The Bitter Cup and the Bloody Baptism & The Soul's Center | Jeffrey R. and Patricia T. Holland

Sister Holland offers some advice for the modern woman who, exhausted by others' expectations, needs help find her inner self and rejuvenate her soul.
President Holland: Jesus Christ and His disciples know what it means to stand firm for the "duration of the war" - to drink the bitter cup in the battle between good and evil.

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"I believe that as women we are becoming so concerned about having perfect figures, or straight A’s, or professional status, or even absolute motherly success, that we are being torn from our true selves. We often worry so much about pleasing and performing for others that we lose our own uniqueness, that full and relaxed acceptance of ourselves as a person of worth and individuality. Too many women watch helplessly as their lives unravel from the core that centers and sustains them. Too many are like a ship at sea without sail or rudder, tossed to and fro (as the Apostle Paul said) until more and more of us are genuinely, rail-grabbingly seasick.

Where is the sureness that allows us to sail our ship—whatever winds may blow—with the master seaman’s triumphant cry, “Steady as she goes”? Where is the inner stillness we so cherish and for which our sex traditionally has been known? In the shadow of the twenty-first century can we find what Charles Morgan once described as “the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body [as] still as [the center] of a revolving wheel is still”? (cited by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea [New York: Pantheon, 1955], pp. 50–51).

I believe we can find it—the steady footing and the stilling of the soul—by turning away from the fragmentation of physical preoccupations (whether it be thin or fat) of superwoman careers or endless popularity contests and returning instead to the wholeness of our soul." - Sister Holland

"You see, a disciple of Christ—which I testify to you Joseph was and is—always has to be a disciple; the judge does not give any time off for bad behavior. A Christian always stands on principle, even as old Holland is out there swinging a pitchfork and screaming an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth—forgetting, as dispensation after dispensation has forgotten, that this only leaves everyone blind and toothless.

No, the good people, the strong people, dig down deeper and find a better way. Like Christ, they know that when it is hardest to be so is precisely the time you have to be at your best. As another confession to you, I have always feared that I could not have said at Calvary’s cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Not after the spitting, and the cursing, and the thorns, and the nails. Not if they don’t care or understand that this horrible price in personal pain is being paid for them. But that’s just the time when the fiercest kind of integrity and loyalty to high purpose must take over. That’s just the time when it matters the very most and when everything else hangs in the balance—for surely it did that day. You and I won’t ever find ourselves on that cross, but we repeatedly find ourselves at the foot of it. And how we act there will speak volumes about what we think of Christ’s character and his call for us to be his disciples." - President Holland

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/patricia-t-holland_souls-center/
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland_bitter-cup-bloody-baptism/

Jeffrey R. Holland was president of Brigham Young University when this devotional address was given at Brigham Young University on 13 January 1987.

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