Marion D. Hanks | Fuller Understanding | 1982

With the principles of the Plan of Salvation, a knowledge of who we are, and a testimony of the gospel, we have a fuller understanding of life.

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"For you who were in a meeting where I spoke last week in the stake conferences here, I will in comfort and patience quote the words of Ambrose Bierce who was defining the word twice as “Once too many.” And I will also quote the words of Dr. Edward Hashimoto the morning after Pearl Harbor. He was a professor at the University of Utah Medical School and a delightful and marvelous human being of Japanese Ancestry. You may recall what happened at Pearl Harbor on a certain Sunday morning. On Monday morning Dr. Hashimoto faced his class in absolute silence, looked slowly around, and then said, “Don’t look at me. I’m Irish.”

Well, I have come as bidden, delighted to be invited and hopeful that I may be useful— in some way an instrument in the Lord’s hands this morning. I had two or three delightful hours reading scriptures last night and incidentally noting some ideas. I thought with a smile to myself this morning, not knowing exactly what I’m going to serve you, about my dear friend with a large family whose wife is a very sweet, wonderful, and perhaps over-sensitive person. She was serving her large family soup one night and had just begun to put the bowls on the table—having served the littlest people first—when the doorbell rang. She quickly snatched back the bowls already served and put them away while the visitor was ushered in. Just before the visitor departed, the littlest boy, looking with some bewilderment at what had lately been and no longer was before him, said, “Daddy, have we already aten?”

I feel as if I’ve already “aten.” I’ve had the advantage of feasting on the most important words in the world for several hours. Lacking some specific direction, I just read, and that was really fun. I commend it to you. I thought of two other little incidents that seem relevant and not just stories to be told.

A major financial institution in Salt Lake City has just completed the refurbishment of their original small building on the corner of First South and Main Street and the modernization of the old clock that has stood out there for years, once run by water power, now of course by more modern means. A man was on a tall ladder working on that clock while people walked by him. Apparently a good many asked if he was fixing the clock. Finally he said to one who inquired: “No, I’m nearsighted.”

The other story is about the boy who was having trouble with mathematics. The teacher, anxious to help him, brought some physical objects and said to him, “Now, Tom, if I have ten apples and I take five away, what’s the difference?” He said, “That’s how I feel about it, teacher, what’s the difference?”

Importance of One Day
Among the wonderful ideas I was blessed to run across last night, some of which I’m going to share with you, is this page with three or four short paragraphs to which I ask you to listen with interest because it’s worth it. From David Grayson, a favorite and beloved friend, whom I know through his books, I read:

This is a well earned Sunday morning. My chores were all done long ago, and I am sitting down here after a late and leisurely breakfast with that luxurious feeling of irresponsible restfulness and comfort which comes only upon a clean, still Sunday morning like this—after a week of hard work—a clean Sunday morning with clean clothes, and a clean chin, and clean thoughts, and the June airs stirring the clean white curtains of my windows. From across the hills I can hear very faintly the drowsy sounds of early church bells, never, indeed, to be heard here except on a morning of surpassing tranquility. And in a barnyard back of the house Harriet’s hens are cackling triumphantly. They are impiously unobservant of the Sabbath Day.

I turned out my mare for a run in the pasture. She has rolled herself again and again in the warm earth and shaken herself after each roll with an equine delight more pleasant to see. Now, from time to time, I can hear her gossipy whickerings as she calls across the field to my neighbor Horace’s young bay colts.

When I first woke up this morning I said to myself:

“Well, nothing happened yesterday."...."

Видео Marion D. Hanks | Fuller Understanding | 1982 канала BYU Speeches