Hank Smith:                      00:00:00             Coming up in this episode on followHIM.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:00:03             What has helped me have more of a Zion heart is when I’ve had to be a receiver. I’ve had to say to the Lord, “I’m in trouble. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t have the thing that I need. Can you help me? Can you send somebody to me?” I don’t want to humble myself in that way. I don’t want to have to admit that I need help. Sometimes I wish the Lord would just keep it between him and me, but he doesn’t. He sends somebody to help me and I have to acknowledge my weakness in front of them too.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:33             Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with my co-host, John Bytheway, who I like to clothe in the garment of praise. John, occasionally people will say, “Man, it’s almost like you worship that John Bytheway, with all you say about him.” Well, in Isaiah 61:3, the Lord talks about the garment of praise. I like to clothe you in the garment of praise.

John Bytheway:               00:01:00             It’s embarrassing for me too, Hank, but thank you. Yeah. I can’t live up to all this, but –

Hank Smith:                      00:01:06             Just so everybody knows that everybody listening out there says, “Is John really that great?” He really is. He really is that great. I’ve been with him one-on-one in many, many occasions, many different settings, in high stress situations. He’s still that great. He, you deserve the garment of praise. Now, John, speaking of someone who deserves the garment of praise, occasionally we’ll have someone on the show who hasn’t been on before, but we’ve quoted them. It makes me a little bit nervous, right? Here’s a person we’ve talked about multiple times on the show, but never had them here, and now they’re here and I get butterflies in my stomach. John, we are privileged today to be joined by Sister Sharon Eubank. Sharon, I am a little nervous. Welcome to followHIM.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:01:49             I’m very grateful to be here. Thank you.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:51             I’ve been looking forward to this for a long, long time. In the back of my mind, I thought, “I wonder if Sharon would ever come on the show. I wonder if I could get Sharon on the show.” The time has come. John, we’ve done four lessons in Isaiah. You’ve written a book called Isaiah for Airheads. We did Isaiah four years ago. We’re going to do Isaiah again in two years when we study the Book of Mormon. Are you thinking, “I’m done. I have learned it all.”

John Bytheway:               00:02:15             No, not even close. The thing that’s fun about Isaiah is his multiple levels of meaning. For me, I’m thinking that Isaiah 58 about fasting, I thought, Hank, what a perfect choice to have Sharon here who has spent her life doing service and humanitarian work. And I thought, oh, this is perfect. I’m looking forward to it. And I’m still an airhead.

Hank Smith:                      00:02:37             Yeah. That’s not the garment of praise. Sharon, what do you want to do today? What are we looking forward to?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:02:44             One of the things that appealed to me about coming on the program was that we were going to talk about Isaiah, not because I know a lot about Isaiah. Both of you probably know much more, but there’s so much in Isaiah that touches me when I read the scriptures. For me, I’m hoping that maybe we can just talk about three things. I love the part in Come, Follow Me this week about Jesus beginning his ministry by quoting Isaiah. So I wanted to give a little context about that, why that’s so meaningful to me. I love that Isaiah will speak and plead for the poor, for somebody who’s worked in humanitarian services like me for 30 years and anybody who has a covenant. That’s a really evocative point for me.

                                           00:03:26             I don’t think there’s anybody better than Isaiah who can speak about covenantal joy. You brought up 58 and we talk about fasting and about the purpose of the Sabbath. I just want to revel in how that feels and what it feels like when I’m depressed and sad to read a little bit about that beautiful covenantal joy that comes from my relationship with Jesus. I don’t think anybody does that better than Isaiah. That’s what I hope to talk about.

Hank Smith:                      00:03:51             Perfect. My nerves are calming and my excitement is going up for what we’re going to look at. I’ve been surprised the more I’ve really gotten into the Old Testament, how often, and Isaiah, and so does Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi, all, you are not caring for the poor. They are stealing from the poor. They’re taking advantage of the poor. They’re oppressing the poor. I’ve been surprised. Even in Isaiah 1, John, which is the preface to the entire book, Isaiah says, you need to relieve the oppressed, help the fatherless, and plead for the widow. He rebukes the leaders who grind the faces of the poor and they pass unjust laws that rob the needy. This is everywhere. Now, John, there may be someone who does not know who Sharon is, which would be surprising to me if they were a listener of our show and they’re like, never heard of her, since we quote her so much. John, do you have a bio for us? Did you get the FBI’s files? What do we have?

John Bytheway:               00:04:51             Yes, I do. Hank, you said you were a little nervous. I saw Sister Eubank. I saw Sharon at the airport a few months ago. Looked like she was going somewhere fun with some friends and I wanted to go over and say, “Hi, Sharon, you’re the best.” I was a little bit nervous myself, so next time I’ll try to stop you.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:05:08             Come say hi. I would love to see you.

John Bytheway:               00:05:10             Okay, sounds great. Sharon currently serves as the global humanitarian director for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she has spent decades working with humanitarian efforts around the world, as we’ve talked about. She earned a degree in English and history from BYU, has one of those wonderfully varied careers that makes a biography difficult to summarize. She taught English in Japan, served a mission in Finland, worked as a legislative aid in the Senate, owned a small business before beginning her work with the church’s humanitarian organization. She’s represented the church in humanitarian and interfaith settings around the world, including the G20 Interfaith Forum, Chatham House, and United Nations Conferences on Sustainable Development. Much of her work is focused on issues such as maternal and child nutrition, literacy, refugee assistance, interfaith cooperation, and the remarkable things that can happen when ordinary people decide to help one another.

                                           00:06:13             Most of our listeners probably will recognize Sharon from her service as first counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency from 2017 to 2022. And I always remember when she would give a talk, this woman is brilliant. Everybody listen. This is going to be great. She’s the author of Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World, which is a book about the enormous difference that can come from seemingly small acts of service and about people all over the world who are quietly doing extraordinary good.

                                           00:06:47             Because resumes never tell you enough about a person, her official author biography also tells us some of her interests include homemade pie recipes, Wordle, The James Webb Space Telescope, all those pictures. I can look at those all day. They’re stunning, which may be the best combo of hobbies we have ever had on followHIM, Hank. Well, you’ve got pie and the Webb Space Telescope. Sharon, we are super grateful to have you here. Thank you so much for being with us today. I’m excited for our listeners.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:07:22             That was such a generous introduction. I only have to say one thing and said after 29 years of working in church humanitarian services, I retired in April. I have turned the reins over to Elissa McConkie Gifford, who is very capable and she continues at work, but I felt so lucky to have that kind of a career.

John Bytheway:               00:07:42             And Hank, we need to say that the name of Eubank, I grew up in Salt Lake City. I remember Channel 5 News watching Mark Eubank do the weather. Can you please tell us your relationship to Mark Eubank?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:07:59             Mark Eubank is my dad. Everybody loves him and I love him too. He’s just the best. He has three interests in his life, pretty much. His family, the gospel and weather. He’s just a man with very intense passions. It’s been fun to be his daughter.

Hank Smith:                      00:08:15             Yeah. He’s a convert to the church, you told us.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:08:18             He grew up in the church, but he quit attending when he was like 14. His mother was a member, but his father wasn’t. And he married my mother who wasn’t a member of the church at all. But they moved into an apartment as newlyweds and about four doors down was this other couple and they just started inviting him out to eat and go see a movie and, “Hey, we have the missionaries coming over and you should come visit with them.” And because of that couple, my parents got active in the church and then my mom got baptized. It completely changed everything about my life. I’m proud of that couple for loving their faith enough to be able to share it with their neighbors. I’m proud of my parents too because they jumped in with both feet. They just weren’t half measures. They said, “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it all the way.” They prepared and they got sealed. They went through the temple when my mom was pregnant with me. My life is completely different because they embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I’m really, really grateful and proud of the kind of people they are.

Hank Smith:                      00:09:18             I don’t know how many children would say, “Hey, as a kid, I watched the weather.” But I did. I did. You know, seven, eight, nine years old and I’m looking forward to the weather at night. That might have been an odd childhood, but that’s what it was here in Utah. He made it so exciting. I think it’s his passion. The passion is what made you think, “This is really great.”

John Bytheway:               00:09:42             He would wear a white jacket when what was coming?

Hank Smith:                      00:09:46             When the snow was coming, yes.

John Bytheway:               00:09:48             When snow was coming and we were, as kids, you know, especially around Christmas when Mark Eubank put on the white jacket, we’re like, “Yeah, here it comes.”

Hank Smith:                      00:09:57             Yeah. It was maybe there’s no school tomorrow coat as well.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:10:03             That we all hoped for. Yeah. My dad was a real professional. I can remember being, I don’t know, 10 or 11 years old, and the Today Show had offered him to be the weatherman on the Today Show, but we had to move to New York City. And I can be aware of my parents trying to make this decision, and they prayed and fasted and they decided, “We’re not going to do that. We’re going to stay here in this market.” I look back on that as an adult now and think, “That was a fork in the road.” And, you know, we would’ve been different if they had taken that road. It’s good to know he was outstanding in what he did, and other people recognize that too.

John Bytheway:               00:10:39             Yeah, I never knew that. That’s amazing.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:10:42             And we would’ve had a beautiful life in New York City. I’m not saying it would have been bad, but it just would’ve been different.

Hank Smith:                      00:10:47             John, Sharon did not in any way, shape, or form ask us to do this, but I hope everyone will go pick up Doing Small Things with Great Love. Go online and read some of these reviews. People are saying this book changed their heart, changed their life. Funny stories. I love a good funny story. Let’s jump into the Come, Follow Me Manual. The lesson this week, the Redeemer shall come to Zion. This is our last lesson in Isaiah. The Come, Follow Me Manual starts this way. Early in his ministry, Jesus Christ visited a synagogue in Nazareth where he was raised. He stood there to read from the scriptures, opened the book of Isaiah, and read what we know as Isaiah 61. He then announced, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” This was one of the Savior’s most straightforward declarations that he was the anointed one who would heal the brokenhearted and preach deliverance to the captives.

                                           00:11:41             This scripture was indeed fulfilled on that day, and like many other prophecies of Isaiah, it is also being fulfilled in our day. The Savior continues to heal the brokenhearted who come unto him. There are still many captives who need deliverance, and there is a glorious future to prepare for, a time when the Lord will create new heavens and a new earth and cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations. Reading Isaiah opens our eyes to what the Lord has already done, what he is doing, and what he will yet do for his people. Oh, what a great introduction. All right, Sharon, how do you want to start?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:12:17             Well, you gave such a perfect segue. What I really want to talk about is a little bit more context in Jesus announcing his ministry, because Isaiah knows how to paint a picture and then to see it fulfilled when you read about this in Luke 4. So I have some friends who live in Nazareth. They are Arab Christians and they live in Nazareth, and so when I visit them, they took me to the Mount of Precipice, which is part of the scripture. We’re standing up there. It’s actually quite high. It’s higher than I envisioned. It looks way out over the plains. Jesus had just come back from fasting and being tempted of the devil. And you remember all those things that the devil said, “If you are the son of God, then try this.” Well, now Jesus is going to stand up in his home synagogue where he was raised.

                                           00:13:02             The scriptures don’t say this, but maybe there was a time when he was reading and he comes across these verses in Isaiah, and there was some revelation that he as Jehovah gave those words to Isaiah, and now as he’s reading them as a boy and he’s planning to announce his ministry. So he stands up in the synagogue, which is this, he’s going to read, and they pass him the scroll that maybe he asked for that is in Isaiah. He reads what you just read for the Come, Follow Me lessons. He says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.” Anointed means I’m the anointed one, you know, I’m the Messiah. “He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

                                           00:13:56             Then he closes the book and he gives it to the minister and he sat down and all the eyes in the synagogue are looking at him. He said unto them, then he says, This day, the scripture is fulfilled in your ears, and they don’t know what to do. Their minds are processing. Wait, is he saying about the Messiah? This is what we’ve always thought about this. I mean, he’s Joseph’s son, and if you really are that, do those miracles that you did over in Canaan, do those over here. We want to see something if you’re saying what we think you’re saying, and they move right into, you better prove it, the greed of the miracles. And then he tells them, he said, Look, Elijah came to the widow, and there were lots of widows in Israel, but he came to a Gentile widow and did the miracle with the cruse of oil and the loaves.

                                           00:14:48             Naaman, who was Assyrian, is the person that Elisha healed from his leprosy, even though there were other lepers, and they get mad. They get ticked. The scriptures say when they heard these things, they were filled with wrath and they rose up and they thrust him out of the city. You can just imagine that jostling crowd coming up out of the synagogue and pushing him up toward that, and they’re going to push him off. This is the scripture about the Messiah is being fulfilled in your ears, and they’re going to kill him. Then something happens, you know, it just says they were distracted. He passed through the midst of them and went his way. But they were so easily distracted by either do some miracles, or are you saying that we’re not as good as the Gentiles, that they just went from zero to 60, and they missed everything else he was going to say. We all missed it because they got so upset, and I have long wondered what is the rest of that sermon that he would have preached?

Hank Smith:                      00:15:48             And that’s got to be heartbreaking. These are his friends.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:15:50             Yeah, these are people he’s known his whole life.

Hank Smith:                      00:15:52             No prophet is accepted in their own country. It’s kind of a silly story, but I remember Elder Bednar when he said that they called him to be the president of BYU Idaho, his son said, you? Really? Right? Like it’s difficult. They couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see past the fact that they knew who he was.

John Bytheway:               00:16:11             Sharon, you alluded to it. Did he choose the scroll or did the minister hand him Isaiah? And I don’t know. If we had to choose a verse of scripture out of the Old Testament that describes the mission of the Savior, what would you choose? And the answer is, we don’t have to choose. Jesus chose it. That’s what I like to think. Jesus chose the one that would describe it. And notice, there’s nothing about judgment or you’re doing this wrong or condemnation or commandments. I’m going to go to Luke 4. He says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me. He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives recovering of sight to the blind.” If you had to choose a verse that describes his mission and Jesus chooses that one, to me, that’s so nice because I think we sometimes feel like, I can’t live up to all of this. There’s too many commandments that I fall short of. But what did Jesus just say? Actually, I’m here to heal broken hearts.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:17:11             I really like the next verse that’s also in Isaiah 61, and Hank, you alluded to it in the very beginning. You know, it follows this thing that we’ve just read. “To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion,” and that’s pretty much everybody. Everybody has something to mourn about. I’m going to give them beauty for their ashes. I love how that’s translated into English, and I don’t know what it is in the Hebrew, but it’s just that to give them beauty for their ashes, everything that burned down and was not what they wanted, the oil of joy for their mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.

                                           00:17:53             He didn’t read that part in Luke, but Isaiah gives us part of the rest of that. Those feel like the very things that the Savior of the world, the Messiah, would give to people who are mournful and heavy and oppressed and not growing the way that they should because he is there to help them achieve all those things that are in their hearts.

Hank Smith:                      00:18:15             Yeah. That is beautiful. John, that never occurred to me. The Savior announces himself not with, Here are the commandments. I need you to be obedient. It’s, do you have a broken heart? Do you have mourning in your life? Ashes? Spirit of heaviness? That’s why I’m here. Tells you about his, not just his mission, but his character, who he is.

John Bytheway:               00:18:42             Sharon mentioned it, that the spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord hath anointed me, an anointed one that is Messiah and in Greek, that is Christ. I hope we get to see the video someday when he says, “This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears” and what you said Sharon. They’re all like, wait, isn’t this Joseph’s son?

Hank Smith:                      00:19:03             I always tell my students, you would be playing the dot game, you know, where you’re connecting the dots with the lines and then stop and go, wait, what? What did he just say?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:19:11             And I like the part that you read from the Come, Follow Me Manual, it’s still being fulfilled. It was fulfilled that day, but it isn’t just about that one day in Nazareth. This is an ongoing story about what’s happening. Look forward to the day when you and I could be anointed, as kings and queens, as priests and priestesses, to be able to go out and minister in his name and do the same kinds of things that he would do because we’ve made a covenant. We’re his disciples. He’s just starting that then, but it has a very long trajectory, and we get to live 2,000 years later when there’s a lot of richness.

Hank Smith:                      00:19:50             That struck me yesterday. I was listening to Chad Lewis, John, you know Chad, down at BYU, and he was teaching. He said, “The thing we do here at BYU, the number one thing we do is bring people to Jesus Christ.” It’s something that is said often, of course, but it struck me. There’s just nobody else from history that we just talk about so today, relevant, active today. Sharon, this is the beginning of a couple of years of ministry for him, but really it’s not. It’s the beginning of an eternity of healing broken hearts, and he was doing it before.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:20:27             I like what you said. Jesus is claiming, I’m Jehovah. I existed in the beginning. I will exist in the end. And everything that I’m talking about, this is the work of the Father because he loves his children. I’m going to be the broker of the covenant. I’m going to be the Savior of everybody because of love. It’s been going on from the beginning. I will be there at the end. And wherever you are in this arc, I’ll be there with you. This is my work and it’s the glory of the Father.

Hank Smith:                      00:20:58             To them that mourn in Zion, I wonder if he kind of winks like that’s everyone. Everyone has had mourning in their life. What do you want to do next, Sharon?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:21:08             Before we leave this, there’s just one application that I just thought I wanted to bring up, and it is that it was so easy for that congregation that in the synagogue to get distracted. Yet, the conventional wisdom about Isaiah is, oh, skip through those in the Book of Mormon, you know, he’s so hard. I can’t understand that part. And we lose the beauty of what he has to offer by making a judgment early on of, oh, I’ll never be able to understand him. He’s hard. He’s challenging. Everybody knows that he is. Nephi, Jesus, when he speaks to the Nephites, they said, you don’t have the context to always understand what Isaiah’s talking about. I’m going to help you. I’m going to give you some explanation. And we’re lucky to have those. And I guess that’s my point. For the application, I live in a time when Isaiah, who wrote 2,600 years ago, that’s somehow been preserved all the way down to my day.

                                           00:22:03             There are reformers like Erasmus and Luther and Tyndale and others who made sure that that got put into my language. The Bible now exists in, like, 800 plus languages and thousands more are being done through AI. That idea that Tyndale and Erasmus had of, “I want even a plow boy to be able to read these words for themselves in their own language,” that has been fulfilled. In the whole history of the world, what percentage of women could read? It’s much less than 20%, and most of that 20% happened in the last couple hundred years. The fact that I’m one of those women and that I can pick up on my phone or on my bedside table and flick through Isaiah at my leisure and read it in my own language and feel the Holy Ghost come through me without any intermediary, what a miracle that is.

                                           00:22:59             It’s been eons in the making, but it’s happening right now in our time. And if we just say, oh, I can’t understand Isaiah, I don’t get that part, and just skip over it, we’re sort of ignoring the great gift that the Lord gave us in those kinds of things. And I just don’t want to ignore that. For my application, I don’t want to just get distracted by something. I don’t see any miracles in my life. Here is a miracle sitting right here in my Bible when I open up Isaiah, and I don’t want to forget that.

Hank Smith:                      00:23:30             Wow. I have the internet. In case I can’t understand, I can go look at other translations. When the Lord says in Luke 4, he says, “Preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” That confused me at one point. I went, well, what does that mean? So I went and looked at different translations of the Bible, and this was my favorite one that helped me understand. Good news translation. He has sent me to tell you the time has come.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:23:56             Yeah, that’s really happy. I said earlier in the show, I retired in April from my very long career at the church. I was released from the General Relief Society presidency, and people say to me, you know, What are you doing now? What’s your job now? And I say, I’m a minister. I love being a minister because it gives me a chance to do the things that Jesus is saying is his gospel. A little bit later down in Isaiah 61, he talks about, “They shall repair the desolations of many generations, and you shall be named the priests of the Lord, and men shall call you the ministers of our God.” I was thinking about my dad’s mother. She’s my only grandparent who’s a member of the church. Her brothers didn’t stay in the church. She married a man who wasn’t in the church. Her sons, at least her older son, he stayed home with his dad, you know, he wouldn’t go to church.

                                           00:24:48             And here’s this faithful woman who continued to pray, continued to fast about all the people that she loved in her life so that they would have these gifts that were so special and powerful to her, but they weren’t active in her family life. And I know there’s a lot of people in this situation right now, and this idea that they can repair the desolations of many generations by being a minister for all the terrible things that we’ve been through, all the things that we shouldn’t have experienced, but we did. I can be a minister in the name of Jesus Christ. I’ll never be like him, but he’s put his power on me so that I can try and be better and to repair the desolations of generations. And like my grandmother, I look at the generations that came out of my dad and her other son, they’re just trying to do the very best they can to live what she taught them, because she was a simple woman with no professional credentials.

                                           00:25:43             Nobody ever will know her name except her family, but she was faithful in her testimony and it changed generations later. And I think we have the chance to do that, whether we’re alone in our faith, if we’re expanding our faith, if we’re teaching children, if we come and participate with our family, in the ward or the branch, I think we’re lucky in that way to be able to do that.

Hank Smith:                      00:26:07             That sort of thing brings a new look to redeem the dead. It’s not just about temple work, it’s about repairing.

John Bytheway:               00:26:15             Hank, I think it was Melissa Inouye who kind of opened our eyes to that redeeming the reputations of those in the past. I thought the world is so vicious with people who have died sometimes, people in our own church history that aren’t here to defend themselves and we pass judgments on them, we do all sorts of things. Like Sharon said earlier, people are just doing the best they can. Everybody’s just doing the best they can. Maybe we can calm down and extend some grace that way, even to those who have passed on.

Hank Smith:                      00:26:51             I’ve noticed the past is pretty stubborn. It doesn’t change. You can beg the past to change and it really doesn’t, that you can actually do something about the future. It’s a little less stubborn.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:27:02             When I was in Finland, I was way out in the tiniest little island between Finland and Sweden. There was a church, one of those old churches, and so I drove up there and of course they have the graveyard and as I walk through there, they’re honoring the soldiers that from that tiny, tiny little village. I think it has a population of 2,000 people, and yet you can see there were 51 of their young men who died in 1944 when there was a big battle. And I think about those young men, they’re 18, 19, 20, they gave their blood so that that country could remain free. They didn’t get to get married and they didn’t get to have their children. They didn’t get to join the church or anything else because they gave that sacrifice in the way that Jesus also gave a sacrifice. And there’s something about joy for their mourning, the sacrifice that they gave, that breach in time and place where they didn’t get to do the things that maybe they wanted to do or maybe were even destined to do, the gospel of Jesus Christ will also make that up, that Jesus is the repairer of the breach for them in that kind of situation. I love Melissa’s idea about repairing people’s reputations. In this way, also redeeming what could have been that never was.

Hank Smith:                      00:28:19             John, here’s a quote we’ve given many times on the show. I’m going to give you a little bit longer version this time. Joseph Smith says, “I am glad I have the privilege of communicating to you some things, which, if grasped closely, will be a help to you when earthquakes bellow, the clouds gather, the lightnings flash, and the storm’s ready to burst upon you like peels of thunder. Lay hold of these things and let not your knees or joints tremble, nor your hearts faint. Then what can earthquakes, wars, and tornadoes do? Nothing. All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the Almighty. I have seen it.”

John Bytheway:               00:29:02             One of our guests years ago talked about one of the hardest things we deal with in life repeatedly is the idea of loss. Expectations, people, situations. So I’ve always loved that statement that all your losses will be made up to you. Tremendous amount of hope in that. And I was thinking about the beauty for ashes thing and just how miraculous it is that we can take dirt, you know, soil, and we can put fertilizer in it and all sorts of unmentionables in the dirt and churn it up and a salad can come out of that. That’s miraculous. Look what God can do. A beauty for ashes, another way I like to think of it as salad from that dirt.

Hank Smith:                      00:29:48             From manure.

John Bytheway:               00:29:49             Yeah. Salad from manure.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:29:53             I’m not as good as you are, Hank, at finding the source for this, but there’s that very famous quote from Joseph Smith in light of the persecution that was happening to the Saints. He said, “If they send us to hell, we’ll turn the devils out of it and make a heaven out of it.” And there’s something that I just love about that. And it goes back to John’s point about salad can come from dirt. It doesn’t really matter what elements that you have that you’re working with. If you’re working with the living God and everything responds to him, he can transform any situation, any negative thing into something that’s positive and good. It’s his nature to redeem. He cannot be stopped from redeeming things. That gives me a lot of hope when I feel weighed down by some of those things.

                                           00:30:39             And people will say, it’s not fair to expect that your losses will be made up to you outside of this life. Why? I need something in this life. I need God to show up in this life for me too. I believe that he is showing up for us every single day and that the scars that we carry will be erased and made up for us because he’s going to redeem every single particle of things that happened to us. And we’re in the process of it now.

Hank Smith:                      00:31:06             The Redeemer. I think I have written here in my scriptures, maybe it was from four years ago here in Isaiah 59, When the earth is at its most sinful point, then enters the redeemer. He is coming. The Messiah shall intercede, come to Zion and redeem the repentant. That’s right out of the heading of chapter 59.

John Bytheway:               00:31:26             Remember, Hank, when we had Kathryn Davis here a few weeks ago, she kept emphasizing the title of Restorer. If you ever have a minute, just go through the Savior’s titles one day. It will just fill you with hope. He’s a redeemer. He’s a restorer. He’s a deliverer. He’s a healer. I loved what you said, Sharon. It is his nature to redeem.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:31:50             I enjoy the chance for us to also participate in that work that we’re not very good at it, but he allows us to participate and he calls us. He invites us to be part of that so that we can learn more about it. And one of the parts that I really resonated with in Isaiah when I was reading it this time was this idea that he pleads for us to remember the poor. You’d already mentioned some of those verses, but Isaiah 65, there’s a people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face, that sacrifice in gardens and they burn incense upon altars of brick which remain among the graves and they lodge in the monuments. I think he’s saying that they live among dead things and they lodge in monuments that they think are so beautiful. They eat swine’s flesh and the broth of abominable things is in their vessels. You can’t get more pointed than Isaiah is being.

                                           00:32:45             If you go back to chapter three, the Lord stands up to plead and standeth up to judge the people. He’s going to judge those ancient princes because he says, “You have eaten up the vineyard. The spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that you beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor.” I’ve been in so many situations where people cannot progress because they are trapped in a cycle of corruption. And no matter how hard they try, they cannot remove themselves from money lenders, from inequitable systems and everything that they try to do. And the Lord is saying to those people, you had stewardship. You’re grinding the faces. I can’t think of anything more cruel than to put somebody’s face down in the dirt and grind it. And that’s what he feels about us when we don’t take care of the poor, when we don’t respond to that redemptive mission that Jesus is inviting us to participate in.

                                           00:33:51             There’s a lot of work in Isaiah that says, this is how the Lord feels when you don’t take care of the poor. And I’m inviting you as part of the gospel, this is one of your main work. You love God and you love other people. That’s the summary of the whole thing.

John Bytheway:               00:34:07             Sharon, I loved what you just said there. I feel like in my circles, we’re thinking about, ooh, have I saved enough for retirement? Is my 401K all right? But in the Philippines, I lived among people that the concern was, am I going to eat today? It was just today. I can’t even think about tomorrow. How do I feed my kids today? A long time ago, President Kimball used to speak of the threefold mission of the church. Proclaim the gospel, perfect the saints, redeem the dead, and now President Monson added care for the poor and needy. Now it’s been articulated, care for those in need, which I like how we’re bringing that to the forefront. This was the mission of the Savior. He constantly talked about it. Jehovah talked about it. Isaiah talked about it. We’ve got to have that in the forefront of our minds if we are really ministers.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:35:03             We did a really good job with the threefold mission of the church because branding-wise, we still all remember that from a long time ago. I love what President Monson did. I was working in welfare when he, as the prophet said, we’re going to add something. We’re like, you can add to the threefold mission of the church? Right. He knew from a prophetic viewpoint, if you leave out caring for the poor, we’ve lost the meaning of so much of it. I can’t live the gospel if I don’t care for the poor. I can’t redeem the dead if I don’t care for the poor and I can’t preach the gospel if I’m not taking care of the poor. It’s the fulcrum for those other things and it had to be in there. And I really love that he got us now to think about the four divine responsibilities of the church instead of the threefold mission of the church. That’s prophetic revelation right there.

Hank Smith:                      00:35:51             Sharon, I want to ask you about something you said up at BYU Idaho, and I’d love to hear you expand on it. We’ve quoted it here on our show multiple times. I would encourage everyone who’s listening, after you finish our episode today, go online, look up the Sacred Life of Trees, Sharon Eubank. The whole talk is inspired. John and I have quoted from it multiple times. You even quote Alma 32, which John, I’m sure you know did cartwheels because it’s his favorite. I’m going to read one part. After you give the 30 things you can do to help your forest thrive, which I love how you said, you know what? You could do this today. Here’s things you could do today. Here’s the quote. “I’m occasionally asked, why doesn’t the church spend more money on humanitarian work? Why doesn’t it stop building expensive temples and focus its resources on relieving the poor?

                                           00:36:39             This is a legitimate question for the Church of Jesus Christ. But is it money that solves society ills? The world has poured $2 trillion into addressing chronic issues in Africa. Why isn’t the situation better? Because money isn’t the real issue. Lasting progress comes through trusted relationships, infrastructure, reducing corruption, and the ability of people to work together. Money doesn’t necessarily create those things. They must be developed alongside the resources, and frankly, it is a much harder work. I will never discount the one thing this church does that lifts entire communities in rapid development. It invites men and women of all social classes and backgrounds to enter sacred buildings and make the most binding and important promises of their mortal lives. In those buildings, they promise not to steal or lie. They promise to be faithful to their spouse and children. They vow they will seek the interest of their neighbors and be peacemakers and become devoted to the idea that we are all one family.

                                           00:37:38             All are valued and alike unto God. If those promises made in holy temples are kept, it transforms society faster than any aid or development project ever could. The greatest charitable development on the planet is for people to bind themselves to their God and mean it. So thank goodness the church builds temples. It is the greatest poverty alleviation system in the world.” Wow, that’s the pen of heaven. Sharon, when you say help the poor, it is our covenant responsibility. It makes my heart leap. I want to, but this is much more than filling out a donation. You know, I talk to friends. I have a good friend, Brandon Hatch, who said, How do I do it? Do I get rid of all my belongings? Do I give all my money away? Do I even have a house? Like, what do I do? Help me know what to do.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:38:26             I’m going to answer this by telling a story. I was visiting in Ethiopia with one of our partners, Care International, and they’ve developed a little model that’s about savings groups, little, tiny little savings groups. They wanted me to meet a family that had participated in one. I met the Tadesse family. They had five kids. They had been in bondage to money lenders for everything. They were just like what John was saying. They had to work that day to get enough resource to find something to eat. But if somebody was sick or something happened or they had to use it for medicine or something else, then they didn’t eat that day. If they had to go to money lenders to borrow some money, the money lenders charge 100%. So you borrow a dollar, but you owe me $2 tomorrow and then you owe me $4. And you can just see how that gets out of control.

                                           00:39:16             Mrs. Tadesse was invited to participate in this village savings group. So she’s with 24 of her neighbors and she has to commit to save 50 cents a week, which is kind of a big deal when they’re using a dollar to eat every single day. She commits that I will save 50 cents a week. She brings the coins along with her neighbors and they put them in a metal box that has three padlocks on it. In other words, nobody can open that box unless three people are present and they write down what happened. They start saving their money. In three months time, the 25 of them with their 50 cents a week, they’ve got like $75. And they say, okay, we’re going to allow people in the group to borrow some of the money and then pay it back. So what do you want to do with your money?

                                           00:40:00             Mrs. Tadesse says, I’m going to borrow, I think it was $4, and I’m going to buy chicken. I’m going to buy six chickens because that would really help my family. She borrows a little bit of money and she buys chickens. The chickens start laying eggs. She starts selling the eggs in the market. She eats eggs when she’s pregnant and she gets enough money to sustain her family and also pay back the $4, and everybody else did too. They keep going on this cycle. So she buys chickens and then she buys a goat that she fattens up and then sells at Easter. And then they decide to put in trees, fruit trees, and then they get a little hand pump that brings up some dirty water out of their ground so they can water their trees. Then they put in bees and then they decide, you know what? We could get a cow and we could start making yogurt and we could milk that cow. Where are we going to put the cow?

                                           00:40:51             Well, if we put the cow in our house, we could build ourselves another house. But you can see the layers of things that they’re doing. They do this for seven years. Now I’m coming to visit them. It’s been seven years that they’ve done it, and they’ve got this gorgeous coral painted house, big bright thing, you can see it from the street. They’ve got the cow in their old rondavel. They’ve got beehives and they’ve got fruit trees. They sell stuff in the market and they sell the honey. On their house is a sign that’s painted on a piece of white paper. And I said, what does that sign say? She said, oh, it’s congratulations to our son who just finished qualifying as a teacher and our daughter who just finished pharmacy school. And I’m like, wait, what? You went from borrowing from the money lenders at 100% interest rate to your two oldest kids becoming a pharmacist and a teacher, and they did it by saving 50 cents a week. So I look at that, and it doesn’t work out for everybody.

                                           00:41:48             The Tadesses are unique, but they were able to use that little village savings program. And I said to her, what was it about the money that was so different than what you were doing before? She said, oh, it wasn’t the money. It was the trust of these neighbors that when I had a problem, I could go talk to 24 other people who would give me advice. I trusted them. They trusted me because we were in this borrowing group together. She said, it wasn’t the money that made a difference in our family. It was for the first time in my life I had somebody to trust. And I just rocked back on my heels because that helps me understand you need the money, you need to buy the chickens and the goats and all the things, but that isn’t what changes people’s situations, the ability to trust. So then I think about, so what is it that builds trust in communities?

                                           00:42:42             You can talk about third spaces and the ways that people interact and know each other, but all those things are just echoes, shadows of the gospel of Jesus Christ, because when it comes down to it, that quote from BYU Idaho is, look, if you want to transform someone’s soul, get them to make a covenant with God that I won’t lie, I won’t steal, and I’m going to try and live that. And when I make a mistake, I’m going to repent through Jesus Christ and try to be better. That pattern will change society more than village savings groups, more than anything else, more than giving away all your possessions. We have to build up trust, and the only way to build that trust is by following true principles. And whether people are members of this church, Christians or non-Christians, they know from the light of Christ what’s right.

                                           00:43:34             When they follow what’s right, that flows into the community and it improves. It gets better because he’s a redeemer. I feel like we are living below our privileges. We’re playing too small. We’re throwing up our hands and saying, well, I don’t know what to do. We have the light of God. We have the Holy Ghost in us. We can wrestle and find out what to do, but we have to be more active than maybe we’ve been in the past. We’re being too passive about the gifts we’ve been given.

Hank Smith:                      00:44:04             I could say to my friend, keep donating. The money is useful, especially when you’re giving it to organizations who are stewards, careful, careful stewards, but then also do the hard work of helping people build relationships, missionary work, covenants, temple work.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:44:21             Yeah, it means you have to get involved.

Hank Smith:                      00:44:24             I want people to give money. I don’t want anyone to stop giving their donations to the humanitarian work of the church. Don’t stop doing that. But I love what you’re saying here. There’s so much more.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:44:33             Maybe that’s why I was writing the book. I think people get discouraged about, I don’t have a lot of money to give. I can’t serve a full-time mission. I can’t do those big things. I can’t go to Africa and do something. But the point is there’s so much that you can do right in your block, right in your family, right in your ward, in your neighborhood, or in your community where people feel like that we’re so insular that members of the church don’t reach out to them. They’re dying for us to reach out. All my interfaith work tells me they want to build those bridges and they’re afraid that we don’t want to do it. There’s just so much work that can be done, and you don’t have to have a lot of money. You don’t have to serve a mission. It’s just right there in front of you every day.

Hank Smith:                      00:45:17             Yeah. And social media can give you the wrong idea about people of other faith because there’s a very vocal minority who says, no, I want nothing to do with your church. But that’s a minority, minority view from people who are, who have loudspeakers online. But that’s not your everyday neighbor, at least not in my experience.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:45:34             I think most people, they want to understand about you. They want to find out something you have in common, and then you can build off of that if you can just find one thing that you have in common. I was sitting on a ship and there was a rail and I was leaning against the rail, just looking at the scenery go by, and a woman came up to me and she said, oh, it’s beautiful, isn’t it? So we started chatting. She was a documentary filmmaker from San Francisco. She said, what did you do? You said you just retired. And I said, oh, I was the director of humanitarian services for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. She said, is that the Mormons? I said, yeah, some people call us that. She said, I didn’t think they had women in positions of responsibility. And I said, let me tell you about my experience with 29 years. But it was just that opportunity that we both cared about humanitarian, and it was a chance for me to express a little bit about a misconception that she had, and we had a great little discussion, and then it was done. We have chances like that all the time.

John Bytheway:               00:46:30             We do have this fast offering. What I love about that is there are people who really research how to help people. Sometimes I don’t have that information, but I know people who do and I can donate fast offerings and people like Sharon and everybody in humanitarian can figure, what is the best way to help out? I’m thankful for that. I need to do more personally, but I trust that when I donate in fast offerings, that there are people who know the best way to help, not to just throw money at something, but the best way to help people, to help the poor, not to help them stay poor, but to help them build. Like that wonderful story of that family, like you said, layers to make those incremental steps to get a little bit better. I love that. Don’t stop paying fast offerings. That’s one of the things I love about the church is I trust them. I trust the committee on the disposition of the tithes. I don’t have to know where every dollar goes. I trust them.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:47:34             I’m so glad that you said that, John, because we live in a time when people don’t love organized religion. What do you need organized religion for? Fast offerings is an example of the power of organized religion, because I can give a little bit. I’m going to pay for, you know, the two meals that I didn’t eat, or maybe I’ll be a little bit generous if I can. That’s still a small amount of money, but when that gets aggregated, I was in a position where I was able to see the results of that funding that was aggregated so that we could work with countries that were under a terrible disaster, or we could work with multi-level governments and say, let’s address some of the child nutrition issues that are going on here. We have our own resource that we can bring, and it’s because of everyday men and women, little children, grandparents and aunts and uncles who have gone without eating for two meals and then donated what they would have spent so that other people can eat.

                                           00:48:33             When I had the chance to explain the source of some of the funding that comes that way, people were really touched. This is everyday people giving a little bit of sacrifice because they care about it. If the church makes a mistake on what they do, it’s not the fault of the people. We’ll have to answer for that, and I felt that every single day. I’ll have to answer for the way that this funding was spent, but I was so grateful for the people who donated to the humanitarian fund and paid fast offerings because it blesses the poor. It was a way to bless the poor at scale. We can do our small things, we can do the great things that the church can do, and we can participate in other people’s efforts too. There are many good people who are doing good work.

John Bytheway:               00:49:20             When Hurricane Katrina came, what could I possibly do? But what did the church do? I mean, roll the semi-trucks full of water and blankets. And I remember then Elder D. Todd Christofferson giving a talk called Why the Church?, and he talked about the things that an organized religion can do that individuals, I wouldn’t have known where to start on Hurricane Katrina, but the church could roll semi-trucks full of supplies and really help in a situation like that. I couldn’t have done that if I just thought, well, I’m just going to worship at home and not be involved in an organized religion.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:50:02             We don’t talk about it as much in the Church News, but after those trucks rolled, after people mucked out all the mud and everything, and after people had come back home from living in the stadium in Texas, we set up an employment center and we tried to help people get connected with jobs because the whole employment sector had shifted because of what happened there. And people had gone out of business, but new businesses had started, and that work goes on for a long time. Usually in a disaster, the church will work for two or three years, starting off with the supplies, but ending up with people’s jobs and working in that way. And I loved seeing that myself in my own eyes, and I love being a part of it.

Hank Smith:                      00:50:42             Wow. Who was it, John, just recently, someone on our show, you can’t care more about visibility than impact, because the impact is made in very much a one-on-one, let me help you find a job, let me help you get an education. That’s not going to get a news headline like a, you know, semis rolling in. If this is about visibility for you, you’re headed in the wrong direction, this has to be about impact.

John Bytheway:               00:51:12             Sharon, I would love to hear if you have some insights about, because we don’t hear about the perpetual education fund as much as we used to. I had friends, former companions in the Philippines who were greatly blessed by that. I just though it was the coolest thing. It was such a Zion idea to me that we could help somebody. I mean, when I came home from the Philippines on my mission, my standard of living went from cold water showers and no central air conditioning to home, to hot and cold running water out of the sink that I didn’t have to boil. My companions went back to, many of them, a lower standard of living. The Perpetual Education Fund, oh, I just thought it was so cool. Go learn how to write a business plan. You know how to talk to people, you’ve just been on a mission. The stories I used to hear coming out of the Philippines, in some cases, some of my former companions, were so great.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:52:15             I’m so glad that you asked. People are grateful for humanitarian aid, but they don’t want to live on humanitarian aid. Most people, what they really want is to get education and to start a business or be able to work for somebody so that they can support their families themselves. That’s the idea of self-reliance, and humanitarian aid is meant to be just a temporary stabilizer until that. And the great work of the church is for us to say, what’s the barrier? What’s getting in the way of people being able to be what we call self-reliant or God reliant? There’s all kinds of programs that help. And if you think about it in the trajectory of a person’s life, what’s the barrier when you’re zero to five years old? The barrier is you might die. A lot of kids die before they reach the age of five because they don’t get immunizations, they don’t get nutrition, they didn’t have a safe, healthy birth or their mother died.

                                           00:53:08             Those are all preventable things. We know how to prevent those things. That’s why you’ll see the Relief Society right now and President Johnson really focusing on that early beginning part of what can we do so that mothers and babies survive that early window? The next part is we’ve got to get kids into primary school, and there’s barriers because they don’t have a uniform or they live too far away or it’s a boarding school or there’s different barriers that we can help, but you’ve got to have kids learn to read. They can’t progress in the gospel if they don’t know how to read and to function and to do math. Most governments in poorer countries, they stop funding education when kids are 12. So your parents would have to pay to go on to junior high, what we would call, or high school. So there’s another barrier there.

                                           00:53:54             How do parents get the funding to be able to do that? For kids to pass through those levels, they have to hit these benchmark tests. If you haven’t eaten all day, and if you live far away and you don’t have anybody to ask, you’re not going to pass those tests. Then seminaries and institutes started saying, look, we’re going to take your institute teacher and we’re going to open up the chapel and you can come just do your homework there. And there’s somebody to ask if you need some help, but our goal is to help prepare you to pass those benchmark tests. It’s called Succeed in School, and it’s gone all through Africa and part of the Pacific, and they’re helping kids pass those tests so that when they go on a mission and when they come back, now they’re prepared to either access the Perpetual Education Fund or Pathway or some other kind of higher education so that they can then start a business, get their education, and finish up.

                                           00:54:48             So the Perpetual Education Fund that President Hinckley was so inspired about, that is still up and going. It fits a different niche than Pathway does. Pathway, you need to speak English to be able to do Pathway. You have to have a online resource. Perpetual Education Fund says you can study anything in your own language, wherever you are, vocational training. It used to be that there was an interest rate, but almost in every case now, the interest rate is 0% unless the country demands that it has a nominal interest rate. That’s also important because you don’t want people to be burdened with debt when they come out of those things. From the beginning, from when you’re born, the arc of your life, all the way to when you finish your mission and you come out and you get your education and you get enough skills, you can use your loan to buy the tools you need for your job if you’re going to set up as a welder or as a haircutter or something else, then you can be a leader in the church and you can be self-reliant and you can help other people be self-reliant.

                                           00:55:50             When people like us who live in a country where those things are easier for us to obtain, when we donate to those causes in the church, we open up the doors for that perpetual exaltation to happen for other people. We not only give them the chance through the gospel principles, but they need temporal principles in order to thrive. Then when they thrive, they turn around and help other people. That beautiful cycle, although it doesn’t always work perfectly the way we want it to, we’re improving it every day. The fact that Pathway has come on board, it’s the latest iteration of something good, all of those pieces fit together so that there’s a path for people to follow so that they can become self-reliant.

John Bytheway:               00:56:33             It used to be, I think, on the tithing slips and it’s not there anymore. Has it become self-sustaining? That would be wonderful news. I knew about it in the Philippines, but it’s in a lot of places around the world, isn’t it?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:56:46             Yeah, the Perpetual Education Fund, I think, is in 50 or 60 countries. The reason it’s not on the tithing slip is because when you make a donation and it’s in a category that’s defined, it has to be spent in that. It’s not fungible. You can’t move that money around, and there is enough funding in the Perpetual Education Fund to do what it needs to do. It’s spinning off enough from its corpus that it’s okay. That gives the church the flexibility to be able to do other things that are needed.

John Bytheway:               00:57:13             The people that I know thrills me to see what they’ve been able to do, and I thought, what a Zion idea. We’ve got brothers and sisters who just can’t even afford to go to school. Maybe we can help.

Hank Smith:                      00:57:25             Sharon, since we have your expertise here, maybe just speak to our listeners who think, okay, what can I do right now? For example, I want to go help the people of Kenya. I want to be there. I can’t do that today, but there is a widow in my ward who I know is hurting. I saw her at church the other day with tears in her eyes. I can drop by her house and say hi.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:57:50             For a talk I’m going to give in a couple weeks, I looked up the statistics for Davis County where I live, and I said, what are the main issues that are facing Davis County? Because when we think about helping people, Africa comes up, you know, war comes up, you know, these big giant categories.

Hank Smith:                      00:58:07             Disasters, yeah.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        00:58:08             They do need our help, but we are limited in the ways that we can do it. We can’t all go to Africa, and if we go to Africa, we’ll be there for 10 days and then we come home again. We don’t speak the language that is there. We don’t understand the cultural things. We come with our own cultural biases. One of the points that I wanted to make was we are most powerful, I’m most powerful in Davis County where I live, because I’m going to be there all the time, and because I can understand what are the issues? The number one issue in Davis County is mental health in schools. Well, I didn’t know that. I just found that out this week. What could I do in the place that I live that would have anything to do with that? I ask myself that question, well, do I know the names of all the kids in my ward?

                                           00:58:55             Do I know the primary kids by name and the young men and the young women by name just so that I can greet them in the hall or say, hey, how did your basketball game go? Because if I’m trying to increase connection, I’ve got to know their names, and I’ve got to know a little bit about them. That’s just my neighborhood. That’s just my ward. Then there are other things that will lead from that, that we can do to bolster people’s mental health or to increase their opportunity to go to school or to decrease the bullying that they’re experiencing or to foster ties with people of other cultures, other faiths, other backgrounds. We need to be better at that. I can see I’ve got work to do in Davis County. I still care about disasters. I still care about Africa and Ukraine. I care about the things that are going on, but I am most able to do something every single day in the place where I live. That’s an inconvenient truth. We’re not mobilized by that. It isn’t something that we can post on Instagram, but it is the everlasting truth.

John Bytheway:               00:59:55             Sharon, I’m sure you’ve seen that movie called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. I got to speak to an elementary school faculty a few weeks ago, and I was amazed at how many of them hadn’t seen it. I wanted my kids to see how desperately this kid wanted to go to school, but he couldn’t afford the uniform. Oh, that’s a great story, a great movie. It just reminded me of a little bit of education, how he figured out how to get water out of the well. Oh, man.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:00:26             You know, when I said that we’re playing too small, we’re taking all of these blessings, like the hot shower and the ability to go to school, and that’s just the baseline. And we don’t recognize the hard won work that people went to so that we could have those things so that we can dare to dream about something else.

Hank Smith:                      01:00:44             Sharon, you think like C.S. Lewis. This is a hard quote to understand, John, you know, because it’s from Lewis’s book called The Screwtape Letters. The Screwtape Letters is just a backwards text because you’re hearing the perspective of a devil who is trying to ruin a human’s spiritual life, get him away from God. It’s a difficult book to read sometimes because he calls the enemy, the enemy is Jesus, in the book. You’re like, oh, wait. Yeah, I have to reverse that in my mind. This is a quote, this is from a devil who is training another devil about ruining this man that he’s going to talk about connection to God. So this is what he says. “The great thing,” this is the devil giving the advice, “is to direct the malice, the hatred, to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day, thrust his benevolence out to remote circumference to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes very real, and the benevolence, largely imaginary.”

                                           01:01:50             Sharon, I think you and C.S. Lewis in tandem here are telling me, when I’m thinking about all this help I can do far away, I’m really not having a lot of impact. And when I ignore the need next door, because I think, well, that’s not a big thing, I may think I’m having impact. I may think I’m doing good, but the real good is right here in front of me, knowing the names of the youth in my ward.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:02:22             I think a lot of what I’ve been feeling as I’ve read through Isaiah is just my own inability to grab the opportunities that are in front of me. Sometimes it helps pacify my conscience when I think about the good I could do that’s far away and yet the malice I have toward the people that are closest to me. If I am able to flip that somehow, which the gospel of Jesus Christ encourages me to do, even though it goes against my worldly nature sometimes, there are treasures that come out of that. That’s the thing that they don’t talk about in the Screwtape Letters, is that there are some benefits that come. The thing that I wanted to talk about very last in Isaiah is this idea that he’s such a good communicator about covenantal joy, really talks a lot about what it feels like when we’re connected to God and the joy that is there.

                                           01:03:11             A couple weeks ago, I was attending a fast and testimony meeting in the Helsinki Finland English-speaking ward, and it happens to be held in a building that used to be the mission office. And I attended there as a young missionary 41 years ago, you know, it’s a very long time. It was a very small branch. It was maybe 15, 20 people struggling, people who didn’t really have families and it was one of the hardest places to serve back then in Helsinki. When I attended this time, I was expecting it would be similar. I walked in, I think I counted 85 or 90 people. People just kept pouring in. They were from all over the world. They greeted each other and they had a baptism last week and they’re having another baptism this week and it’s just that, wow, this is different than when I was here as a missionary.

                                           01:03:59             For fast and testimony meeting, a young man stood up and he had come from a place of conflict in Africa. He had worked really hard. His wife’s restaurant had been burned down and he had been threatened and they were forced to leave. He worked to get legal passage to Europe, but when he arrived in Europe, he came up through Italy, they said, look, you can live anywhere in the EU. You have the papers to live anywhere. And he thought, where should we go? He read in the newspaper that Finland was the happiest country in the world, according to some survey. So he told his wife, we need happy. We need peace. Let’s go to Finland. They don’t know anything about it. They’ve come from a very warm Sub-Saharan climate and now they’re up in cool Finland where the winter is coming. But he met the missionaries.

                                           01:04:45             They had their first baby. Both of those things happened at the same time. And so when they joined the church, he then was ordained to be a priest so that he could baptize his wife. Then he turned around that very same day and gave his little baby a name and a blessing. So that had just happened. And now he’s up standing at the podium and he’s testifying, I found peace. I thought it was going to come to me through Finland and it came to me through the Prince of Peace from this gospel, and I can’t believe the riches that I’m holding in my hands. He said, I don’t care that our restaurant got burned down. It had to get me to this place so that I could find my God. People were so touched in the congregation. The woman I was sitting next to, she went up to him afterwards and she said, what’s the thing you’re working on next? He said, well, we both need jobs, but we’ve got to learn Finnish in between. She said, all right, I’m going to fast next time.

                                           01:05:42             I’m going to fast for you. The feeling of the 85 people in that room, they were bonded to each other and they were bonded to doing something for him. And I was really touched and moved by that. I just want to pair it with this scripture from Isaiah 60. He says, “Thou shalt know that I, the Lord, am thy Savior and thy Redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob, for brass, I will bring gold. For iron, I will bring silver, and for wood, brass, and for stones, iron. I will make the officers peace and thine exactors righteousness. Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders. Thou shalt call thy walls salvation and thy gates praise.” I thought Isaiah is describing the experience of that man. I’ve left violence and it’s no more heard in my land and my gates shall be called praise.

                                           01:06:42             You teased John about wearing the garment of praise, you know, when we started up. Maybe every single one of us is part of our covenant. We get to wear that. The praise lives in our gates. And when we can live up to our privileges and our blessings and we can help other people, this praise of God just lives in us. We are rich. We have everything that we need. I’m so grateful for that brother in that testimony meeting for teaching that to me.

John Bytheway:               01:07:08             Yeah. And for a member to say, oh, what can I do? I can fast for you. I mean, that’s a perfect example of what would Stephen Covey say? There’s your circle of concern that you can’t do anything about, but then there’s a circle of influence. You can do something in your circle of influence and that might be your own ward. Learn the names and can I fast for you? What an inspiring story. And learning Finnish, that’s not very hard, is it?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:07:33             No, not very hard.

John Bytheway:               01:07:35             Not at all.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:07:36             But you know what? He’ll do it. And his wife, they will do it. They have all the tools that they need to be able to succeed.

John Bytheway:               01:07:43             And the relationships around them, trusted relationships, as you said.

Hank Smith:                      01:07:47             And it’ll be a joy. Talk about beauty for ashes. That’s real ashes.

John Bytheway:               01:07:52             Sharon, you gave a talk. I just feel so funny calling you Sharon because –

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:07:57             Please call me Sharon.

John Bytheway:               01:08:00             You gave a talk about light that I never forgot. You told a story about the lights on the temple. Can you please relate that again? That was, was it 2019?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:08:11             It must have been around 2019. I was sitting in my office in the Relief Society building. It was late at night. It was like seven o’clock. My windows looked right out over the Salt Lake Temple. I could see the lights come on when the sun went down. I was sitting there working and the room seemed so dark and I thought, what’s going on? And I looked out my window and the temple lights were off. It was dark outside and they weren’t on. And I’m like, whoa, this means something huge has happened. What’s going on? I went around and I could see other people clustered around the window. Of course, people recognized that there must be some really big problem. But I was reflecting on how I felt because to see the temple dark when it always was lit, it was a really foreboding feeling for me of something’s wrong.

                                           01:08:57             I wanted to just extrapolate that into my own life when I should be lit up with the Spirit of the Lord and I’m dark and I have depressed thoughts or I have doubts that are overcoming my mind. What do I do about that? I know a lot of people are in that situation. They at one time have been lit, but they’re not lit now. It’s a terribly foreboding feeling. People noticed. They called the temple engineer and one of the power circuits had failed. There was a little part in there that had failed. They got a new part and they installed it and it comes back on. They lifted it back on and the lights came back on. I went on to say that when we feel dark, when we don’t have that light that we used to have, it’s the very time that we can turn to Jesus Christ because he’s the light that shines in darkness.

                                           01:09:49             That was the point I was trying to make. And you cannot quench his light. It’s never going to be put out. When you’re dark, you can trust in him that he will light the way. It’s easy to want to turn away from him and to find reasons to justify why you feel so dark, but the greatest gift we could give ourselves is to turn to him in our darkness and let him light the path for a little while. Even if our answers aren’t there, if we can’t find the resolutions for what we need, if we still doubt, if we still are angry, if things have not worked out, all of those things are fine to be able to hold in our conversation with him. He will accept all of that. Don’t turn away from him because he is the light of the world. I feel more strongly about that even now than I did in 2019 when I gave that story, because all of us have darkness in us.

                                           01:10:39             We’re not light all the time. We can’t even expect that about ourselves. And to face our darkness and to figure out what’s really going on and ask God to help us with that is probably the essence of the gospel. It’s not wrong or shameful to be able to say, I have darkness and will you please help me with your light?That’s a paraphrase of a story in the New Testament, but I think it’s true.

John Bytheway:               01:11:04             The topic of light is just one of my favorites because I’m so fascinated by it. I am also fascinated that Jesus would say, I am the light of the world. Talk about an object lesson. People in the new world have been in the dark and then first thing out of Jesus’ mouth is, I am the light and the life of the world. I bet there was a collective ohh, we get it. Then for Jesus to say, “I give unto you to be a light to this people,” or, I am the light of the world, but then the Sermon of the Mount, ye are the light of the world. It’s like we get to reflect his light sometimes, which is beautiful. So I’m looking at Isaiah chapter 60, “Arise shine for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth and gross darkness the people, but the Lord shall arise upon thee. His glory shall be seen upon thee, and Gentiles shall come to thy light and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” Isn’t that amazing? Years ago, the youth theme was section 115 of the Doctrine and Covenants verse five. When I saw how close these two verses are, Hank, I was shocked and amazed.

                                           01:12:26             I was exceedingly astonished. To use some Book of Mormon lingo. So this is Section 115, verse five. “Verily I say unto you all, arise and shine forth that thy light may be a standard for the nations.” And here Isaiah is saying, the Gentiles will come to thy light. His glory will be seen upon thee. I met a Sister Christensen who was down on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, speaking of the temple. She told this story and I said, oh, Sister Christensen, will you send that to me in an email? This is what she said. “One day we took a few people from Argentina around Temple Square. My companions speak Spanish and I don’t, so I was praying that I would understand what they were feeling and that they would feel the Spirit. At one point in the tour, one of the women looked at me, she hadn’t been talking, and started gesturing up and down with her hand while saying something in Spanish about what I look like.

                                           01:13:23             I guess I just looked at my companion who had a big smile on her face. Then the woman looked at my companion and said the same thing to her. Afterwards, my companion filled me in on what the woman had said. She told us that we looked like we were shining. She wondered what it was about all of us that made us shiny and she wanted it. Isn’t that fascinating? When I read, “The Gentiles shall come to thy light and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” We know that Moses, his countenance shown, we know that Abinadis did. Does that stuff still happen today? And I wonder if that’s what Isaiah’s talking about right there.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:14:09             That’s a really great story, and I know there’s lots of versions of that. I think spiritually we can sense each other when there is light in each other’s eyes and faces. I was giving a little tour in the Relief Society building to a Chinese couple who had just wandered into Temple Square. They were from mainland China. There were some Minerva Teichert paintings in there, and one of them is, I like it because it’s the original and it’s got these gorgeous parrot feathers as part of the frame. You know, she’s really gone to a lot of effort. It’s of Christ blessing the children in 3 Nephi and the angels coming down out of heaven. That Chinese couple stood in front of that. They wouldn’t move on. And they said, what is this? What is this story? I just outlined it briefly a little bit and they said, where can we find out more about that? And I said, well, if you go over to Temple Square and, you know, there’s some sisters, they can show you that book and give you that.

                                           01:15:02             They didn’t want to leave the building because they were feeling something that they didn’t want to end, and they were just bonded to that story, that gorgeous part of 3 Nephi, Christ blessing the children, and they felt it. They recognized it and they wanted to know more. I think that’s true of all the good parts of us, ourselves and the scriptures and the Temple Square missionaries. When the Spirit of the Lord is in us, we become like him and it attracts people. People want that.

John Bytheway:               01:15:32             Hank, you know I love airplanes, and so when President Uchtdorf speaks, I’m like, oh, I hope there’s an aviation analogy coming here. One time he said the coolest thing, and it’s so obvious, but it’s, you don’t think of it. He said, I was up at 30,000 feet, and I’m paraphrasing, and I saw the terminator. If you get up high enough and you see the curvature of the earth, you can see where the line is, where the light ends and the darkness starts. And he said, I could see the terminator, and it occurred to me, night is nothing more than a shadow. The light has always been there. You’re just not in a place to receive it. If anybody’s saying, I feel in the dark, be assured the light is there and will always be there. As you said, Sharon, his light is unquenchable. The light is always there. Just get in a place where you can receive it.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:16:24             I though you were going to make a joke about the terminator in a different way. I was waiting for that.

Hank Smith:                      01:16:28             Yeah, I was like, he saw the Terminator?

John Bytheway:               01:16:31             That’s what they call it. We aviation dudes, we just think, you know, that’s part of our jargon. We airplane guys, so…

Hank Smith:                      01:16:40             John, you’re talking about light and airplanes. I actually have a story. Church News, way back, 2007, written by Greg Hill, Church News staff writer. He said he was visiting the Oakland First Ward sacrament meeting, sat in the back of the chapel, and a nice man came up to him, said good morning. Greg says, I introduced myself, told him I was on vacation in the area. So he started asking about this man who he’s talking to was once the bishop of the ward, and then they keep asking, do you have any other connections to the temple? He said, yeah, I was president of the temple at one point. Greg laughs says, you were probably a mission president too. He said, yeah, I was in England. He goes on to tell this story. It’s a small story, but I think it fits what we’re talking about. He said, Brother Hoopes said the temple is a beacon for members in the area. He added that it was once also a beacon in a more literal way.

                                           01:17:31             There was an energy crisis in California and people were asked to cut back on the use of their electricity, so the church turned off the temple’s exterior lights at night, but he had a frantic call come in from air traffic control asking the church to turn the lights back on because the temple was a marker that they used to guide pilots to the airport. Isn’t that great?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:17:53             I love that.

John Bytheway:               01:17:53             I love it.

Hank Smith:                      01:17:54             Excuse me, can you turn the lights back on over there?

John Bytheway:               01:17:58             The church obediently says, okay, we’ll save electricity, and turns it off.

Hank Smith:                      01:18:05             Pilots are saying, I don’t know where the airport is. Sharon, I notice in these chapters, Isaiah talks a lot about the future Zion. We’re going to build Zion, and the Lord is going to come to Zion. I was just looking in the chapter headings, and almost every one of them mentions either the Second Coming or the Lord coming to his people, to Zion. Your experiences in your career give you a particular insight on how we build Zion. I have something that I tell my students, they say, we talk about the Second Coming, we say, we’re waiting on the Lord. And I think, I just tell them, I wonder if the Lord’s waiting on us saying, as soon as you build Zion, I will come. We’re thinking, as soon as he comes, we’ll build Zion. What would you offer there as Zion is on our minds this week?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:18:51             I don’t think it’s any accident that these things are converging at the same time, that the church members have resource to donate toward humanitarian causes, that we are building so many temples all at the same time, and the service, the hours that it requires to staff all of those temples and to staff all of that humanitarian work in our communities and around the world. All of that has to do with the definition of Zion, which is people that dwell with one heart and with one mind, they dwell in righteousness and there’s no poor among them. And that requires that we care about others at least as much as we care about ourselves. And that is the golden rule. I mean, it’s been out there for ages and ages, but it’s very hard to implement. We have lots of chances to practice doing that. I watched a little story.

                                           01:19:40             It was on CBS Sunday morning, and I think it was in May. The biggest wildfire in Nebraska history happened in March of 2026. It burned a thousand miles of grassland in Nebraska, so not in acres, miles. They interviewed this couple, their name were Mike and Kayla Wintz. They said, you know, you have 11,000 acres of ranch land and you have all this cattle. How much of your ranch burned? He said, all of it. It was gone in two hours, every bit of it. He said, we have our cows. We saved our cattle, but there’s nothing for them to eat. Usually, other farmers would help us, but everybody’s in the same boat. It burned all of that part of the state. And he said, without asking, somebody called him up on the phone and said, I’ve got some hay that I want to deliver. I just need to know the address. He said, well, who are you? And they said, you don’t need to know.

                                           01:20:36             I’m just sending you hay. 200 phone calls came in from places as far away as, like, South Carolina. These are other farm families who saw it on the news, and they start shipping semi-truck loads of hay. So the Wintz’s had, like, $80,000 worth of hay delivered to theirs and farmers all around. And it was such a good example of beauty coming out of ashes. You know, we talked about that earlier. For me, that spirit, when people do that, or when we even see it on the news, because Mike Wintz gets all emotional, he said, it was so tough, and his voice breaks. Then he said, but then this miracle, this beauty happened out of what was the worst moment in our lives. We thought we were going to lose everything, but the kindness and the empathy of people from all over the country. He said, we’re so bonded.

                                           01:21:26             We hear all these stories in the news about how we’re fragmented and nobody cares about anything anymore. He said, I don’t believe that anymore because people reached out to me. That’s a great story of what Zion feels like. And so then the burden is on me of how do I create that feeling that I feel when I listen to Mike and Kayla tell their story? How do I create that every single day? Because that for me is creating Zion, so that people feel connected and cared for and that somebody is with them in their worst moments. What can I do about that? So that’s how I feel like we each have an individual responsibility to build Zion. It’s the most exciting work in the world. When you read Isaiah, when you read the Doctrine and Covenants, you can’t believe that we get to be part of this, that we happen to live here. It’s such a privilege.

John Bytheway:               01:22:14             You have set this up, that why do I get to be here? Why do I get to be here now? How come I know how to read, as you were talking about before, when so many don’t, that literacy rates so high now, but around the world in some places not so high. And I think it was President Hinckley that said, does this mean we’re better than other people? No, but I think it means we’re more accountable. Because I have been given much, what can I give?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:22:42             One of my favorite things about the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it isn’t so that we’re going to create a society that favors Christians because we’re Christian. In its principles, it says we’re going to create a society that favors everybody because that’s the real gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re going to protect the rights of minorities. We’re going to watch out for people who feel differently than we do, because that’s what the gospel of Jesus Christ is about. So it isn’t about just protecting my own viewpoint. It’s about protecting the rights of everybody to have a viewpoint. That story is also part of Zion, that people who worship differently from me will still be part of Zion as they’re on their road to growing toward God too, and that it can accommodate that and that I can accommodate that too.

Hank Smith:                      01:23:30             I go to the temple. I make my covenants. I’m going to build Zion. Everything I have, I’m going to build Zion. And then I come out and I want everybody else to build Zion first. Like I’ll give as soon as they all give, right? Well, I don’t want to give more than everybody else, but how do I overcome that? How do I overcome this which kingdom am I going to build? Am I going to build mine or am I going to build the Lord’s? Because no man can serve two masters. I find myself very, very frustrated going, no, I really want to do this. Sharon, you are Zion. I think if Zion had a picture, it would be your face, right? How do I get there? I was reading in Isaiah 66, “You have chosen your own way.” It’s almost like the Lord says, you are so distracted. You’re not building Zion.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:24:18             So I don’t mean to put you on the spot, Hank, but I’m just going to ask you, because you know something about this. However old you are in your life, you’ve already made progress in this way. What worked for you?

Hank Smith:                      01:24:28             She turned it back on me. I’ll give a couple of ideas. It works for me when I stop comparing, because I remember Elder Holland said once, “You have to free yourself from our culture’s obsession with comparison, competition, and being enough.” That was a long time ago that he said that, and it still rings in my ears. Free yourself. Get away from the obsession, our culture’s obsession with comparison. That works for me. John, do you remember when Adam Miller was here a couple weeks ago and he taught us how in Ecclesiastes, the preacher says, none of this is going to last, right? What did he say? Futile, futile. It’s all futile. All we are is dust in the wind. When you come to that place, it’s easy to give it away because you know it’s all going to disappear anyway. I was at a friend’s house, Kyle Nelson, who works on our show.

                                           01:25:27             He has a fun car collection, and I was taking my boys over to see the cars, and he sat them down beforehand, which I was like, oh, what are we going to do here? And he said, listen, I love collecting cars, but these cars are just metal and rubber, and they’ll all be in the junkyard one day. If they’re going to be gone tomorrow and my happiness changes, I need to get rid of all of them right now. I was so touched by the lesson he gave. You should see my boys going, oh. And then we went out and looked at the cars, and it really was a different experience. He gave them a different experience rather than them coming out going, oh, I got to have all this one day. They all came out and said, oh, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. But that’s about as far as it went. Both of those things have helped. I just wish I could bottle it and keep it.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:26:11             We all do. The reason I asked you, and I’m going to ask John, I’m going to ask you the same question, is because unless it’s personal to you, it’s just a doctrine on a piece of paper. It doesn’t go inside, and so I’m always interested, what is working for you? And then can you do more of that or can you build on that? What has worked for you in the past, John, as you’ve tried to become more Zion-like and kinda turn down the dial of the world?

John Bytheway:               01:26:36             Listening to Sharon Eubank has helped me a lot.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:26:39             Come on.

Hank Smith:                      01:26:41             Me too.

John Bytheway:               01:26:43             There’s a verse in Mormon 8. Moroni is taking over for his father’s record. If I could add three words to the Book of Mormon, I shouldn’t even think I want to do that. This is Mormon chapter eight, verse 39. You know how Moroni sees our day, and instead of saying, you guys are great, you’re awesome, you’re doing so wonderful, he rips us to shreds. In verse 39, “Why do ye adorn yourselves with that which hath no life, and yet suffer the hungry and the needy and the naked,” here’s my three words, who have life “and the sick and afflicted to pass by you and notice them not.” To me, that was just don’t treat things like people and don’t treat people like things.

                                           01:27:34             Boy, he nailed it with the way he said that. It’s hard because I feel a little bit of tension because aren’t I supposed to save for a rainy day? Aren’t I supposed to put away income so that maybe one day I can serve a mission with my wife? That’s a righteous desire, isn’t it? But how do I do that and build the kingdom with my resources? That’s what has worked for me is reading Moroni’s advice right there. I love Moroni.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:28:03             So I’m writing that down because I love that so much. And what you said about don’t treat things like people and don’t treat people like things, refusing to engage in the competition you talked about, Hank, those are the realities of the 21st century where we live and maybe they’ve come up through all centuries. They sure make a difference when you’re trying to practice them. I can see on your faces that it does. The difference for me is that I feel so good when I’m a giver. I feel so good when I’m able to say, I was the director of humanitarian services for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and it means something to people. But what has helped me have more of a Zion heart is when I’ve had to be a receiver. I’ve had to say to the Lord, I’m in trouble.

                                           01:28:47             I don’t know how to do this. I don’t have the thing that I need. Can you help me? Can you send somebody to me? I don’t want to humble myself in that way. I don’t want to have to admit that I need help and that I have a lack and I need somebody to help me. Sometimes I wish the Lord would just keep it between him and me, but he doesn’t. He sends somebody to help me and I have to acknowledge my weakness in front of them too. But that great statement that is at the heart of all service that we do in the church, it’s by J. Reuben Clark. He was in the First Presidency. He said, “The reason for being of this church is the flower and fruitage of givers and receivers.” He talks about that it’s their character, that the Lord doesn’t mind about the stuff that we hold in our hands, what we have on our plates or what we have in our closets or our garages.

                                           01:29:35             He’s worried about our character and how do we improve our character so that we can participate in Zion? It’s by being a giver and it’s by being a receiver, and we have to be both. We have to understand that it flows back and forth. When you go to Kenya and you look at that and I’ll hear people say, oh, it’s so sad, people around here, I just saw people with nothing. That can’t be true. They’re filled with all kinds of riches. I’m using the wrong measuring stick if I think they don’t have anything because they have things that I don’t have, and I need that exchange with them to make me a whole person. Every time when I’m in a community, I’m always looking for what’s my lack and what do they have so that I can receive from them, and then I can also give what I have. To me, that has made the biggest difference on how I want to participate in Zion, to recognize it’s about character, it’s not about things, and that everybody’s a giver and everybody’s a receiver, and I have to respect that.

John Bytheway:               01:30:35             Wow. Oh, I love that. I mentioned I saw people in the Philippines that were so this joyous little family, and I would be baffled when I’m walking away going, this goes against everything I thought about where happiness comes from. I’m trying to tell them how to be happy, right?

Hank Smith:                      01:30:56             Recently, at BYU, President Reese and his wife, Sister Wendy Reese, they give a devotional to the students at the beginning of this fall semester. It was powerful. If you have a young adult, anybody listening, send this devotional to them, if they like devotionals.

John Bytheway:               01:31:13             Embrace the awkward. Is that the one?

Hank Smith:                      01:31:15             Embrace the awkward. My wife came over and embraced me during the talk. He said a couple of things. They don’t have the text out yet. I have a couple of things from my notes. One was he said to the students, “You’re using your earbuds to avoid awkward conversations. You put your earbuds in because it feels safe because no one’s, it’s a signal. Don’t talk to me. I can’t hear you.” He challenged them to earbuds out when they’re on campus, when they’re walking across campus. And I’ve echoed that to my students. You can’t build Zion, I don’t think, with your earbuds in. Now, if you’re listening to followHIM, that’s one thing. He said, “Jesus would never have seen Zacchaeus had he been staring down at a scroll.” That’s kind of funny. He said, “the Savior was focused on others. His gaze was upward and outward, not…” And then he even looked at his phone, I think, during his talk at this point.

                                           01:32:16             “His gaze was upward and outward, not inward and downward.” And then he dropped this line. He said, “Oftentimes, picking up your cross begins with putting down your phone.” It was magical. And Sister Reese did something very similar as she talked to the students about, “Don’t wait. Don’t wait. Go. Help. Serve.” That works for me. I’m going to put down my phone. I’m going to try to break away from the obsession. And I like what you said. I’m going to receive. Because when I think of Zion, that’s not the first thing I think of. I think of, okay, give, give, give. Rarely does it come to, okay, learn how to receive.

John Bytheway:               01:32:56             People have a hard time with that, don’t they?

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:33:00             It requires a lot of humility to receive.

Hank Smith:                      01:33:04             Yeah. One last thing, Sharon. We get emails and comments on YouTube from people who listen to the show because they’re in pain. They’re in a situation that maybe they didn’t choose. A marriage is falling apart or we even have people who are inmates in penitentiaries who are listening to the show. And John and I are mindful of that. Our whole team is mindful of that. There is this part in Isaiah 65, this is verse 17, “I will create new heavens, new earth. The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. Be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create. For behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing and her people a joy. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and joy in my people and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.” It’s this promise of a future day when tears are wiped away.

                                           01:34:04             John the revelator is borrowing a little bit when he writes in the book of Revelation that the Lord will wipe away the tears from their eyes. I’d like both of you to speak to a hurting heart, if you could, because when I think about our show, John, that’s my thought. Who is hurting? You know, we love to discuss scripture and Jacob says, “The word can heal the wounded soul.”

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:34:27             I’m always aware wherever I go, whether I’m in a small room with just a few people or if I’m, you know, in a room with 500 or a thousand people, at any given time, there are 500 or 1,000 heartaches that are going on in that. We all look good. We’ve dressed up and we’ve come to the meeting or whatever this, the thing, and we present ourselves well, but in every single heart, there is some grief, something that’s just stealing their breath that they can hardly even put into words sometimes because they’ll just fall apart. For people who are home listening to this or wherever they are, you know what your heartache is. You know the thing that you’ve taken to the Lord and asked for it to be removed or asked for progress and help and it’s still with you. I cannot get over the simplest idea from what we have in the Pearl of Great Price.

                                           01:35:26             And I’m so thankful that we have this in the Pearl of Great Price where it talks about the council in heaven and it talks about the Father presenting his plan. He says there will need to be a savior because you’re going to sin and this person will pay for the sins of everyone. And I imagine myself sitting there thinking, who could do that? I can’t do that. And looking around and then the magnificence of Jesus Jehovah standing up and saying, here am I. Send me. I will be thy son. The fact that he was willing to do it, and then we all took the leap of faith and went ahead and went to earth because he hasn’t accomplished it yet. And then he came in the meridian of time and he accomplished it. Now at the end, he promises us whatever happens to you, I will never leave you.

                                           01:36:16             Things won’t work out. Things will be different than you’ve planned or what you thought, but whatever else happens to you, you are never going to be alone. I will not leave you comfortless. I will always be with you. That’s the promise of that man who stood up and said, “Here am I, send me.” He will always be with us. We do not ever have to be alone. For me, that is the absolute essence of the gospel, that however stupid I have been, however many mistakes I have made, some of them terrible mistakes, he will not leave me comfortless. He will be with me no matter what I’ve done and he will help me work my way back until I can be a better person. That’s my essence of my testimony. I’m so grateful that he would do that. And I will testify about that to anybody who doesn’t yet know it. They are never alone and he will always help.

John Bytheway:               01:37:12             We’ve come full circle. Here’s Jesus standing up in Nazareth, gets the scroll and says, “He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted.” Now, there’s healing and physical maladies, and he does that too, perhaps to show that if I can heal the body, I can heal the spirit too. But what he emphasizes is I can heal broken hearts for those that are, feel broken. Last week, Hank, in our testimony meeting, a sister said, I am broken, in her testimony. Here’s Jesus who said, I have come to heal the brokenhearted. I just love that’s how he introduced the beginning of his ministry.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:37:51             I really appreciate you bringing this full circle around to his ministry as the Messiah, as the anointed one, John. I always have in my mind a scripture from Doctrine and Covenants 58. It happened, I think it was in August of 1831. Joseph Smith has arrived in Jackson County, Missouri. He’s just gotten there. They have a meeting, they have a worship meeting, and two people got baptized. And then the people ask the prophet who’s just come, they said, what is the will of the Lord for Zion? They’re galvanized around this idea about Zion and that through all these eons, they get to be some of the ones to build it. He gives Doctrine and Covenants 58. That’s the revelation that came out of that. I have really taken this as one of the most important scriptures in my own life because about what it says about our topics today.

                                           01:38:41             I’m going to read six through eight. He said, “Behold verily, I say unto you, for this cause have I sent you, that you might be obedient and that your hearts might be prepared to bear testimony of the things which are to come, and also that you might be honored in laying the foundation and in bearing record of the land upon which the Zion of God shall stand. And also that a feast of fat things might be prepared for the poor. Yea a feast of fat things of wine on the lees well refined, that the earth may know that the mouths of the prophets shall not fail.” We’ve been talking about Isaiah 2,600 years ago and you’ve got Joseph Smith in 1831 who’s saying, what should we do about Zion? And the Lord says to the people there, and he says it to us, look, it’s going to be about a feast of fat things and a table for the poor.

                                           01:39:33             And you’ve got to understand that because that’s my vision of what Zion is going to be. A feast of fat things, wine on the lees well refined, and this is how you’re going to know that the mouths of the prophets will not fail. Everything we studied in Isaiah is about a feast of fat things for the poor, and I count myself as one of the poor. This gospel is a feast of fat things. I’ve just loved studying this with you today and I appreciate the depth of experience that you bring to this discussion. I recognize both of you have really profoundly thought about this and it was a privilege for me to be with you today doing it. I’m really glad.

Hank Smith:                      01:40:11             This has been a really fun time.

John Bytheway:               01:40:13             Absolutely.

Hank Smith:                      01:40:14             I am a little selfish in this show and I get to tell my family that I’m friends with Sharon Eubank.

John Bytheway:               01:40:19             Yeah. If I see you at the airport this time, I’m going to run up and say hi. Is that okay? All right.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:40:25             You better come up.

Hank Smith:                      01:40:27             I love this promise from Isaiah 64:4, “For since the beginning of the world, men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath eye seen O God, besides thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him.”

John Bytheway:               01:40:42             Paul borrowed that in 1 Corinthians 2:9, didn’t he? It sounds just like it.

Hank Smith:                      01:40:48             Sharon, I get that feeling from you. There’s, hearing you teach gets me excited about the things God is preparing. Like the future looks really good. Thanks for being here. Thanks for taking time.

John Bytheway:               01:41:00             Yeah, thank you.

Sis. Sharon Eubank:        01:41:00             Thanks. Thanks for encouraging us all to follow Him.

Hank Smith:                      01:41:04             John, this has been a great day.

John Bytheway:               01:41:07             Absolutely. Like you say often, Hank, you don’t want it to end. We have other things to inquire of her, but,

Hank Smith:                      01:41:13             Yes.

John Bytheway:               01:41:14             We’ll try another time.

Hank Smith:                      01:41:17             Here we are wrapping up five lessons on Isaiah. Maybe someone thinks, oh, I don’t know if I really understand Isaiah. But that’s okay. You understand it better than you did five weeks ago.

John Bytheway:               01:41:27             Yeah. We’ll take it.

Hank Smith:                      01:41:28             Don’t worry. It’s coming around again. I have a feeling that this won’t be the last time we visit Isaiah’s writings. The Lord has a way of bringing it back to us almost every year, I think. With that, we want to thank Sister Sharon Eubank for joining us today. What a treat. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen. And every episode, we remember our founder, Steve Sorensen. We hope you’ll join us next week. We are jumping into Jeremiah on followHIM. As a thank you to our wonderful listeners, we’d love to gift you the digital version of our book, Finding Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. It offers short, meaningful insights drawn from our past Old Testament episodes. Visit followhim.co, that’s followhim.co, to download your free copy today, and you’ll also find the link to purchase the print edition.

                                           01:42:22             Thank you for being part of our followHIM family. Of course, none of this could happen without our incredible production crew. David Perry, Lisa Spice, Will Stoughton, Krystal Roberts, Ariel Cuadra, Heather Barlow, Amelia Kabwika, Sydney Smith, and Annabelle Sorensen.