By
Maurine Jensen Proctor
The
Lord could have sent me no greater witness that he knows and
cares for me than what happened when I was a 19-year-old freshman
at the University of Utah. I attended a fireside given by
Neal Maxwell in a large hall, packed with students. The seats
rose tier upon tier and I sat somewhere in the middle, hearing
him speak for the first time.
I
don’t remember what he said that day, only how I felt, as
his message pierced and expanded me, seemed to rivet me in
place—as if across those rows he were talking just to me.
Isn’t it interesting the way the Spirit makes you feel so
personally known, while affirming the same thing to every
person in a room? When you feel that swelling, the words
come spiritually customized directly to your soul, as if the
universe were designed specifically to answer the yearnings
of your heart.
After
his talk, he opened up a few moments for questions and I asked
one. Later, I was one of a flood of students who approached
him. I had another question.
After
all these years, I can’t reconstruct what those questions
were, but I know where I was in my life. I had begun to feel
inklings of the Spirit, shots of light across the bow of my
soul. I had felt a quiet voice of invitation from the Lord
inviting me to Him. These hints were delicious to me, but
my gospel understanding was scant. It seemed that what I
had heard most about in my Church classes growing up was keeping
the Word of Wisdom. For me as a teenager, the gospel had
been a habit, like a suit of Sunday clothes I could put on
when appropriate. Only in the briefest moments had it penetrated
to my soul.
But
in the last year or so I had really been striving to know
for myself, to weigh the gospel against all the secular learning
I was assimilating at a much greater rate. I read the Book
of Mormon for the first time, asked for Jesus the Christ
for Christmas. I began to sense that there was a powerful
world of spiritual awareness beyond the material surface of
this world. I wanted to open that door that seemed to hang
between me and something more.
So
I asked my question, and Neal Maxwell, who was not yet an
apostle or a general authority, but an executive of the university,
did such a kind thing, an astonishing thing really. I wasn’t
someone who could remotely be considered as part of his responsibility.
I wasn’t in his church stewardship. He wasn’t my teacher,
counselor, or advisor. Yet, he turned and listened intently
to me, sensing everything I felt behind my question. For
a few moments my concerns were his entire focus. He communicated
compassion and understanding, and he offered real help for
my quest. He suggested things I could read and invited me
to come to his home and he would point me toward more reading.
Later,
in his living room, he pulled book after book off his shelf
about coming to know God, suggested authors I hadn’t studied,
sent me home with a book to read. I remember being so excited
about one book he suggested, I stayed up all night reading
in the bathroom, the only light available since my roommates
were asleep.
I
thought it so gracious at the time, but it was only with maturity
that I began to understand the magnanimity of the soul who
would look at one earnest, but unsure freshman and be willing
to take time to give her a bit of gospel tutoring. How could
he have taken time from a pressing schedule for one random
person, just a face in the crowd really? How could he have
worked me in to a day that must have been flooded with too
many responsibilities already? And, I know from letters that
have come in from others here at Meridian, that he was never too busy for individual ministrations
like this.
Casting
those calm and discerning eyes about that day at the fireside,
he must have sensed the enormity of my yearning for spiritual
things and answered it with a sacrifice of his time. How
could I have been so privileged? Only because, like all of
us, I am a child of God, and Neal Maxwell was—long before
being called to the apostleship—his true disciple.
Zeezrom
“was convinced that” Alma and Amulek “knew the thoughts and
intents of his heart” (Alma 12:7). So I felt when Neal Maxwell answered my simple question
that afternoon with an invitation to deeper study. It changed
my life. It expanded and matured me in spiritual things and
I felt light bursting upon me as I read and studied.
Elder
Maxwell said, “God, who oversees the interlacings of galaxies,
stars, and worlds, asks us to confess His hand in our personal
lives, too. Have we not been reassured about the fall of
one sparrow and that the very hairs of our heads are numbered?
God is in the details! Just as the Lord knows all of his
vast creations, He also knows and loves each in any crowd—indeed,
He knows and loves each and all of mankind.”
“Consider
His tender salutations to Moses—“I know thee by name, and
thou hast also found grace in my sight” (Exodus 33:12)
God
knows us by name, and that day in a crowded hall when I was
19, he sent Neal Maxwell as his emissary to tell me.
Not
Yet the Ending
It
is tempting to end the story there—wrap it up with a nice
neat bow, but life doesn’t usually offer such tidy finishes.
Even after you see the valley of peace in the distance, you
have to walk there on a sometimes rocky, stumbling road.
So
life went on for me as it does for everyone from age 19 and
that ignited fire of spirituality. My vision of what life
would be was often edited and changed, my expectations sometimes
dashed. I found that life offered joy, but also heartrending
disappointment and even tragedy, that it was one thing to
embrace eternal principles wholeheartedly and another thing
in the face of tedium, sorrow or dimmed hopes to live what
you know. I learned that we can comprehend more than we can
developmentally deliver, be farther ahead in our minds than
we are in our hearts.
In
short, I received the hard and wonderful lessons of mortality,
what Elder Maxwell sometimes called the “wintry doctrines.”
In mortality we experience chastening, wrenching, the bitter
as well as sweet. We are pushed to exceed what we thought
were our limits. We fall to our knees in desperate need and
sometimes wonder if we’ve been heard. We feel the push and
pull of the battle between light and darkness raging around
us, the seemingly continual struggle against discouragement
as we quest to be disciples of Christ. We find that sometimes
progress is inch by inch and the journey to wholeness is only
for the adventurous and courageous, for those who can finally
confess that they are nothing without the atonement.
In
those years and then decades ahead from 19, it was still Elder
Maxwell who so often taught me through his words in General
Conference and his prolific writing, saying just the things
I needed to hear as if speaking to me personally.
Life
taught me, for instance, that I had a tendency to want to
counsel the Lord about what I wanted my life to be like and
feel crushed that he didn’t rearrange reality to fit what
I wanted or sometimes desperately felt I needed. I found
out that some times I pledged consecration with my lips and
then held part of myself back, as if afraid what the Lord
would ask or angry at what he didn’t seem to deliver.
Yet
Elder Maxwell’s writing addressed this failing and so I carried
a copy of one of his talks with me until it was dog-eared
and worn out. It is called “Willing to Submit”, his conference
address from April of 1985.
He
wrote:
