I got called to be Bishop in November. It was an overwhelming time to be called to be Bishop, but as a Bishopric, we managed to keep our heads afloat and the building is still standing. As we rounded into the new year, I was asked when I wanted to have the annual Bishop Youth Fireside to present the Youth Theme? I figured we’d better do it right away, so I prayed and set to preparing a fireside. It was an open format with lots of questions, counter questions and joking. But I mostly shared some stories and bore my testimony of what life is all about and why we’re are here, and why it’s all made possible because of the love of God.
I want to talk to you about Life and what we want out of it? Why are we here? What is our goal in life? I mean, we had it pretty great up in the pre-earth life. We lived with loving Heavenly Parents. We had friends and family all around us, I mean, we had it good? So why leave? Why come to Earth? To be tested. Why? What’s the point of that? Are tests just stupid exercises a teacher gives us to stress us out? I know as a student, I wasn’t a big fan of tests. But, as an Electrician, when I’m trying to identify the source of a problem, testing is crucial. I need to know which part of the circuits are operational are working and which might not be working as designed. I gave the youth plenty of opportunities to share their thoughts before I continued.
I want to tell you a couple stories. When I was a kid, the older men and boys in my family would go on Canoe Trips. They’d disappear for two weeks into the back woods of Northwest Ontario. They would pack all the food they would eat, except the occasional fish fry and berry patch. They’d have finite amount of clothes, no electronics and the only shelter they’d have is a flimsy tent or a large tarp if it got particularly bad and they would need to hunker down. My first memories of this experience included a 21 hour drive back to Ontario and my mom would visit her parents and sisters while my dad and brothers, as well as uncles and cousins would embark on these trips and I would stay with mom, since I was too young to go.
But I heard the stories and the adversity they would face and Canoe trips did not sound fun. We’d have to help them get to the drop off point and the hiking alone was enough to scare me from ever wanting to go on one. But after a few weeks of visiting cousins and sleeping in and hanging out, it’d be time to pick everyone up. The excitement from those trips, the stories that were told and the memories made that I would hear about made me want to go. So I prepared. I remember a few years later, just prior to my first canoe trip, I would put rocks in a backpack and hike around town practicing carrying a heavy load. That lasted until I saw some friends putting coins on the train track or swimming in the river or something like that and I’d go play with them.
Regardless, the canoe trip came, and it was hard, and there were days that I didn’t want to be there, and I complained, and I murmured, and I questioned why it had to be so tough. There were rainy days where you were drenched. There were long, muddy, muskeg infested swamps that we had to portage across that left you soaked to the bone and often with a leech or two stuck to you. There were days we paddles 20km, there were sunburnt shoulders or legs. We slept in ½ inch foamies that stuck to your sunburnt shoulders. The mosquitoes in Northwestern Ontario have been known to carry off small dogs and in the back woods, they were relentless. You’d have little food. We’d start the day off with oatmeal or coyote mix pancakes, that were burnt on the outside and raw in the middle, but you ate it, cause there was nothing else. You’d get trail mix or an eatmore bar for lunch and when you’d finally get to your next camp, tired, dirty and hungry, you’d get a small bowl of back woods Kraft Dinner. Not nearly enough to fill you up, but you ate it and savoured it and if you wanted to eat more, you’d go fishing. Limited food wasn’t the worst thing though because, the more you ate, the more you had to go #2… and #2 in the woods is a lot of fun, especially when 10 Trillion mosquitoes in the neighbouring few square kilometres.
I’m not telling you this to scare you from ever going on a canoe trip. Because I was all too aware of these issues after my first canoe trip, and I still went on 3 more. There is nothing about the canoe trip that I hated. It was uncomfortable, but even the difficult times helped me to grow. The fun times were great. Snorkeling, Fishing, Stargazing, Playing card games, sitting around the fire, or when there’s be an all-girls group camping on the same lake and we’d go bring them a fish fry.Who has been on a Pioneer Trek? Would you go again? It was tough though right? (Of the 20 or so people in the room, half had been on a Trek and to a person, every single one would go again.)
I think this is a little like how we viewed earth before we came. We’d heard the stories. We’d heard the challenges and the triumphs. We were jazzed about the chance to come down and show our friends what we could do. But, then we get here, and the veil is placed over us, and we forgot. We forgot that we were gonna kill it. We were going to crush this life and return to our Heavenly Parents honourably, the best possible version of ourselves. But we simply forgot.
So I bring us back to where we started? What do we want out of life? What are our goals? How do we get there? How do we be most happy and experience life? Do we just hang out in our rooms playing video games? Is that really why we wanted to come to Earth to receive a mortal body?
Last year in June, I worked some overtime and my boys were giving their mother an especially rough time. They were complaining a lot and we being especially ungrateful, all of which wreaked of first world problems. So I thought a little canoe trip style wilderness camping would help teach them that life could be so much harder and if it were, they were tough and could do hard things. I booked some time off work, we packed our gear for a two-night hiking trip to Elk Lakes. The weather was decent, so we even packed our swimming trunks.
We packed everything tight, let their teachers know they’d miss a few days of school and headed out. When we got to the Elk Lakes Parking, we noticed very few vehicles, but we unloaded our gear, and hiked the 1.5km to the Lower lake. We were planning on using it as a base camp and hike up to the Glacier and Water Fall the next day. Because we were going to be spending a couple nights and we had nothing else going on, the 3 of us did 2 round trips, while I did a third later in the evening. We had everything we could need out there. We swam, we fished a little. We cooked and sat by the fire and as it started to rain, we put our food in the Bear Proof Boxes well away from the Camp ground, I chopped some kindling for the morning fire and tidied up camp and we settled in for the night, playing a few card games before dozing off to the sound of rain on the tent.I woke up several hours later to no rain. But the sound of soft snow hitting the tent. I groaned, knowing this would complicate our hike the next day. I got up, shook the tent off to prevent it from collapsing under the weight of the snow and fell back asleep. I woke up again a few hours later to the sound of rain again. Big. Heavy. Raindrops. At that point, I was starting to get concerned. Not only was it going to be cold out, but now the snow that had fallen would be slush and we would have little hope of staying dry. Hiking was out of the question. Staying warm and dry was the game now. As I lay there contemplating strategies to stay dry, One of the boys called out and said he needed to use the outhouse and was too scared to go alone. I escorted him, sloshing through 4 inches of slush in the process. After he was done, I sent him back to bed and I set out to make a fire. It was like 5:30 and I figured I could get a good fire going and have breakfast ready for them a few hours later. It was raining hard and most of the wood was saturated. My dry paper and kindling lit right away, but were soon snuffed out by the big drops of rain. There was little I could do to keep that flame glowing. I built a shelter for the fire, but that barely helped. I collected dry brush from under trees, but that would burn up quickly without even so much as drying the slightly bigger wood I had prepared to use next. Finally, I turned to the bug spray and proceeded to use that as a blowtorch. Combining that with the shelter, and the multiple efforts at dry wood, I finally got some coals, which was enough to start some of the bigger logs. This took a solid hour. I decided to give it 30 minutes with no help and see if the fire would last if I brought some of the gear back to the truck. It did. So I built up the fire and headed out with my first load. I managed one complete round trip before I was soaked to the bone. I could not have been more wet. I managed another trip, stoking the fire between loads, before I needed to wake up the boys. I loaded up for a third load while they were waking up, getting dressed and having some breakfast by the fire.When I got back from that third trip, I warned them of the danger we were in, that we were not hiking for fun that day and that the goal would be survival and we’d need to get our gear to the truck and drive home. The best chance for warmth was to get to the truck. They’d need to carry some gear and if they got cold, or the gear got too heavy, there was nothing I could do for them, until we got to the truck. We packed up the remaining gear, said a prayer and snuffed out the fire. The last trip was tough. I was soaked to the absolute bone and frozen. The boys were struggling but being tough about it and we managed to get to the truck. We said a prayer of gratitude and started the long drive home.Was that Elk Lakes Trip a failure? Did we accomplish what I wanted to? My goal was to teach the boys we could do hard things by taking them on a long and arduous hike through difficult and unforgiving terrain. The Lord provided that exact experience, and the boys and me, all learned that we could do hard things, and to lean on the Lord, and not to go camping at the Elk Lakes in June.But, if asked, I wonder if my boys would go again? Owen, would you? (He said yes)
We just learned about Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and Nephi’s attempts to get the Brass Plates? Laman and Lemuel complained about it, but ultimately went. Did we all noticed how they didn’t seem to complain when they were being asked to go retrieve Ishmael and his daughters? Anyway, Nephi had a goal to get the Brass Plates. Plan A was to ask outright. That didn’t work. Plan B was to buy them. That didn’t work either. That’s when Laman and Lemuel were done. They had failed. But did they? What do you guys think? Up to that point in the story? Had Nephi, Sam, Laman and Lemuel in their attempts to retrieve the plates? They didn’t have them yet? I want to share with you a quote. It’s by David O McKay, and it’s in response to one of his most famous quotes. Ronald A Rasband shared this while teaching us in Magrath last year. David O McKay’s most famous quote was, “No other success in life can compensate for failure in the home.” That’s a good quote eh. Powerful stuff. But, several weeks after this quote, while doing a fireside at BYU, President McKay was asked, what constituted failure, and his response was, “When a parent stops trying.” This applies so easily to each of us, just as it applies to Laman, Lemuel, Sam and Nephi, because they didn’t give up. Laman and Lemuel wanted to, but Nephi wouldn’t let them and they didn’t refuse to stay. We know how the story ends, Nephi leans on the Lord, finds Laban drunkenly passed out on the street, argues with the Spirit a little before killing Laban, dressing in his clothes, retrieving the Plates, Scaring the crap out of his Brothers along the way before convincing Zoram to join them on their adventure to the promised land.
This brings me to us. What does all this say about us? We are going to struggle. We are going to be tested. But will we ever fail? Reggie Jackson struck out 2,600 times in baseball, the most in baseball history. But people don’t think about the strikeouts, they think about the home runs.Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments, but the 1,001 was the light bulb.Every failed experiment is one step closer the success. Nephi and his brothers didn’t get the plates after two attempts, but those two attempts taught them what they needed to do. Trust in the Lord. When we were in the Pre-Earth life, we were excited about the opportunities to come to earth. To the exact circumstances we find ourselves in today. We knew we’d fail. But we signed up anyway. When we agreed to come to earth, we decided we would Go. Now that we are here, will we Do?When Nephi struggled in getting the Plates, He Went, and Did. He and Went and did a second time and built a boat. I went and did and had experiences on a canoe trip I wouldn’t have gained any other way. Despite the trials and challenges.My boys and I went and did up to the Elk Lakes and learned we can do hard things.
I want each of you to set an ambitious goal in your life. Maybe it’s to read the Book of Mormon this year, or to make the basketball team, or to serve a mission. Set that goal, and Go and Do and the Lord will teach you, He will Bless you, and you will grow and be made better through your going and doing.
~Todd Bruce
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