautiful fall colors on a plane, and she was over a place that she’d never been before and never even dreamed of in America.

And at the same time, outside of this prison, my dad was a neurosurgeon. And during this period, a very high-ranking religious leader from Iran needed a very difficult medical procedure. My father was blessed enough to perform it, and by skill or grace, we’ll never know, probably prepared by the hand of God, though, the procedure was successful. And because of that, this leader asked my dad, what can I do for you? And it turned out his wife and sister were both being held in political prison, and so they were able to be released six months later.

And through miracles, my family was given the opportunity to leave Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and to immigrate to America, to start over. I was seven years old when we arrived in America, and I knew exactly two English words that my mom taught me the day we were leaving, yes and no. And I used both incorrectly. Yes was really hard, so I’d say no a lot because it sounds like nah, nah, no, that’s the same word in Farsi. So, but yes, I did not remember, and so I would get in trouble quite a lot at school.

So this is where our story turns from miracle into miracle. Within six months of arriving in America, my father, who was now working in this hospital setting, met a nurse, and she happened to be a Latter-day Saint, a convert, and she was from Iran. And so she didn’t see my father as a, you know, foreign physician with a heavy accent or a complicated past. She looked at him and she felt this prompting from the Holy Ghost, invite his family over for family home evening.

And she felt it, but she didn’t act on it. She thought, they’re new here. they don’t know me. This is strange. I, I won’t do it. Then she said she felt the prompting a second time, invite them to family home evening. And again, she hesitated. This time she thought, no, because they’re here for one year. If I invite them and they come to my house and learn about Jesus, they have to go back to Iran and they might get killed.

But then she says, she describes her third time getting this prompting. She said, she’s at a, my dad’s at a water fountain pausing to get a drink. And then she gets the prompting again. This time she finally obeys and walks up to my father. She invites him and we came. And that from that one family home evening, this nurse that was prompted three times and finally listened, my family was able to learn about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and we were baptized into the church.

I just marvel at that, and I, you know, so happy to be able to share this with you because I think about my mother praying in a prison cell in Iran, my father having the opportunity to perform a procedure on a religious leader, grant, getting granted passage to America, and within a few months being introduced to the church by this incredible nurse in the hospital. And here I am today in Holladay, Utah, more than thirty years later, with five kids of my own, a marriage in the temple, serving in the church, working at BYU, having a covenant family, just because this nurse followed a prompting to invite us over.

This is the wisdom that my family first learned is that walking with Christ means trusting promptings that we don’t fully understand. I think of the scripture in Isaiah, and it shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer, and while they are yet speaking, I will hear. Before my mother had even finished praying in her cell, God was already arranging a nurse on the other side of the world, and before my father had finished his procedure, God was already preparing our visa. Before any of us knew there was a thing called Latter-day Saints, the Holy Ghost was already nudging a nurse to invite us to her home. God was answering my mother’s prayers in a language none of us yet spoke.

So you would think that a girl who came from these miraculous circumstances, who had been delivered out of a prison cell from Iran by the hand of God, would walk into American life confident and grateful and sure of who she was. I did not.

I want to tell you what I tried to be, because I think this part’s more universal than the prison cell story. the prison cell story is my background, but the next part, I think, is something that a lot of us might be able to relate to.

When I started elementary school in America, I wanted to, more than anything in the world, to be a girl named Kimberly. And I don’t mean a specific Kimberly. I would have been okay being Jennifer. The blonde-haired Kimberly with freckles who carried an L.L. Bean backpack and wore Gap jeans, who walked into the classroom seeming to belong there without any effort. And I was none of those things. I was a small Persian girl with thick, dark hair and an accent and a family that ate food that no one else’s family ate. And I looked at the Kimberleys and I was convinced that the key to belonging was to become one of them, preferably one named Kimberley, preferably taller, blonde, with freckles.

Now, it didn’t occur to me at seven or eight years old that maybe the Kimberleys might also be struggling with something. And it didn’t occur to me that the freckled girl might be wishing that she might have tan skin. we were both miserable maybe for something that the other wished they had.

This is my first version of what I would call a wisdom deficit. I didn’t yet know what wisdom was. I thought wisdom might be figuring out how to be more like the girls who seemed to be doing it right. I thought wisdom meant changing myself, editing myself, and learning, and my sister and I would actually impart wisdom to each other every night as we tutored each other, and we’d get home from school and teach each other the things we learned about being American, how to be more like Kimberly. One of the things, you don’t wear the same clothes every day to school, right? There’s a lot of things we taught each other and tried to, to do to fit in.

Now fast forward a decade. By the time I was a college student at BYU, I had not entirely outgrown this impulse to be someone else. I had only changed the someone. So as a BYU student, I had a, a chance to do an internship in South Africa. I was so excited, but I thought, I really want to belong here, and so I wanted to be embraced by this community, so I decided the best way I could fit in in South Africa is to grow dreadlocks.

Yep. Now, here’s the problem. My hair doesn’t quite easily form dreadlocks. I have Persian hair, and it behaves differently than hair that dreads, but to make it dread, I learned you have to have some damage to it. So I went to a local store in South Africa, and I bought some dye. And I first tried to dye it brown, and that didn’t quite make it dread properly. So after seven of attempts, I ended up with a color of hair I can only describe accurately as lion mane.

So there I was, a Persian girl at BYU, doing an internship in South Africa with damaged hair the color of a lion’s mane, trying to grow dreadlocks. Now, I want you to know in that moment, finally and ironically, I achieved my childhood dream that I’d given up on years earlier. I had become a blonde.

And to, to be honest, that story is funny now, but it wasn’t funny then, because underneath the lion mane hair was the same Persian girl who wanted to be Kimberly, the same instinct. I was trying to be something other than what God had made, still tiptoeing down the ramp, afraid to fail. I just chosen a different costume. And that’s obviously the opposite of wisdom. It was a long, exhausting, decades-spanning project of trying to be enough by trying to be somebody else. And the only thing that pulled me out of that project, the only thing that’s ever stopped me from tiptoeing has been Jesus Christ.

And he, he’s never made me prettier or thinner or blonder or changed my name to Jennifer, but he showed me what wisdom actually was. When we use the wisdom, the word wisdom today, We sometimes think of it associated with something like intelligence, strategy, right? The ability to figure out the right answer in a difficult situation, being smart in a way that’s impenetrable. In the world’s vocabulary, wisdom sounds performative, something that means oppressive, learned through mistakes or hard-earned life experience. But that is not wisdom in scripture.

In scripture, wisdom is a gift that you ask for. James taught it. He said, if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. That’s the verse that sent a boy named Joseph into a grove of trees, and it’s a verse that still sends us to our knees. Wisdom is asked for, and it’s given.

When I have asked, the wisdom he’s given me has come to two simple things. Wisdom is accepting who God made you to be and trusting that you don’t need to be anyone else. And wisdom is walking with Christ, especially in his holy house. Everything else I want to share with you today highlights one of those two truths.

The wisdom of Jesus Christ is something completely different. It doesn’t come from old age or cleverness or even being right. It’s steady work of walking with someone in a way that lets them to be seen. It’s taking a longer road, asking a question when you already know the answer, or being patient enough with a person’s disappointment to let it speak before you reply.

I want to take you to a place in scripture where Jesus does this beautifully. It’s a moment that defines to me what wisdom in Christ looks like. On the day of the resurrection, on the very day that Mary Magdalene found the empty tomb, two disciples were walking from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles away. One of them’s named Cleopas, but we don’t know what the other one’s name was. But they were walking and grieving. They had spent the last three years of their life following a man who they came to believe as a Messiah, and three days earlier they had watched him die.

The scripture says, and they talked together of all these things which had happened. That’s what grief looks like. Two people walking down a road, trying to make sense of this tragedy that they just witnessed. And while they’re walking, Jesus came up beside them. But this is the part of the story that’s remarkable. They didn’t recognize him. The scripture said, but their eyes were holden that they should not know him. The resurrected Christ is walking beside them, and they had no idea.

So I want to ask you something. If, if you were Jesus and you had just been resurrected, having defeated death, and you found two of your grieving disciples on the road, what would you do? I, it’s clear to me what I would do. I would reveal myself immediately. I’d say, Cleopas, my friend, it’s me. Look at me, I’m alive. Look at my hands. I would shortcut the whole thing. I would skip to the punchline. I wouldn’t waste a single second.

But as we know, that’s not what Jesus does, right? Instead, he comes up alongside them and asks them a question. In the King James Version, it reads, what manner of communications are these that you have with one another as you walk and are sad? So in modern English, right, what does he say? He says, why are you sad? And, and what are you guys talking about? He asks them a question. He invites them to tell him what’s wrong.

And Jesus, the resurrected Christ, the Son of God, who already knows every answer to every question they could possibly ask, doesn’t grab them by the shoulders. He doesn’t say, you’re getting this wrong. You should actually be happy. Let me, let me tell you why. He walks beside them. He asks them a question, and then he lets them talk. And they did talk. And they tell him about Jesus of Nazareth, and they tell him about the crucifixion. And then they say the line that I think must be one of the most quietly devastating sentences in the entire New Testament. They say, but we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel. We trusted, past tense, we don’t anymore. They told the resurrected Christ, who’s walking right beside them, that they had lost their faith in him. And he listened to every word. He let them say it. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t correct them. He didn’t say, stop, I’m right here. Look at me. He let them tell their disappointment all the way to the end.

And then only did he, then after they get done speaking, then does he open his scriptures to them, beginning in Moses and talking about the prophets, he expounds to them all the scriptures of things about himself. He walks the long road with them and he talks to them as they walk. And when they reach Emmaus, he made as though he could have gone further, but he doesn’t impose himself. He waits to be invited and then they invite him. They said, come with us in the evening. It’s a day far spent. He comes in, he sits down, he took the bread, broke it, blessed it, gave it to them. And then at last the scripture says, their eyes were opened and they knew him. And then he vanishes out of their sight.

And then comes this line that’s most instructive. The two disciples look at each other and said, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? Did not our hearts burn within us? Their hearts were burning the entire time, the whole seven mile walk. They hadn’t known it. They hadn’t known it was him, but something inside them was already responding to him before their eyes could see him. The wisdom that they were receiving was already changing them before they understood what they were receiving.

That is what wisdom from Christ looks like. It’s a slow walk, a long question, the willingness to listen all the way to we trusted before you offer a single reply. It’s the choice not to shortcut what someone’s feeling. And breaking your bread at the end of the road, not even knowing who you were walking with. This is for us. I think of all of us. Next time one of our children or the people we love comes to us upset, and you can already see the three points that you want to teach them, right? I would love us all to remember Emmaus, to walk beside them, to ask the question. Tell, let them say we trusted. Their hearts will burn before they understand why. That is a godly pattern. Christ often walks alongside us in our disappointment before we recognize him. In the hardest seasons of our lives, the ones we said we used to trust, we hoped this would be different, he has been there with us, asking questions, listening, waiting to be invited in.

My mother, in that prison cell in Iran, didn’t know the name of Jesus Christ, but he was walking with her along her road. Her heart, even within then, was burning, and her dream in prison gave her her vision of her future life, living in New York, where she would see the most beautiful fall colors imaginable, in the Hudson Valley, where I grew up.

I want to tell you a story now for my own marriage. Because wisdom is not just something we admire in Jesus, it’s something that he wants to grow in us through the hardest parts of our lives. Years ago, after a painful first marriage and divorce, I went through a season of questioning my faith, even though my family had received it through such miracles. I had grown up as a Latter-day Saint, but as an adult, after most of my family had found their own spiritual paths, and after a divorce, I wasn’t sure anymore. I still believed in God, I still believed in Jesus Christ, but I had anger over my marriage and wondered, do I need a church? Do I need to get married in the temple? Could I have faith on my own?

So I ran my own little experiment. I told my bishop that I’m stepping back from my callings in my ward for a time. I read scriptures with my young boys sometimes on Sunday mornings. We made sandwiches for the homeless. I prayed. I tried to serve my neighbors quietly and tried to worship God on my own terms. But I was missing something, and I couldn’t name it, but I was missing something that I couldn’t manufacture on my own, how, no matter how sincerely I tried.

At the lowest point in that season, I knelt down and prayed and, and with tears asked God a direct question. I said, what is your spiritual path for me? Do you want me to be a member of the church? I have real questions, and I laid them out honestly, and then I waited. And two days later, I met my husband, Ryan.

Now, I want you to understand what that means for someone in my position. I had been through one painful temple marriage. The last thing I was looking for was another temple marriage. I had told myself, and anyone that asked, that I was done with that chapter. My heart was closed to it. I wanted to marry a good person, but not somebody that was a member of the church.

At this point, I barely knew Ryan, but of course I noticed immediately he was quite handsome. That was clear. But that wasn’t it. Something more profound happened. In the space of two days after this most honest prayer, something happened that I can’t explain in any other way. My heart softened. Not to Ryan exactly, though of course I was excited about this prospect, but my heart softened miraculously to the possibility of another temple marriage, of trusting again, of knowing without a doubt that I needed to fully engage in God’s church on the earth, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

That softening wasn’t analytical, it was godly wisdom, the wisdom of an honest, fervent question answered by a powerfully kind God, the wisdom of being willing to ask a real question and accept the answer.

And, you know, I’d love to tell you that that marriage to Ryan and what followed after was happily ever after. We actually met in April and got married in August. It was quite quick, even by LDS standards. But That happily ever after didn’t quite happen for us at first. being two people in their thirties together, one with two small children, another one who had been dating everybody, it seemed like, for eighteen years. Literally, we, we couldn’t go anywhere without meeting somebody that he dated. it’s probably there’s some in this room, some of your daughters, anyway. Yeah. So you, you see the struggles.

It meant working through some hard moments for us, right? Ryan and I fought in our early marriage. We just didn’t see things the same way. I was a single mother. He was, you know, a single man, a really good single man, but, but still. So at one point we’re having a real, real bad fight, and Ryan has this inspired thought. He says, what if we go to the temple every week together?

The best advice we applied in our marriage was to be in the house of the Lord as often as we could. This, I can’t say this with enough emphasis, this healed our marriage. It healed my past. The Draper Temple, the, the Taylorsville Temple, the Bountiful Temple, and my favorite, the Jordan River Temple, most efficient temple in the world, are all within thirty minutes of this space here. It’s my favorite place to pray, pray on earth, the house of the Lord, and I just have had all of the, the, some of the questions that I put on hold when I came back to church about women and the priesthood and our role there, it, the more time I spend in the house of the Lord, I feel very confident in my priesthood power, and all of those questions have just really gone away. I just know that in our future, we have this magnificent Power and this future that as women, and we’re integral to it. So I, I just, all of those issues in my past just went away.

the Lord has told us what kind of place his house is, a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, house of learning, a house of God. When my own house feels disordered, which is a lot of times, I like to go to his. And I want to tell you specifically of what happens when I do.

Just a little while ago, not too long ago, I was struggling with something with my two oldest sons. I have five kids, the, the two oldest are, are boys. They’re really good boys, but there was this particular issue that I’d been worried about for weeks, and I had a thought about it, and I prayed about it, I talked to Ryan about it, and the night before, I was going to sit down and have a real conversation with them. I told Ryan, this is my three-prong plan, these are the three things I’m going to say to them. And I thought it through real carefully. I told Ryan I was going to say these things, and he thought it was a great idea. He said, great. My plan was very reasonable, I have to say.

Then the next day we go to the temple, and so I thought, before I talk to them, I’ll go to the temple and pray about it first. So I do my ordinance, I sit in the celestial room, and I pray, and I sit in the house of the Lord with my three points written down in my head, had everything ready, I was prepared. I was going to take these three points and deliver them, but as I sat there, the spirit whispered something that I didn’t expect at all. The spirit didn’t refine my three points or give me additional ones. It didn’t give me a better version of how to say it, more clever version, no. The spirit said, don’t say any of those things. Just love them.

That was it. That was a whole revelation. Don’t say any of those things. Just love them. I’d gone in expecting to leave with my points, a blessing from the Lord on them, and instead I left with no point at all. I went home, I didn’t say the things, I didn’t lay it out. I, I loved my sons, and I held them, and I listened to them, and just had conversations with them that were much different than the ones I had planned to have. It was pure love, not instruction, more listening, less talking. That is a road to Emmaus. That’s Jesus on the road, refusing to shortcut his disciples’ grief and refusing to teach them before they have a chance to feel what they feel. The only way I’ve ever been able to access this kind of wisdom, the wisdom not to teach when I want to, is, is in the temple.

Sister Patricia Holland, who I love, said something near the end of her life. She said, be quiet, be still, simplify, be meek and lowly of heart and pray. And I testify that miracles will come when we slow down, calm down, and kneel down. That to me is a temple in three lines. Wisdom is discipleship in life. It’s not knowing the perfect thing to say. Wisdom is knowing where to go when you don’t have the right answer. And for me, that place is always the house of the Lord.

I want to tell you about another woman who walked into my office a few years ago. Her name is Hannah, I’m just changing her identity, obviously, but she’s a law student at BYU. She had been through trauma that I will not describe in detail. She’d been abused and mistreated by several people close to her, so much so that she asked me, before classes even began, that she would never want to be called on in my class, which is criminal law. She didn’t want to be looked at, she didn’t want to be tested, she just wanted to disappear.

But her ears perked up one day when I spoke of forgiveness. So one day she came to my office, and I remember praying before she came that I might have the spirit with me, because I didn’t know what to say to her. Nothing in my training as a law professor trained me to deal with the kind of trauma that she was carrying. So she came to my office with her pencil and paper, wanting to leave with, with a list, things to work on, things to read, strategies, you know, how do we fix what’s going on.

And I started to tell her some things. I started to talk about forgiveness and about Jesus Christ, and she picked up her pen to write down what I was saying. And as she did, the Spirit whispered something to me unmistakably, the same kind of whisper I heard before. It said, tell her there’s no list. Just tell her to go to the temple every week.

So I said it, and Hannah looked at me and said, do you mean once a month? I’m in law school. And I said, no, what if we start with once a week? And she said, I have not been to the temple in four years, but we committed to go and to send each other a picture every week to be, to hold each other accountable.

In her second week, she wrote me a text. She said, I don’t want to speak too soon, but honestly, just after going once to the temple, a lot of good things have just fallen into place. I choose to believe that God is already helping me more from just even going twice, but I will keep being consistent. Hannah had been going to therapy for years. She was not seeing the results she needed until she started going to the house of the Lord.

On her third week, she wrote me again. She said, I honestly feel like I’ve seen a fire hose of blessings since I’ve been going to the temple, which feels too good to be true. She says, for the last several years, my every day has been rough because I’ve had night terrors in the evening. I’ve had flashbacks and panic attacks during the day, but every day I went to the temple, my night terrors stopped. That is a miracle because this is having a serious toll on my health.

This is wisdom that says sometimes the best counsel I can give you is no counsel at all. Sometimes wisdom is the courage to give counsel so simple it sounds a little embarrassing coming out of a law professor’s mouth. The spirit will not let me dress it up. Just tell her to go to the temple. Nothing you say will heal her. Send her to my house.

Sometimes God’s wisdom for our lives is simpler than we want it to be. We come to him wanting a five-pronged plan. He wants to give us a habit, a weekly walk, a small faith act that we can repeat. We sometimes resist the simplicity, I know I do, because we’ve been trained to think wisdom should be complicated, but it’s not. Christ’s wisdom is simple, and what matters are a few things.

As Elder Shumway said earlier this year at BYU devotional, you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. One of my favorite quotes, you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything except walking with him. King Benjamin taught the same wisdom, and see that all these things are done in wisdom and order, for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. Can we take one small faithful step at the speed where we can walk with our Savior?

I want to tell you about Linda, because she shares one of the most beautiful examples of wisdom that I’ve ever encountered in a Latter-day Saint mother. There’s a man named David, he grew up in the church, and as an adult, he worked in what some might politely call as an unlicensed pharmacist, a drug dealer. The, the younger one’s got it, you know what I’m saying. He was arrested and incarcerated more times than he could count. He spent nineteen years in and out of prison on, addicted to prescription drugs, in pain, in prison cells. He caused much sorrow to his parents, especially his mother, Linda.

Miraculously, after years away, David came back to church, and he bore his testimony recently about the atonement of Jesus Christ. He said, I am living proof that Jesus Christ loves us, and he loves you. I asked David, how did this happen? He told me his mother helped him, but he didn’t explain how. So I went and asked his mother, Linda.

Linda told me that for years, she was at a loss for what to do for her son. She had spent much of her retirement bailing him out of jail, losing most of her income. She cried more tears than she could count. But then one day, she says, I felt a clear prompting. She was supposed to work in the temple. She didn’t say a word about the prompting to her husband. She just felt it. And that same week, the stake president called them in and asked them to serve as temple workers.

Linda spent every free moment in the house of the Lord, and while she was there, she did something I find astonishing. She would close her eyes and visualize her son in whites, her drug addict son, the boy she’d bailed out of jail more times than she could count. She could see him in whites, working in the temple beside her. She would see him as a divine being, even while he was sitting in his cell. This is the wisdom of a mother who refused to see her son the way the world saw him. A mother who after hour after hour in the house of the Lord trained her eyes to see her son the way her savior Jesus Christ saw him.

Her son David said late one night in his cell contemplating his situation, God came to him. And because of that experience, he decided to change. Linda said, the temple transforms us because of the power that seeps into your soul while you’re there. And then she said, if people understood the power of the temple, they would be lined up and crawling and fighting to get in. We have a temple, many temples within driving less distance. We have what Linda would have crawled to reach. That’s the kind of wisdom none of us are born with, but it’s what we can glean as a gift from the house of the Lord.

Now I want to come back to the little girl who wanted to be Kimberly, to the BYU student with the lion mane hair in South Africa, to David and Hannah, to all of them who are operating on the false belief that if we could get themselves right, if we could get ourselves right, God would accept them and that we would belong. But that’s not how God works. Paul wrote, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty. The very things about ourselves we wish we could trade are often the things that God has already chosen in us.

There’s a sister whose words I wish I could have comprehended at seven years old, a former member of our Holy City Presence, Chieko Okazaki, a Japanese, Hawaiian born to Buddhist parents, and she joined the church at fifteen. She definitely knew what it looked, what it felt like to not be a girl named Kimberly. And she said this about our Savior. She said, Our Savior is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He’s not embarrassed at us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and grief. Jesus Christ doesn’t need the polished version of us, not the version with no freckles, perfect hair, and zero awkwardness.

Though I have to say, I recently talked to a woman in my ward who is truly my ideal childhood beauty of a Kimberly. Her name’s Laura. And she told me she hated being tall growing up, and she was teased for her freckles. So apparently even the Kimberleys didn’t want to be Kimberleys. Christ wants the real version of us, even the lion-mane version, especially the version that, that we’re trying to edit out. He wants us how he made us. And I think that self-acceptance is wisdom, and it doesn’t come from looking inward. It doesn’t come from finally fitting in or becoming someone else. It comes from walking with Christ. He’s the only one whose embrace can sustain us.

But Christ’s acceptance isn’t our path to stop growing. It’s what gives us courage to keep growing without hating ourselves along the way. The gospel asks us to become new creatures, avoiding despising the creature God is making, patiently making new. There’s a difference between wanting to become more like Christ and believing we’re worthless until we get there.

Michelle Craig, a former counselor in the Young Women’s General Presidency, gave a talk in 2018 called Divine Discontent, and she drew a distinction between divine discontent, the holy yearning that moves us forward in faith, and what she called Satan’s counterfeit, paralyzing discouragement. Sometimes it feels like what feels like a spiritual crisis is actually discouragement dressed up as humility. She has taught us a lot about wisdom. She’s a woman who was born and raised in Utah, and if you ask her, says that she lived a small, quiet life. She was born in Provo, Utah, married and raised a family, but by her own description, she said, I’m not even someone who made comments in Sunday school.

And yet, on March 21st, 2018, while taking a nap on her couch, she was interrupted by ringing on her home phone. She looked at the caller ID. It said, Jesus Christ. And she stared at it puzzled, and then it rang a second time, and she thought, well, I ought to pick it up. And a sister on the other end asked her and her husband to meet with President Dallin H. Oaks, and as she sat across from an apostle of the Lord, overwhelmed, feeling completely inadequate, he asked her, are you worthy to receive a calling? And are you willing to accept any calling? She said yes, and yes. And she teaches, what you have to offer is more than enough, even with your human frailties and weaknesses, if you rely on the grace of God.

We are more than enough, not because of who we are, but because of whose we are. Because of the grace at work in us, the very thing that we’re most embarrassed about, the heritage, the divorce, the nightmares, the fear of making comments in Sunday school, it’s often the doorway in which the miracle walks in. The very thing you wish that wasn’t part of your story is the part that Jesus Christ loves.

So I want to come back to where we started, my little 17-year-old self in my white shoes, tiptoeing down the metal ramp, still bleeding from my knee. I thought wisdom meant figuring out how to be someone else, someone who could wear high heels. Though you might notice if you ever see me, I never wear high heels, even today. Let’s see my shoes. No heels. I’ve learned that safety lesson once.

Patricia Holland wrote that she spent years comparing her quiet, reflective, thoughtful self to the robust, bubbly, talkative, and energetic Elder Holland. Over time, she learned that she had untold abundant sources of energy to be herself, but the moment that she tried to imitate her neighbor, she said, she felt she was fractured and fatigued. Her point was, God didn’t create us to exhaust ourselves becoming someone else. Wisdom is learning to become ourselves in Christ.

What I have learned since then is that wisdom is not a smarter, more careful version of me or you. It’s not what you do when you stop worrying, what people think, what people will think about you when you fall. But it’s starting to walk with our heads held up high. Even our bodies know this truth. When we lift our gaze, something in us begins to lift too. And researchers have found looking upward is actually associated with beautiful mental effects in our, our brains that lead to healing and happiness. And so when I go to the temple, one of my practices is to lay in the celestial room, or I guess you can’t lay, but put my head back and look up. And you have this beautiful ceiling here, but to look up in the celestial room in the house of the Lord.

Wisdom is a road to Emmaus, the willingness to walk the longer road than you wanted to with someone who might be listening. Wisdom is the temple, the place where you go when you need to revisit your battle plan to God’s plan. Wisdom is Hannah, who came in wanting a list and left with a covenant relationship. Linda, who closed her eyes in the temple and saw her son in white.

That is the wisdom I’m here to bear testimony of today, the kind of obedience, the unshowy, three times prompted obedience that changed every generation of my family forever. Some of you today in Holladay, Utah, are quietly trying to walk towards this kind of wisdom. Some of us here are tiptoeing. Some have fallen recently and are afraid to walk normally. Some of you are bleeding under a dress that no one can see. Some of you have been the nurse in this story, filling the prompting once, twice, three times, wondering if you should obey it. Some of you have been the mother praying from her own kind of prison cell.

I want to testify that we don’t have to tiptoe. Christ is walking next to us the entire time. He’s not waiting for us to be perfect. He’s not embarrassed by us. He wants us just as we are, doubts, questions, and all. He wants to know what we’re thinking about and why we’re sad. He wants… He’s okay letting us doubt. He is speaking to us from scriptures and from the words of our leaders on a longer road than we wanted to walk. And in our hearts, in the moments we maybe haven’t yet named, he’s already allowed us to burn with the spirit within us.

Let’s all slow down, calm down, kneel down. Let us be with women of wisdom, with ears to hear and eyes to see what’s important, what is true, and what is right. Sister Du, the beloved, a beloved leader in our church said recently at BYU Women’s Conference, she said, tell me what you pay attention to, and I’ll tell you who you are. When we give him even some of our time, it seems like he multiplies the rest. While dividing our sorrows, our anxiety and grief. So let us spend time with the Lord in prayer, visiting his house often, and walking with him in wisdom. So when we walk down whatever ramp life asks us to walk down, we can walk with his confidence. Our beloved God does not want his daughters to tiptoe, and I say that in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

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