Emma's Talk

Emma is blaming the fact that she was waiting on me after church last week on the encounter she had with a bishopric member running into her and taking it as an opportunity to ask her to speak this week.  I told her that the only thing I did was save the bishopric member from a phone call to our house.  She did this talk completely 100 percent herself.  The only thing I did was hand her the book she referenced and tell her about section 188 of the d and c.  She had been having a hard time all week trying to decide how to talk about the scripture she was given for the basis of her talk.  My only advice was that she pick one aspect of the verse and talk about that.  She said she had an epiphany in the shower and knew exactly what direction to go. 

So, here it is:

Good morning. Today I have been asked to speak about 1 Nephi: Chapter 1, verse 1. Um I was a little nervous about this, well I still am, because it is based off of one verse and  this is a verse many of us have read many times so I didn’t want to mess it up and say something wrong but here goes nothing. So to start off I am going to go ahead and just read the verse. It says I, Nephi having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days. Ok so basically this is telling us why Nephi was chosen to be the person to write down the records and be in charge of them. I decided to make this more personal and choose one thing that I could apply to my life and then expand upon it a little bit. I chose to not take my parents advice and write about having goodly parents but decided to talk about how we can become highly favored of God, and who can be highly favored of God, because let’s be honest, who doesn’t want that. So to start off who can become highly favored of God, and the answer to that would be anyone. John Bytheway talked a little bit about this in his sermons in a sentence book and he talks about how God has not just nephites and lamanites and so on he also has favor-ites. We choose to be one and to be recipients of Gods favor. You just have to do the right things. It says in the first few lines of 1 Nephi chapter 17 verse 35 Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God. He is the heavenly version off our father and we all know even if our parents love us equally, as God does that doesn’t mean there can’t be a little favoritism. Like in my family for example I know without a doubt that my little brother Ethan is my mom’s favorite child. He isn’t picky so he eats everything she makes and is a mama’s boy so he always tells her he loves her and just giggles his way out of trouble. So while it may stink not being on that favoritism side we can choose to be the favorite child and kiss up as well. There are soma advantages to this. For example I was thinking about my talk last night at the Chili Cook-off  and my mom brought a Chili and Ethan got only that chili of course. After he finished he came up to my mom and told her she was wonderful and then he repeated this probably seven more times. So I decided to do a talk about this because my brother Jared and I always complain a lot to my mom about her having favorites, when really we could be too if we tried harder like John Bytheway said. So how can we do this with God? Some of the ways we can become highly favored of God can be found in the scriptures one of these places we can read about this is in Alma 27 and this is where the people had sworn off taking up arms (or weapons)  and we can read verse 27 that says And they were among the people of Nephi, and also numbered among the people who were of the church of God. And they were also distinguished for their zeal towards God, and also towards men; for they were perfectly honest and upright in all things; and they were firm in the faith of Christ, even unto the end. And then if we skip to verse 30 it says And thus they were a zealous and beloved people, a highly favored people of the Lord.  So because they were “Honest and upright in all things, had a zeal towards God and man, and firm in the faith of Christ even unto the end, they were highly favored off the Lord. They were also obedient unto the commandments they had been given, stuck to their promises to god, and were a righteous people.  I also wanted to talk about what some of the advantages to of being highly favored of the Lord are, we can see that Nephi was chosen to do an important task for the Lord in 1 Nephi chapter 1 verse 1 but we can also look to other scriptures to see some other things we can get, In doctrine and covenants section 130 verse 21 it says And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated. So basically God can give us any blessing he sees fit. There are several examples of these blessing in section 88 of the doctrine and covenants and many other places but I don’t have time to go through them all which shows us that there are a lot. So I would like to close my talk by bearing my testimony that I know that God loves us all equally but I also know that we can choose to become highly favored off the Lord and do his will and if we do we will be blessed and I know we can use this in other aspects off our life as well by doing what we need to do to get a desired outcome and I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Now, you may say that I am biased, but she totally nailed that talk! It had all the important elements, she used the scriptures and she applied them to her life and then testified of what she knew.  She even had people laughing with her assessment of our family dynamics and the goodly parents comments.  She is definitely my daughter and I am so proud of her. 

After church we have choir but this week I had a meeting to attend, so Emma went alone.  She said that they were talking about her talk in there and that one of the ladies (I'm working on being kind so we'll just leave a description of her out) commented "well, I don't have a favorite, I love all my children the same.  There are different things I love about each of them."  I'm sure you can imagine the tone she used while saying that.  I asked Emma if anyone added their comments to hers and she said no, everyone just ignored her.  One of the other adults in there, who's Mom is our choir director, joked about how she was her Mom's favorite and she was happy to list all the reasons if they wanted. :0)  Emma said it was funny and that everyone loved her talk.  She also said (I'm paraphrasing to the best of my memory here) "that's just silly if you don't think there are favorites.  We just learned how there are certain things you can do to become of favor-ite of the Lord.  That carries over to every aspect of our lives." She wondered if the lady had never been anyones favorite because she doesn't understand that.  She also told me that she knows that there are things she can do if she wants to become my favorite and she realized how there were things she could do if she wanted that position (they are very similar to the things she needs to do to become favored of the Lord) - she had already been doing this with teachers at school and forgot to apply it in other areas. 

Stephen R Covey used to talk about emotional bank accounts.  The positive deposits and negative withdrawals.  Kids who appear to be favorites have learned how to make lots of deposits into their parents EBA's so that when they make a withdrawal the bank account isn't overdrawn.  That's what we are talking about here.  There is a natural order and law to things.  Does it mean you love the kids that make more withdrawals less, no.  A perfect example of that is the prodigal son.  Sometimes you have to invest even more time on the kids making all the withdrawals - so that turns out looking like favoritism as well.  So you see, there's no winning here! haha :0)