CC #18 Brothers and Sisters in Christ

The main point of the transcription is that we are all spiritual brothers and sisters in Christ, and that there is division and prejudice in the world because people focus on their differences rather than recognizing their shared humanity. The speaker highlights the importance of abandoning prejudice and promoting respect for all of God's children. They discuss various types of differences that divide us, such as political, racial, social, economic, cultural, and ideological differences. The negative effects of social media in exacerbating division are also mentioned. Overall, the message emphasizes the need to overcome prejudice and work towards unity and love for all. Surely, the Lord God will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets. How blessed we are to have a living prophet today. Brothers and sisters, the Savior declared, whether by my own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same. Welcome to Conference Chronicles, where we systematically take one conference talk per week from the previous conference and dissect it and learn from it. I'm your host, Taylor Lithgow, and I firmly believe that as we listen to and apply the Lord's teachings through His living prophets, we will fulfill the full measure of our creation and we will be prepared for the Lord at His second coming. So please join with me each week as we take this quest called Conference Chronicles. Hello everybody, and welcome on in to this week's episode of Conference Chronicles. I apologize for missing last week. The week kind of was busy, got away from me, and I just didn't take the time to record, and so I apologize. It's not because I didn't like the talk, because I loved it. It was by Elder Suarez, Ulysses Suarez of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and it's entitled Brothers and Sisters in Christ. So the main point of his talk is that we are all spiritual brothers and sisters in Christ. We have so much in common, and yet oftentimes in the world we seem to focus on our differences. He points out that there tends to be so much hate and prejudice and discrimination because we're focusing on our differences and not focusing on the eternal truth that we are indeed brothers and sisters. So let me start by reading an excerpt from the beginning of his talk. He says, The gospel of Jesus Christ teaches that we are all begotten spirit sons and daughters of heavenly parents who truly love us, and that we lived as a family in God's presence before we were born on this earth. The gospel also teaches that we were all created in the image and likeness of God, therefore we are equal before him. I liked that, and I just wanted to highlight three eternal truths that I heard from what he said. One, we are literal spirit children of heavenly parents. Two, we're created in the likeness of those heavenly parents. And three, we are all equal before them. So moving forward, he quoted from our prophet, President Nelson, in a talk he gave in October of 2020 entitled Let God Prevail, and here's what President Nelson says, I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God's children. I also wanted to read an excerpt from a social media post released by the church in June of 2020, and it's the prophet speaking in this post. And here's again what President Nelson says, The creator of us all calls on each of us to abandon attitudes of prejudice against any group of God's children. Any of us who has prejudice toward another race needs to repent. During the Savior's earthly mission, he constantly ministered to those who were excluded, marginalized, judged, overlooked, abused, and discounted. As his followers, can we do anything less? The answer is no. We believe in freedom, kindness, and fairness for all of God's children. Let us be clear. We are brothers and sisters, each of us the child of a loving father in heaven. His son, the Lord Jesus Christ, invites all to come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female. It behooves each of us to do whatever we can in our spheres of influence to preserve the dignity and respect every son and daughter of God deserves. Any nation can only be as great as its people. That requires citizens to cultivate a moral compass that helps them distinguish between right and wrong. Never has one wrong been corrected by a second wrong. Evil has never been resolved by more evil. We need to foster our faith in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. We need to foster a fundamental respect for the human dignity of every human soul, regardless of their color, creed, or cause. And we need to work tirelessly to build bridges of understanding rather than creating walls of segregation. I plead with us to work together for peace, for mutual respect, and for an outpouring of love for all of God's children. Okay, wow, there is a lot there. A lot to unpack, and what a powerful message, truly. The words that the prophet chose were pointed and clear and concise. He did not mince words. He said that for any of us who has prejudice towards anyone, we need to repent. Elder Suarez goes on to add to President Nelson's words, and he says, as a global and ever-growing church, following this invitation from our prophet is a vital prerequisite for building the Savior's kingdom in every nation of the world. And isn't that true? In order for the work to move forward, any attitudes of prejudice need to be abolished. It is impossible for the work to move forward without that. Can you imagine being a missionary going into a foreign land with people that look differently than you, behave differently, have different customs and cultures, and you have an attitude of prejudice towards them, or superiority of any kind? It will be impossible to spread the love of Jesus Christ to that people. And again, I'll remind us of the most important thing taking place on the earth today. President Nelson says, the gathering of Israel is the most important thing taking place on the earth today. It is impossible to do that work, the most important work, gathering of Israel, if there is any inkling of prejudice in our hearts. So I think it's no secret that there's plenty of division happening in our world today. What are some of the things you guys have noticed that divide us? I've noticed that usually it's just a difference of some kind. Some sort of a difference between us are the things that seem to divide people. So what kind of differences? Of course there's political differences. And this one seems to be creeping into our world more and more and more. How about these last few election cycles? Holy cow. So much division. Any older person I've asked, you know, over the age of 60, about these last few election cycles have told me that they have never seen something so divisive. They've never lived through political campaigns that have created so much division among the American people. I wanted to point out something that the prophet said in that social media post from a few years ago. A nation can only be as great as its people. And then put that up next to Abraham Lincoln's quote when he said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. And it makes me feel a little worried about the future of our country, right? Our nation is only as strong as we are, the citizens of it. And if we're divided amongst ourselves, how can we stand, as Honest Abe said. Okay, so there's political differences. What else? Of course, there's racial differences. There's been racism that has existed throughout the history of the world. And again, isn't it so odd that we have hatred or division with another human being because of where they're from, or the way they look, or the color of their skin? It just seems so backwards and twisted that we are literally spiritual brothers and sisters. We are a nation of loving, heavenly parents. We have the same divine heritage and same divine potential and purpose, but yet there's hostility and hatred and slavery and all manner of prejudices because of somebody's race. Okay, what other differences? There's of course, social differences and economic differences. When I think of these, I think more of like classes. You know, what neighborhood do you live in? How much money do you have? What's your status in the community? All of these types of things are all too prevalent in our societies and in our culture. Speaking of that, another difference I've noticed is cultural differences or customs that different people have. This can come down to the language that we speak, the food we eat, the traditions that we have in our different cultures and customs. All of these things that really can provide beauty and diversity into the world, all too often will end up dividing us and causing prejudice. Another thing that I thought of was ideological differences. This one's very common and you see it on social media a lot. Because somebody thinks differently than you, all of a sudden we just don't like them or don't respect them or whatever it might be, just because they might have different ideologies. So again, there's political, racial, social, economic, cultural, and ideological differences that we all have, which is very normal and natural. So why are we allowing them to divide us? I think we can all recognize that social media has played a hand in accelerating this division. Of course, like any tool, it can be used for good or bad. We see that social media has accelerated missionary work, of course, and it's allowed relationships to be intact or strong, even when people are living on opposite sides of this earth. But I think I might argue that the negative effects of social media have far outweighed the positives, and you might disagree with that, and I'm open to being wrong. But it's amazing how social media has accelerated this division. I don't know if any of you have seen the documentary called The Social Dilemma, but essentially there is somebody interviewing former executives of these large social media companies, Meta, you know, who does Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, so on and so forth. These former executives are being interviewed and asked about the monsters that they helped to create, essentially. They all admit that they will not let their children use social media. That says something, doesn't it? When the creator of these platforms won't allow their own children to use them. But they explain how the AI and predictive technology that has been created is way too intelligent and has already taken over so much, and we can do nothing about it. It's way too far gone, and it talks about how it can track everything we do. Every eye movement, everything we look at, if we pause over one photo longer than another, especially if we click on a photo or a video or whatever it might be, it's just telling the algorithm what we're interested in, and it will feed us more and more and more of that thing. So how this is relevant when it comes to division is somebody will be on social media and they think that everything they're consuming is, number one, true, which a lot of the times it isn't, but number two, that everyone else is seeing the same thing. Hey, I have Facebook, I have Instagram, so does the other person. They must be seeing the same things that I am. But that could not be further from the truth. We just get fed things that we show interest in, so we become more and more engulfed and entrenched in one way of thinking, while our next-door neighbor might be getting further and further entrenched in a completely opposite way of thinking. So we are literally next-door neighbors, but we have completely differing ideologies about the world and everything in it, and it leads to a lot of online hatred and bullying, and it leads to a lot of us becoming not very sympathetic or understanding or open-minded towards people that might differ from us in any way. And it is really quite scary. At the end of this documentary, the person asking these executives questions asks, so where do you see all of this going then? And this specific executive said, civil war, which is a scary thought, right? The fact that this silly little social media platform has the potential to cause such great upheaval, but ultimately, small and simple things do bring about great things, whether for the good or for the bad. So on that note, let's maybe talk about a few extreme examples that we've already witnessed in our world today. And I'm not bringing these up so that we can continue to wallow in negativity, but so that perhaps history doesn't repeat itself, and also so that we can glean some maybe root causes of these divisions and prejudices so we can correct them in our own personal lives. So the first one I thought of was the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and this is perhaps fresh on my mind because I went to Rwanda in August of last year, and before going there, Cassidy and I watched the movie Hotel Rwanda. For any of you who haven't not seen that movie, I would recommend it. I think it's a good movie. But while in Rwanda, we went to the genocide memorial and learned a lot more about the history of the country, and especially the history of this genocide. It happened in 1994. That was the year Cassidy was born. That was 30 years ago. Just to explain kind of over the top what happened is there were 2 million Rwandans that were murdered, that were massacred in 3 months. In 3 months' time, 2 million Rwandans were murdered. So the people that were murdered were called Tutsis, and the people that were doing the murdering were called Hutus. They were both Rwandans, okay? I want to be clear, they were all Rwandans. They were just tribes of people in Rwanda. But oftentimes, they looked very similar, and behaved very similar, and even married each other, and were neighbors to each other. So a little bit of a backstory on how these tribes were even created, or how any of this division started. I'll kind of go back to where Rwanda was colonized by Germany in 1897, before Belgium took control in 1916. So in this colonial administration, the Europeans considered the Tutsis to be superior to the Hutus. And so they collaborated with the Tutsi monarchy to be the rulers of Rwanda. So being a Tutsi was commonly equated with a life of superiority and domination, whereas being a Hutu was associated with inferiority and subordination. The Tutsis were predominantly herdsmen, while the Hutus were predominantly farmers. Sometimes they're described to as ethnic groups, but they really weren't. They're the same ethnicity. Their main differences were mostly just occupational, what they did for work. For instance, they shared the same language, they shared the same culture, they lived in the same regions, they married each other. Hutus, if they acquired larger amounts of cattle, could become Tutsis. Whereas if there's Tutsis that had decreasing number of cattle, they could become Hutus. So these tribes that were administered by the Europeans when they colonized in the early 1900s continued to be reinforced over time. Like for instance, in 1933, the Belgian colonists introduced identity cards. So formerly it was kind of more of a loose, flexible system. It now became very formal in 1933 when these identity cards were administered. Another key point was in 1962, this is when Rwanda gained its independence, the Hutu government maintained the identity cards. So even after they became an independent country in 1962, they still maintained these cards, distinguishing between the Hutus and the Tutsis. So from this point until 1994, so about 30 years later, there just became an increasing amount of propaganda surrounding the differences between the Hutus and the Tutsis. There was newspapers created, radio stations, where Hutus would smear the image of the Tutsi people and they would stir up fear, saying that the Tutsis were trying to overthrow them and they were creating some secret way to get rid of all of them. And in reality, the Hutu people were the ones calling the Tutsis cockroaches and they created their own Ten Commandments where they couldn't marry Tutsis or hire a Tutsi person or work for a Tutsi. There's a bunch of rules that they lived by that if you were quote unquote a real Hutu, you would abide by these. It was essentially just propaganda to perpetuate this hatred towards their brothers and sisters of the same ethnicity. So fast forward, 1994, they had been training an army, a militia, and they identified a date where they were going to shoot down the airplane of the president of their country and then they announced over the radio to quote unquote exterminate the cockroaches. So that was the key word for all of the Hutu people to begin murdering or in their words exterminating all of their Tutsi brothers and sisters. As we learned about this genocide in the memorial, it was so saddening to see all of the atrocities. Most of the murders were committed by machete. But of course there was lots of people being shot, but also many people were hacked down with machetes. So many women and children that were abused and murdered along with of course men. It was just horrible. And to think that it happened so recently. Now the second example I thought of was the Holocaust. This is probably the most common one that we would all think about, but I did look up on DoSomething.org and learned a few additional key points about the Holocaust. I'll read some of these key points. Okay, so the Holocaust was a state-sponsored mass murder of millions of Jewish people, queer people, people with disabilities, and other persecuted groups by the Nazi regime. The majority of the killings occurred from 1941 to 1945, but Jews began being persecuted by the Nazi regime starting all the way back in 1933 when Hitler came into power in Germany. The Jewish people were excluded from public life on September 15, 1935 when the Nuremberg laws were issued. These laws also stripped German Jews of their citizenship and their right to marry Germans. Kristallnacht, I don't know if I'm saying that right, but it means the night of broken glass, occurred on the night of November 9, 1938. This is when Nazis pillaged, burned synagogues, broke windows of Jewish-owned businesses, and attacked Jewish people in Austria and Germany. 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Starting in 1939, the Nazi government ordered all Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. The tactic isolated Jews from the rest of society and made it easier for them to be identified and targeted. So following Germany's invasion of Poland, Jews were forced to live in confined areas called ghettos, sometimes sealed off from the rest of the city by fences and barbed wire. In those ghettos, they faced shortages of food and medicine and the constant fear of being deported to concentration camps. The Nazis constructed over 44,000 incarceration sites, which included detention centers, forced labor camps, and killing centers. They functioned independent of any judicial review, and torture, starvation, and mass murder were frequent. Approximately six million Jewish people died during the Holocaust, and nearly a third of them died within the span of three months during the killing campaign Operation Reinhardt. Ultimately, two-thirds of all Jewish people living in Europe during World War II were killed by the Nazi regime. In addition, millions of other individuals were also killed during the Holocaust, including Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, queer people, and people with disabilities. Okay, I'll pause there. So again, what were some of the common threads that we noticed here? What were some of the differences? In the case of the Rwandan people, it was kind of this fabricated difference. It's almost like they created differences for the sake of creating differences. The same ethnicity, lived in the same country, spoke the same language, formally married each other. It was all so strange that they were created into these tribes of Hutus and Tutsis, created identification cards. Essentially, the main difference was their occupation, really. If you had more cows, you were a Tutsi, and yet they used these differences, and it festered and festered and festered over the years until the mass genocide that occurred. As for the Holocaust, Germany was being ruled by a sick, sick individual who somehow had it in his mind that their country would be more pure and powerful if they could also exterminate anyone who was different from them. The Jewish people were a different race. They had a different religion. They probably had different customs and practices and cultures. They may have eaten different foods. Are any of these things scary? Do any of these things justify mass genocide? Of course not. Of course the answer is no. So then why do they happen? As I pondered this question, I think it boils down to pride. And if you haven't listened to the episode I released a few weeks ago entitled Humble to Accept and Follow by Elder Coke of the Seventy, I would really advise you to go listen to that one as well. I do a deep dive into humility and pride and I quoted a lot from Elder Benson's talk, Beware of Pride. But with that being said, pride wears so many faces, right? And one of those is fear. So a lot of this division or hate that we see in the world comes down to fear and pride. We're scared of what is different from us. If we don't understand it, sometimes it's our natural inclination to be afraid of it and to want to get rid of it. In Elder Benson's talk, Beware of Pride, he says, another face of pride is contention. Arguments, fights, unrighteous dominion, spouse abuse, riots, and disturbances all fall into this category of pride. So while all of us listening to this podcast right now can agree that mass genocide and murder is terrible and we would never want to be a part of it. How do we recognize pride and more specifically prejudice or division that might sneakily creep into our minds and hearts? How might you recognize that in your life? And then on the other side of that same coin, how can we fix it? How can we be better as individuals and as societies? Before I get to answering that question, I kind of wanted to share some good news, a bright spot that could possibly come from those terrible, heinous situations, the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust. While it might seem so dark, like no good can ever come from it, the beautiful thing is we have a God that can make beauty out of ashes. He can turn something ugly and allow us to learn from it. So while I was only in Rwanda for a relatively short amount of time, I was very impressed by the country. It was extremely clean. They have pretty strict laws against littering, but the great thing about it is the whole community will come together. I think that once a month, everybody has an assigned cleaning day where everyone just cleans their area out in the world. So they seem to have immense buy-in from everybody there. The other thing I found really impactful is it is illegal now to refer to anyone by the name of Hutu or Tutsi. They are all Rwandans now. It's illegal to use those tribal terms. We also saw many video clips of individuals who had survived the genocide and have since provided a lot of outreach for others who have also survived, and there's been lots of healing and forgiveness from these individuals, which I find so beautiful and so moving. As for the Holocaust, I'm going to share an experience that was shared in General Conference in October of 2013. The name of the talk is, Will Thou Be Made Whole? by Elder Timothy J. Dykes. Here's what he says. Corrie ten Boom, a devout Dutch Christian woman, found healing despite having been interned in concentration camps during World War II. She suffered greatly, but unlike her beloved sister Betsy, who perished in one of the camps, Corrie survived. After the war, she often spoke publicly of her experiences and of healing and forgiveness. On one such occasion, a former Nazi guard, who had been part of Corrie's own grievous confinement in Ravensbruck, Germany, approached her, rejoicing at her message of Christ's forgiveness and love. "'How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,' he says, "'to think that, as you say, he has washed my sins away. His hand was thrust out to shake mine,' Corrie recalled. And I, who had preached so often the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me forgive him. I tried to smile, and I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer, Jesus, I cannot forgive him, give me your forgiveness. As I took his hand, the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm, and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness, any more than on our goodness, that the world's healing hinges, but on his. When he tells us to love our enemies, he gives, along with the command, the love itself. Corrie ten Boom was made whole." That account is very moving to me. I remember listening to that General Conference talk live in October 2013. I was a missionary at the time, and I remember just sobbing hearing that story. How amazing this woman who suffered through concentration camps, her sister was killed in one of them. How she was able to speak of forgiveness and healing to the world. And not only that, she found a way to shake the hand of a man who was a guard at her own concentration camp. And the Lord gave her healing. The Lord gave her forgiveness. Somehow he was able to remind her that this man was indeed her spiritual brother in Christ still, despite the atrocities that were performed. Now, I hope that none of us will have to forgive somebody that murdered our family member or enslaved us. However, we come across people that are different from us all day, every day. So then, again, I'll come back to this question. How do we retain in our remembrance that we're all brothers and sisters, and how can we rid prejudice from our hearts? The first step is recognizing that it is there. When we become aware of something and admit it within our hearts, it starts to have less power over us. And then we can begin to change. Do we ever feel superior to others because of where we're from, where we live, what we have, what we look like? If so, we need to repent. Do we ever feel inferior to others for all of the same reasons? If so, we need to repent. So that's the first step, recognizing it within us. So I would invite all of us to search our souls and be honest with ourselves. The next point I thought of was to serve others. It's hard not to love people when you're serving them. Yesterday, I was out knocking doors, trying to save people money on their electricity, and I had a new hire in the office shadowing me to learn from me. And we saw a man laying on somebody's front lawn that was clearly a drug addict, clearly mentally ill, and unfortunately had pooped on himself and had excrement, you know, in his pants. He didn't smell very good. And it was very easy to immediately think, wow, what is wrong with this guy? I am clearly better than him. And just as those thoughts came into my mind, he and I, the guy that was shadowing me, both looked to each other and said, like, hey, should we see if this guy needs some help? As we were about to approach him, the homeowner came out of the house, and she knew who the guy was. And so we were like, hey, can we help in this situation? And he was kind of like not making a lot of sense, slurring his words. And she's like, well, you could help maybe bring him inside. So we picked him up off of the curb, right, out by the street, and he was stumbling, and so he had to put his arms around both of us, and we just walked him in, right, walked him through the front yard, walked him into the house, into one of their bedrooms in the back. And as we did so, I was filled with love for this man. So that's the second thing I would recommend, is serve. As we serve, it's impossible not to love. And then the third and final thing I'll advise is look to the example of Jesus. Study his life. As we study him and his life, we will learn from his perfect example. He is our master, and he is the perfect example of not discriminating or having prejudice in his heart. I will close with this excerpt from Elder Suarez's talk. He says, during his earthly ministry, Jesus so perfectly exemplified this principle as he went about doing good unto all people, inviting them to come unto him and partake of his goodness, regardless of their origin, social class, or cultural characteristics. He ministered, healed, and was always attentive to everyone's needs, especially those who at the time were considered different, belittled, or excluded. He denied none, but treated them with equity and love, for he saw them as his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the same Father. One of the most striking occasions when this occurred was when the Savior traveled to Galilee, purposely taking the route which passed through Samaria. Jesus then decided to sit by Jacob's well to rest. While there, a Samaritan woman approached to fill her pitcher with water. In his omniscience, Jesus addressed her, saying, Give me to drink. This woman was amazed that a Jew had asked a Samaritan woman for assistance and expressed her surprise, saying, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest, Drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans. But Jesus, abandoning the long-held traditions of animosity between Samaritans and Jews, lovingly ministered to this woman, helping her to understand who he truly was, that is, the Messiah, who would tell all things and whose coming she was awaiting. The impact of that tender ministry caused the woman to run into the city to announce to the people what had happened, saying, Is this not the Christ? So let me close with my testimony. It was the Christ. It was our Jesus that came to her and broke down those barriers, those differences between the Jews and the Samaritans and all nations. And he invites us all to break down the barriers in our own minds and hearts and to love everyone as our spiritual brothers and sisters, because they are. I testify that this is Christ's work. This is his restored gospel. And as we seek to love everyone, the work will become natural and intrinsic. I'd like to share that differences bring beauty. Diversity brings beauty. We're all different. And isn't that amazing? We think differently. We look differently. We have different customs and cultures. And it's a beautiful thing. And I know that God is a God of beauty. He created this earth for heaven's sakes. I testify of him. And I do so in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. I learn so much every week as I prepare for these episodes, and I hope you all benefit in some way also. Please don't hesitate to share these episodes. The links for them, for what I reference to, are in the show notes below. I hope you all have a beautiful week. Next week's episode will be Praise to the Man by President M. Russell Ballard, who was at the time the acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and he has since passed away. So this ended up being his last episode. I hope you all have a beautiful week. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless.