John Bytheway: 00:00:01 Welcome to part two with Dr. Rebecca Clarke, 3 Nephi 27 to 4 Nephi.

Hank Smith: 00:00:07 Something that happened when President Monson altered the age for missionaries was that a lot of sister missionaries entered the field, many more, of course, than we’d ever had before. Yet there were some of these young women who went to the Lord and said, “I want to do what you want me to do,” and He said, “A mission’s not for you.” Maybe it’s a stretch, but I can see this playing out where some of these young women John and I both teach, I’m sure, Rebecca, you teach them as well, they feel almost like these three felt, like, “Oh, I don’t think I want the right thing,” or, “I don’t think I’m doing the right thing.” Sometimes they’re treated that way. Sometimes we treat these young women who don’t go on missions as if they did something wrong.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:00:53 There are some really good ways to live righteously, and we get to see that it’s not always our exact way has to be the only way or the best way. I really like that application. It’s really cool to see in this chapter these desires, these righteous desires, of these three come to pass. We get to see their power and all the things they overcame.

  00:01:20 The three Nephites have always seemed pretty magical to me. Their natures were changed. They became more holy. If I were to title this chapter, I would call it When We Have the Spirit, We’re Way More Amazing Than When We Don’t. Listen to what they overcame. Cast into prisons, they’re cast into pits, and they’re delivered. Three times they’re cast into furnaces. Two times they escape wild beasts. This is just the beginning. I haven’t had to escape any beasts lately, but I think about these ideas of like a deep pit.

  00:01:53 I’ve certainly had those types of experiences in my life. We can look at the three Nephites as modeling how much more power we have when we are connected to Jesus Christ. We’re going to face opposition if we’re sanctified like these men were, the powers of earth couldn’t hold them, and I think in a way the powers of the earth can’t hold us either. Despair, it can’t hold us forever. If we can enter into that relationship, that saving relationship with Jesus Christ, sadness, all of this, all of the desolation, we can be empowered to climb out of those pits. But to wrap this section up, I would love to hear three Nephites stories, brushes with fame.

Hank Smith: 00:02:37 Brushes with fame. I love it.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:02:40 I don’t have any. I don’t think I’ve ever met them, but-

John Bytheway: 00:02:43 The one story that comes to mind about the three Nephites, I don’t know if anybody’s ever said, “Hey, that was the three Nephites,” but you both remember that David Whitmer is thinking of going down to Harmony to help Joseph. Well, as soon as you saw a plaster of Paris in the field, I thought plaster of Paris is what I made sculptures out of in paper plates in sixth grade. Why do you sow that in a field? I guess it’s some sort of fertilizer. Sorry, I didn’t grow up on a farm. Then when they wake up in the morning, it’s all been sown. Is it Peter Whitmer, Sr. that says, “There’s an overriding hand in this”? I think one of the accounts says there were three men and the children said, “I never saw men work so fast.” Hank, who is it that has a podcast about these kind of stories?

Hank Smith: 00:03:26 Oh, our friend Chris Blythe. Chris was with us last year in our Book of Revelation, and he’s a scholar of folklore. Chris, if you’re out there, I think you’re going to need to add a bunch more three Nephite stories to your podcast. That’s really fun.

  00:03:43 We should say that those of you who are teaching this week, I think you do what Rebecca did, teach the wonderful doctrines and principles in these, and then maybe at the very end say, “I’ve got a three Nephites story for you.” But don’t make the lesson about the people who disappear from the backseat of the car.

  00:04:02 My friend Steve, he said that he was one of the first people called to the Navajo Nation. He got there and they already had copies of the Book of Mormon. He said, “Where did you get these? This is the first time we’ve had it,” and they said, “Oh, this guy came by six months ago and brought us all these copies of the Book of Mormon. We’re all ready to be baptized,” and he’s sure. He’s like, “That’s got to be … “

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:04:25 Perfect.

Hank Smith: 00:04:25 Only if he would’ve signed them before he left, that old man. Nephihah, right?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:04:32 We could have known their names.

Hank Smith: 00:04:35 I frequently tell my students that I’ve memorized the names of the 12. You have one in four chance. So if you ever think you’re meeting one of the three Nephites, just yell out one of the names.

John Bytheway: 00:04:46 Hey, Kumenonhi.

Hank Smith: 00:04:48 Shemnon. If he turns, you could say, “I knew it. I knew it.”

John Bytheway: 00:04:52 Then you’d be like …

Hank Smith: 00:04:55 Yeah. Rebecca, we’ve covered 27 and 28. We have two more chapters in 3 Nephi. What do you want to do with these?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:05:02 We see in chapter 29 the coming forth of the Book of Mormon will be assigned to people, that God is remembering His covenants, that He’s begun to gather Israel.

  00:05:13 There’s this incredible power that we get to see in chapter 29. In fact, in verse nine, 3 Nephi 29:9, I’d love to have us read that. Think about God’s power and His willingness to keep His promises to us.

  00:05:29 We get to see again this relationality of how God interacts with us. He’s perfectly consistent. He’s perfectly reliable. He’s perfectly loving. If He says something, He’s going to do it. We can put all of our trust in Him. If we could read verse nine, I think that’s a beautiful illustration of God’s incredible power.

John Bytheway: 00:05:49 Okay. 3 Nephi 29:9. “Therefore ye need not suppose that ye can turn the right hand of the Lord unto the left, that He may not execute judgment unto fulfilling of the covenant which He hath made unto the house of Israel.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:06:03 Yeah. We see that nothing can stop God from keeping His covenants or promises with us. We’ve seen it anciently. We’ve seen Him in the rear-view mirror. We’ve seen His covenants come to pass. But if we make covenants with God and we have that relationship, that covenant relationship with Him, we can fully trust in it. Those promises will be kept. It’s really exciting. This chapter is saying, look, to us, the second coming is near. Then we move into chapter 30, which is the shortest chapter in the Book of Mormon. It is two verses long. It opens with this invitation to us from Mormon. Hearken. What does it mean to hearken?

Hank Smith: 00:06:49 Hearken means to … Like, “Give me your eyes. Turn towards me. I’ve got something for you.” If I were to say, “Kids, listen to me,” they might glance over. “Kids, hearken. Stop what you’re doing and look at me. This is important.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:07:07 You’re going to have to follow through on what I tell you. I’m giving you some instruction that’s not just going to be empty words. This is instruction to listen to and to do something. Verse two is that instruction. This verse, I feel like, is written directly to us because we’ve been set in time in terms of, “When the Book of Mormon comes forth, buckle up because I’m keeping my promises.” Then verse two is so cool because it is yet another verse telling us to live the gospel. “Turn or repent.” We bring our imperfections to Jesus Christ. “Be baptized in my name.” We enter into that covenant relationship with Jesus Christ and into a relationship of service and love with each other. Then we can have the Spirit and we can be made holy and happy. Up next is where we get to see the results of people who have chosen to live this gospel.

Hank Smith: 00:08:00 I love it.

John Bytheway: 00:08:01 I had always been taught that hearken means to hear and obey. If my mom said, “Clean your room,” yeah, I heard you. If my mom says, “Clean your room,” and I hearkened, I think that means that I cleaned my room.

Hank Smith: 00:08:13 Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:08:13 Oh, that’s good.

John Bytheway: 00:08:15 Hearkened means I did it.

Hank Smith: 00:08:17 Before we move on, I wanted to mention two things. One is this seems to be an extension of the discussion we had with Dr. Baron last week, understanding what the covenant is. It’s almost as if Mormon turns to the reader and says, “All right, Gentiles, what are you going to do?”

  00:08:33 One other thing is if you look in chapter 30, this is Mormon speaking, as you said, Rebecca, and look what has happened to our narrator. Back when he started, he said things like this, “And Mosiah began to reign in his father’s stead. He began to reign in the 30th year of his age, making in whole about 476 years from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem.” That was our narrator in the beginning. Rebecca, I’m sure you’ve seen this. In the process of writing, in the actual putting the pen to paper or whatever he was using, the stylus to plate.

John Bytheway: 00:09:05 Stylus to malleable gold alloy.

Hank Smith: 00:09:10 He has become something different. Does that sound like the same guy? “Hearken, O ye Gentiles, and hear the words of Jesus Christ, the son of the living God. Turn, all ye Gentiles, from your wicked ways.” He’s gone from historian to prophet in the process of writing the book. What do you want to do with 4 Nephi? I think this is the shortest book in the Book of Mormon. If not, it’s close to. I know you love it, Rebecca.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:09:37 I love it. I want to dive in and talk about happiness and how they got there, how we can apply that to our lives and be maybe even happier, and then talk about how they lost it. That’s instructive as well. But we’ll talk mostly about happiness, the nature of it, how we can get more of it in our lives and in our relationships.

  00:10:02 Back in part one, we talked about how happiness is based more on the quality of our relationships than on anything else. When Christ is talking to the 12 in 3 Nephi 27, He even mentions that His happiness is tied to His relationship with us. He says, “My joy is great even unto fullness because of you, and even the father rejoiceth, and also all the holy angels, because of you.”

  00:10:27 We get to see heaven on earth in this book. We’ve talked about a glimpse of what that looked like, but I’m just going to repeat some of those things, some of those features of this happy people. No contention, no disputations, they dealt justly. They had all things in common, great and marvelous works done by the disciples of Jesus Christ. The Lord did prosper them exceedingly in the land. They built cities again. They waxed strong. They multiplied exceedingly fast. They were creators. They were doers and builders. They became an exceedingly fair and delightsome people. They marry and they’re blessed. They fast and pray and meet together often. The love of God is in their hearts. In fact, if someone could read 16.

John Bytheway: 00:11:06 Okay, this is 4 Nephi 1:16. “And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:11:27 Yup, there we have it. That’s something that we, I think, want. We all want that, right?

John Bytheway: 00:11:32 I think so.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:11:33 We learn, in verse 17, there’s no robbers, murderers, and there’s no -ites. Let’s break this down a little bit. Look at happiness for a second. That’s the good news. I want to quickly address the fact that maybe all of this talk of happiness might be causing some of us to ask, why am I not happier? I feel like I’m following this recipe. Am I not living the gospel fully enough? Why am I not walking around in total bliss all of the time like these people?

  00:12:03 As we talk about happiness, we need to allow other people their agency. We can’t step into this place of saying if they would just do exactly what I asked of them, then I would be happy.

  00:12:16 I had a friend say the other day something great. She said, “If I could just move my son around like a chess piece, life would be so great for all of us.” Sometimes we slip into that, thinking if I could control other people, then I could be happy.

  00:12:29 We also need to allow for seasons of life to be more joyful or less joyful than others. Some things are just plain hard and we have to get through them. We’re going to experience loss. It’s interesting to note that these people, even though they were the happiest people, just from the timeframe, that span lasted for 200 years, we know they experienced loss. We know they lost loved ones. They were living a mortal experience.

  00:12:57 Even though there couldn’t have been a happier people on the whole, we’ve got to know that there are going to be ups and downs and moments in our lives. Do you guys have any thoughts about that, if people aren’t feeling as happy as they wish they were?

John Bytheway: 00:13:09 I go all the way back to 2 Nephi 2 and Lehi talking about opposition in all things. “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” But then in the Pearl of Great Price, it says “Because that Adam fell, we are, and we are made partakers of misery and woe.”

  00:13:30 Sometimes you have 2 Nephi 2:25 days and sometimes you have Moses 6:48 days. But that was his whole point, of opposition in all things. Do you guys remember a musical years ago? “You can never know the good if you’ve never known the bad. You can never be happy if you’ve never been sad” that whole idea of we rejoice in the happy times because we know this too shall pass.

  00:13:55 I remember one day in high school I was having a bad time, and my dad said to me, “This too shall pass.” I remember a month, a year later, I was having a great time, and my dad said, “This too shall pass.”

Hank Smith: 00:14:11 I think of Mosiah 18 where the people get their baptismal covenant, which is mourn with those who mourn, comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and willing to bear one another’s burdens, which I think inherent in that commitment is that there are going to be people who are mourning and who are going to have burdens that are too heavy for themselves to bear. If that’s you, you’re not doing something wrong. The Lord planned on that happening, which is part of why we have our church community.

  00:14:46 To my teenage friends, I usually say, look, three to four days of being sad, that’s not depression. But if someone is feeling a constant state of despair and there really is no reason, there’s really nothing that’s happening that should make you have this pit in your stomach of fear and despair, this is where your social circle can come in, talk to someone. Talk to someone. It is becoming, as you both know, more and more prevalent, especially among youth, to feel this way. Please reach out. Please reach out to someone.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:15:26 I am a huge fan of therapy and medication and treatment that can help people be happier. That’s my research, my professional background. I believe in it. If medication is needed to help you feel what you need, then it should be used. If therapy can help unlock things for you or see things in a new way, then grab hold of that and participate in it. Often these tools can free us up to see more clearly what the gospel has to offer us, and sometimes we need that help.

Hank Smith: 00:15:53 Gone are the days of just pray more, just go to the temple more, right?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:15:58 Yeah, just pray.

John Bytheway: 00:15:59 When you look at the lives of the living prophets, they’re not constant bliss. They’re losing spouses and children. They are all going through mortality just like we are. Don’t get the impression that everybody around you has it easy. Some of us hide it better than others.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:16:19 That’s true.

Hank Smith: 00:16:20 Since you brought it up, a lot of people don’t realize that George Albert Smith, the president of the church, suffered from severe anxiety and depression. It left him shattered and weakened at times. This is in a biography of his. Shortly after pleading with God to let him die, he had several remarkable spiritual experiences that restored his confidence and gave him strength to endure.

  00:16:47 So you’re right, John. Depression never fully left him despite his hard-won improvements, but he pressed on to fulfill his duties and care for his family. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re what scientists call alive. You’re what scientists call human.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:17:04 Yeah. We will talk about ways that we can improve our chances of being happy, but that’s not to say that you’re not doing it right if you’re not happy.

  00:17:13 I want to talk just a moment about gratitude, about how gratitude can help us shift our focus and can sometimes help in terms of helping us be happier. Elder Sabin said in a recent general conference, “You’ll never be happier than you are grateful,” and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. That’s an application piece that many of us can use.

  00:17:36 There was a woman on my mission in Guatemala who taught me some really important lessons on gratitude. Jimena was 21 years old. I was about that age when I was teaching her. She had three kids. We were in really different life situations. She couldn’t read or write. She had a really mean husband. When we taught her to pray, we showed her the flip charts, outlined the steps of prayer, but she couldn’t read it.

  00:18:01 The steps for prayer included give thanks for blessings and then ask for blessings we might need. When Jimena would pray, she would only say, “Te damos gracias por,” like over and over. “I give thee thanks for … ,” “We give thee thanks for … ,” and then fill in the blank. I thought maybe she was doing it this way because she couldn’t read the flip chart instructions. We re-explained it, and she made it clear that she only wanted to say thank you to God for her many, many blessings.

  00:18:29 One morning my companion and I saw Jimena out. It was early-ish. She said she was looking for food for her family, and she was looking in the gutter. If there is someone who would qualify to petition for God’s blessings, it would be her, but I never heard her give Heavenly Father anything but thanks.

  00:18:49 Now this is not to say that we need to follow this model, but it was a beautiful thing to me to hear her focus so much on her gratitude. I think it maybe saved her life really, how focused she was on that. Jimena thanked Heavenly Father for her children. She thanked Him for the way the sunlight came in through an opening in her home and would shine a pretty pattern on her walls which were made of cardboard.

  00:19:15 She found joy and she was grateful for so many things that I would never even consider. Gratitude can help get us through. We know these people in 4 Nephi faced challenges, but I think how we look at them can really be life-changing for us.

  00:19:31 One of the most haunting Book of Mormon verses for me on the power of perspective is way back in 1 Nephi, and it’s when Nephi is commanded to build a ship. Laman and Lemuel really fall apart over this and they say, “You can’t do that because you’re weak and you’re foolish, just like dad. Everyone’s been suffering. We’ve been suffering. This has been terrible.”

  00:19:53 Then in 1 Nephi 17:21, it says this, “Behold, these many years we have suffered in the wilderness, which time we might have enjoyed our possessions and the land of our inheritance; yea, and we might have been happy.” That idea of we might have been happy if … We need to really be thoughtful about our perspective on our lives. Are we waiting for something to happen? I will be happy when …

  00:20:21 This is so haunting to me because we might have been happy. It’s true, they could have been happy. Human beings, we are built to notice the negative. It’s salient. It’s a matter of survival that we actually do this, and yet Christ has told us that we’re not built to live like this eternally. We’re not supposed to continually forecast the bad weather, only the bad weather. There’s good weather, too. Just like we can forecast sorrow and look for the sorrow, we can focus on forecasting more happiness in our lives.

  00:20:56 There’s a great quote by the Roman philosopher Seneca, who wrote, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. We are in the habit of exaggerating or imagining or anticipating sorrow.” I feel like I fall into that sometimes where I’m actually thinking about all the many things that can go wrong. You know what, a lot of times they don’t. A lot of times it goes pretty well, and especially if we’re grateful.

  00:21:22 President Monson was quoting someone else, but he talked about tending to secret gardens, and it’s up to us which secret garden we will tend, that we have parallel things competing for our attention in our lives and we can choose which one we want to focus on. As we start to talk about happiness and relationships, keep that in mind that we don’t have a lot of tons of control over our circumstances, but we have a lot of control over how we view those.

Hank Smith: 00:21:47 I love it.

John Bytheway: 00:21:48 Hank, I’ve heard you quote that exact same verse, we might’ve been happy, when we put a condition on it. Hank, I really want our audience to hear you talk about people who keep putting a deadline on their happiness, because it’s so funny.

Hank Smith: 00:22:02 That’s a great chapter, Rebecca, that you brought up. It’s 1 Nephi 17. You read verses 20 and 21. You have almost the exact same length of Nephi describing his situation in verse 2 and 3. Now they’re living the exact same experience. I’m sure that the tent next door, same ship, same parents.

  00:22:22 Nephi describes it this way. He says, “So great were the blessings of the Lord upon us, that while we live upon raw meat in the wilderness, our women did give plenty of suck for their children. They were strong, like unto the men. They began to bear their journeyings without murmurings. And thus we see that the commandments of God must be fulfilled. If the children of men keep the commandments of God, He nourishes them, He strengthens them, He provides means that they can accomplish the thing which he commanded them. He did provide means for us while we did sojourn in the wilderness.”

  00:22:53 It’s almost the exact reverse of what Laman said. “These many years we have suffered in the wilderness, which time we might have enjoyed our possessions in the land of our inheritance. We might have been happy.”

  00:23:05 Our listeners could take 1 Nephi 17, compare verses 2 and 3 to verses 20 and 21. It’s definitely not your circumstances. It seems like for Laman, happiness is always somewhere else, like you said, Rebecca. Happiness is back in Jerusalem.

  00:23:21 I’ve said we grow up this way. When we’re younger, we think, “I’ll be happy when I’m as old as my brothers and sisters, that I can do the things they do.” Then it’s, “I’ll be happy when I’m out of this house,” when you’re a teenager. Then, “I’ll be happy when I’m on my mission,” and then, “I’ll be happy when I’m back off of my mission,” and then it’s, “I’d be happy if I was married.” I’ve heard students say that, “I’d be happier if I was married.” Then, “I’d be happier if we had kids.” Then it’s, “I’m going to be happy when all these kids move out. I’m sure then I’ll be happy.”

  00:23:56 Then pretty soon it’s, “I bet I’ll be happy when I retire,” and this is not a joke. My own grandmother said to me in her 90s, she said, “Hank, I think after I die, I think if I were dead, I’d be happier.” It’s like when does this stop? I’m convinced there’s people in the spirit world that say, “As soon as I’m resurrected, I’m going to be happy.”

  00:24:19 Happiness is always somewhere else, and that’s a dangerous place because you’re never going to get there. It’s always going to be a little bit further down the road. It never is. Cultivating happiness now is what we’re after, not wishing for different times. We see people in the Book of Mormon doing that. Do you remember Nephi, John? “O, that I had lived during the days of … “

John Bytheway: 00:24:43 “Oh, those were the days.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:24:44 Good ol’ days.

John Bytheway: 00:24:45 “Yeah, it was so great.” It’s like, “Are we reading the same book? Those days didn’t sound very good.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:24:53 It was worse.

Hank Smith: 00:24:56 Nephi says, “Wait, what are you talking about?” It should be said that some of our happiness, right, Rebecca, is just in our DNA?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:25:00 Yes, that’s very true. We come with a temperament.

John Bytheway: 00:25:03 I like that Joseph Smith spoke of his native cheery disposition. I’ve always wondered what that means and where you order that. Maybe nativecheerydisposition.com or something.

Hank Smith: 00:25:15 Yeah. Rebecca, you were right. Not a lot of our happiness comes from our circumstances. There’s a little bit. The research shows two things, health and poverty. If I can change those circumstances, I can impact your happiness, but not your weight, not what car you drive. I remember I told one woman, talking about happiness, and I said, “At a certain point, income stops making you happy. It’s not as much as people would think.” It levels out. Obviously if you don’t have any income, getting more income significantly changes your happiness because you have a place to live and your stress goes down. You have medicine, you have food.

  00:25:55 Up around where you take care of your needs, that’s where money stops really having a lot of impact. She said to me, she said, “That’s not true. Those people just don’t know where to shop.” She just could not believe it. Didn’t you say this earlier, Rebecca, when we started? We’re not very good at-

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:26:17 Predicting. Yeah, humans aren’t.

John Bytheway: 00:26:20 I’ve heard this repeated so often from President Nelson, the joy we feel has less to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives. That was that focused on Christ message.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:26:32 Yeah, that’s beautiful. We know that it’s not so much based on our circumstances, that happiness is not so much based on our circumstances, but one of the defining features, and we brought this up earlier, the element that is mentioned more than anything else in this description of the happiest people is that they did not have contention. That is worth paying attention to because friction is the stuff of human relationships. Tell me that in 200 years’ time, all the married couples-

Hank Smith: 00:27:03 Everything.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:27:03 … agreed on how to handle household issues-

John Bytheway: 00:27:06 On everything, right.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:27:06 … and parenting and money. Our parents and children were totally in sync about curfews and chores. These people were living a mortal life. Conflict is inevitable. That’s not a bad thing. Research shows strong marriages increase in trust when they work through conflict well. They can disagree on something, have an argument or work through it, and then they end up with even more trust. They report feeling happier with each other.

  00:27:34 Weak marriages work in the opposite direction, with conflict. So we have to be careful about saying … Well, it’s a great thing, but we do see that conflict is inevitable, but contention is a choice. Contention comes into play when we are handling conflict in ways that are not in keeping with how Jesus Christ acted or related to us. We can have love in our hearts and disagree on things, but we can’t have a loving heart and be contentious. Those can’t coexist.

  00:28:07 Dr. John and Julie Gottman are scholars of relationships. They study marriages and they’ve done some really neat and insightful research on predicting divorce. They brought married couples into their lab and just asked them to discuss a topic of conflict for 15 minutes.

John Bytheway: 00:28:23 Wow.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:28:23 Then the researchers would watch the tape back and just look for patterns. The Gottmans got to the point where they could predict a divorce within the next five years for a couple with a really high degree of accuracy, like 85%. They tuned into four problematic communication patterns and they called them the four horsemen of the apocalypse, because, left unchecked, they spelled the end of the relationship.

  00:28:50 The characteristic most problematic and most predictive of divorce was a pattern of contempt. Everyone has moments like this in their marriages and close relationships. You are not going to automatically get a divorce if you slip into these behaviors, but unchecked, consistent patterns of contempt are harmful.

  00:29:12 Really, watching videos of couples engaging in contempt is quite upsetting. It’s husbands, it’s wives putting each other down, belittling the other person.

John Bytheway: 00:29:23 Tough to watch.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:29:24 It is. It is. It’s tough. One thing that we can learn from 4 Nephi about this is we read something really fascinating about contention or contempt. 4 Nephi verse 39, it says, “They were taught to hate the children of God.” So this is when they start to lose their happiness, even as the Lamanites were taught to hate the children of Nephi from the beginning.

  00:29:46 I’m really struck by that phrase taught to hate. That’s a strong phrase. But I think that it’s interesting that we can be taught, we can learn mindsets about how to interact with the world and how to be in the world. It’s depressing, but probably worthwhile to consider how would people be taught to hate?

  00:30:08 It would be unlikely that I would ever try to purposely teach my child to hate, yet this happened in this time. It’s possible that we could say something, for example, about groups of other people or other people just even in the presence of our kids that could teach them or model them a mindset of contention or contempt. In terms of application and contention, I think we need to be really careful about what we model to our kids and to the people that we love in our lives.

  00:30:39 When we set people up as competitors or rivals, speak of them in terms of less than, we start to lose our happiness.

Hank Smith: 00:30:48 Wasn’t that Mosiah 10? They taught their children to hate, that they were wronged. We were wronged in the wilderness. We were wronged in crossing the sea. We were wronged in the land of our first inheritance. That went on for centuries.

John Bytheway: 00:31:04 What would be the natural consequence of that, that the world’s against me? Yeah, you can only imagine.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:31:12 In the Gottmans’ work, the four communication patterns that were particularly problematic are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. If you’re trying to connect on something … So you have a moment in your marriage where you’re really trying to work something out and then this is the pattern that you go to, that can be problematic. The first communication pattern of criticism means I’m criticizing you. I’m putting you down. Rather than dealing with the issue at hand, I’m going to attack you with some kind of critique.

  00:31:48 It might even be something where I attack your character. You might need something from me, need to change something, and instead of saying, “Okay, I’ll take that to heart. I’ll try to change this” … Maybe I overspent. I would say, “You don’t make enough money.” It hurts even to say these examples, but it’s being critical, and that doesn’t bring connection.

  00:32:10 Then there is contempt, and that is the most pernicious of the four horsemen. Contempt has an element, a kind of a flavor of hate and disdain. This is the most problematic of the four horsemen. It’s the most predictive of divorce. Contempt indicates a one up and a one down position. It indicates that I’m not even seeing you as worthy of my time. These videos are hard to watch. You see people just belittling their spouse.

Hank Smith: 00:32:38 Probably rolling their eyes, right?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:32:40 Yes, rolling their eyes like, “This again?” Of course that’s not going to be helpful to a relationship. Then there’s defensiveness. Defensiveness is where I try to deflect. Maybe my spouse comes to me with an issue, and instead of saying, “I hear you. I want to try to work through this with you,” “Well, that wasn’t my fault,” I’m going to just deflect it. “That’s something you should have done. You should have told me or you should have reminded me,” or whatever the situation is, and being unwilling to face up to my participation in whatever the conflict is that we’re having.

  00:33:16 The last horseman of the apocalypse is stonewalling, and that’s just shutting down, not participating at all. Males have a primary go-to horseman, and females do, too. We can all do all of these of course, but women tend to criticize more than men and men tend to stonewall more than women. Men will back away and shut down, and then women will sometimes attack and approach.

  00:33:46 Now this is really fascinating to me, the stonewalling on behalf of men. Many times men are actually trying to do something good for the relationship in these moments. They are trying to avoid attacking. We know that in marriage conflict, in marital conflict, men get more physiologically aroused when there is conflict than women do. It hurts them actually physically. They get more upset discussing relational issues. It’s harder for them to decompress.

  00:34:19 Sometimes they’ll put up a wall. If you hear them talk about it, they’ll say things like, “I didn’t want to make things worse. I didn’t want to escalate things,” where their wives will be saying things like, “He never talks to me about this. He just shuts down. He just tunes me out.” That is an interesting piece of this.

  00:34:35 And women with their criticism will sometimes be on the attack. They’re trying to connect in their own way. It’s not a great way, but they are at least approaching the relationship conflict and trying to resolve it. Maybe that criticism is not an effective way to do so.

  00:34:52 But those four horsemen can come together into a constellation of behaviors that can be really troublesome for marriages. But, again, the strongest one is contempt. We need to watch for all of that in our communication. Contempt has the difficult addition of a mindset, of a feeling behind it that’s not really working for the relationship. These other behaviors, defensiveness can be protective. Criticism can be an approach to try to figure something out. Stonewalling can be trying to keep things cool. But contempt really doesn’t have positive benefit, I don’t think. It comes from a place of seeing the other as less than.

Hank Smith: 00:35:33 Let’s tie it back to 4 Nephi then, because seems like praise instead of criticism. Would it be respect and love instead of contempt? Defensiveness. what would the opposite of defensiveness be?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:35:48 Defensiveness would be taking responsibility. It’s saying, “I understand that I’m a part of this. I am not trying to offload the responsibility for this whole thing onto you.”

Hank Smith: 00:36:01 “You do that, too.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:36:03 Yeah, “You do that, too.” That’s a red herring as we argue. Just look over there.

Hank Smith: 00:36:07 Praise, respect, taking responsibility. The opposite of stonewalling would maybe be openness?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:36:12 Yeah, I think so. With stonewalling, it can be really helpful for relationships and marriages if they’re dealing with conflict. If a partner is feeling emotionally dysregulated, it can be really great to take a break. “I’ve got to go process this. Just give me a second.” That’s the antidote to that. Contempt, the antidote is love. You’ve got to change your mindset. Just like you can learn, be taught to hate or learn to hate, I think you can learn to love, and I want to look at that actually, too.

Hank Smith: 00:36:42 I think you’re right on. I can sense … Maybe not those exact words are used in 4 Nephi, the four horsemen versus the four antidotes as we called them there. I don’t know. You can sense the four horsemen creep up in the second half. They had the four antidotes they were working, and then these four horsemen crept up on them. Pride, exercising power and authority. Those aren’t the same words, but that’s contempt. That’s criticism.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:37:06 Yeah, it really is. I think there’s so much power in how we see other people. I think that’s one thing we learn in 4 Nephi is how we see other people. When we are seen and we are loved for who we are, which is something Christ does perfectly for us, it doesn’t mean He wants us to stay in a state of imperfection. He doesn’t want that either. But He loves us for who we are. That can be really motivating to us in relationships when we are seen. Anyone who spent any amount of time with a toddler knows that innate refrain of, “Watch me, watch me. Look at me. Watch me.” I don’t think we ever fully grow out of that.

  00:37:50 One of the most loving gifts we can give in our relationships and to each other is to really see the other person, and that can take time. When I met with couples in marital therapy, I learned that lesson of how powerful it is for partners to feel seen. In fact, that’s what the work of a lot of marital therapy is, slowing things down so that they can hear each other and see each other, rather than they get into these spaces with the four horsemen that muddies the waters. People are looking everywhere but at their real partner and what they really are going through.

  00:38:27 Seeing each other clearly is a celestial principle. In Doctrine and Covenants in section 76 verse 94, we read about those in the Celestial Kingdom. It says, “And they see as they are seen, and they know as they are known.” Being noticed has such power.

  00:38:44 I was talking the other day with Owen, my oldest son who’s 17. I asked him, “When have you felt most loved by me or dad?” He pointed quickly to a family walk we had taken some weeks prior again up the canyon on a Sunday afternoon. He was having a really difficult day. Difficult weekend, difficult day. He didn’t want to be there. He’s lagging behind us, and here I am trying to keep everyone motivated. I’m walking up ahead and charging ahead.

  00:39:12 But Sam, my husband, turned around, just looked back at Owen. He stopped him and gave him a hug, and that was it. He didn’t say anything magical or healing. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. He just hugged him.

  00:39:28 As Owen was telling me this, he got choked up. He said, “I felt so relieved.” Then he said, “Just having dad notice was what mattered.” How we see each other is of vital importance. If we don’t see each other clearly, we can’t connect. That’s when disconnection, I think, really starts. Sometimes we’re blind to our own blindness. We see what we think we already know is there.

  00:39:54 We had chickens for about two decades at our house. They were all layer hens, and we would periodically refresh the batch. One spring, we got five chickens, which the kids named Clam, Carrot, Katie, Zebra, and Star. Sam and I noticed early on that Star, the chicken, she was really picking on the other chickens. She was bossy and she was loud. Not only that, but she was gargantuan. She was almost twice as big as the other hens.

  00:40:24 All the chickens were wandering around in our yard one day. And so, it’s well into the summer. They’ve almost grown. Our neighbor, Brother Young, came over to visit. He was familiar with raising chickens. We started talking to him about our troubles with Star. It was like Star was exhibiting all of her bad behavior right there.

  00:40:42 I’ll never forget this rhetorical question that he asked us that day. After looking at the chickens and looking at us and looking at the chickens and looking at us, he said, “Well, you guys can see that Star’s a rooster.” Right as he said it, we started laughing. For the first time, Star has a comb. Star is cock-a-doodle-doing, waking us up every morning trying to be the rooster, the in-charge of the other chickens. Even though it was completely clear to us in the moment when he said it, because we’d been told at the store that they were all hens, we missed it. We simply didn’t look for the possibility of anything else.

  00:41:19 Sometimes we fail to see the realities of other people, people around us even. “Of course they should be happy.” Of course this, of course that. But if we take the moment to say to people and to be with them and to try to see them, “What is it that you want?” like Christ said to … “What is it that you desire?” that would be a great conversation starter in any familial relationship. “Where are you right now? How do you feel emotionally?” That is one of the great relationship lessons I take from 4 Nephi.

Hank Smith: 00:41:53 Two thoughts came to mind. One, I know in dialectical behavior therapy there’s a practice called the beginner’s mind, where you come into a situation trying to not have those previous idea set of what people are, who they are. One of my favorite examples of this in the scriptures is Luke 7, where a woman comes in … The Savior’s at dinner with a pharisee and a woman comes in. Everybody sees her. She interrupts the meal. Simon the Pharisee, in his mind, says, “This is a sinner.” Jesus turns to Simon … You’ve got to be careful with your thoughts, I think, if Jesus is in the room because-

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:42:32 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 00:42:33 He can just read your thoughts.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:42:35 He’s gotcha.

John Bytheway: 00:42:36 “So, Simon, I have a question.”

Hank Smith: 00:42:38 He does.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:42:38 It turns out.

Hank Smith: 00:42:38 He said, “Simon, I have a question for you,” and it fits right in with what you’re telling us, Rebecca. He said, “Simon, seest thou this woman?” It’s obvious that everyone sees her, but what you’re saying is this is more than seeing someone. This is are you really trying to see who they are instead of the label or what you think you see?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:42:59 Mm-hmm. Or what you wish you would see? We do that a lot of times in our relationships. I wish my husband were always happy with his wife and all of the things that I bring to the relationship. I wish that, so maybe I won’t ask because I don’t want to find out that what he really needs or wants …

  00:43:22 And I think it’s wonderful to attend and to try to map people and to try to understand where they are. We know that in parenting, there’s two great parts of parenting, and that’s to love your kids and then also to have boundaries and expectations and monitoring behaviors, knowing where they are, not just where they are at what friend’s house, but how they feel about that friend, how they feel about that relationship, being with people.

  00:43:51 We do this and we see this in 4 Nephi on a larger scale, where they’re talking about this communal love and peace and happiness. They got good at not -ite-ing people. We’re going to make that into a verb for a second, not -ite-ing people, not seeing them as a monolith or as other than, not having contempt or contention with them.

  00:44:16 I love this quote by Malcolm Gladwell in his book called Talking to Strangers. It’s looking at people that we don’t know, so moving away from family relationships for a second. He says, “We think we can see easily into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic, but the stranger is easy. If I can convince you,” then he’s talking about his book, “of one thing in this book, let it be this: strangers are not easy.”

  00:44:50 4 Nephi teaches us that how we see each other has a profound impact on our happiness. Early in my marriage, I was a student at a graduate program for marriage and family therapy, and I was learning how to be part of my marriage right when I was taking classes on what made marriages happiest. I was an attentive student.

  00:45:08 I’ll never forget one class in particular. I was rushing out the door to get to school on time. I was inconvenienced by one of our cars not working, and Sam was scheduled to have fixed it and it wasn’t done. As I left, I said some sharp words to Sam and I punctuated my comments by a really immature newlywed move and I slammed the door behind me. I walk into the lecture late and I’m self-righteous, simmering.

  00:45:34 Right as my professor said this, and I have this in my notes, she said, “Love is opening up space so that your partner can arise as a legitimate other.” I had to sit in my classroom desk for the entirety of that period knowing that I had delegitimized my husband. I had closed up space for him. I hadn’t seen him as a person with wants and needs and a schedule of his own. I had to wait until I could get home and say that I was sorry. This was just one of many important lessons I learned about relationships and marriage in my marriage and family therapy program.

  00:46:08 One of the neatest things I learned was about this way that we see each other. An Austrian-Jewish philosopher named Martin Buber, he did work on how we relate to each other, how we see the other. He theorized that we see each other in one of two ways. We either see other people in our lives as in an I-it orientation … I, I see you as an it, an object, a thing, either you’re going to benefit me or you’re going to be in my way somehow … or we see each other as a vow. He was religious and used religious language. In this orientation, we see other people as divine. We actually understand there is divinity in them.

  00:46:51 The I part in the I-it orientation, I am the most important part of that type of perspective. If I move through my life and my relationships where it’s really all about me, then other people are never going to be quite real to me.

  00:47:09 We can easily slip into this I-it way of seeing people and not realize that we’re doing it. We can be blind to it, like we didn’t know to look for a rooster in the pack of hens that we had, in the little flock of hens that we had. But when I see my husband as an it, as a fixer of my broken car, as a paycheck, someone to pick up the kids, I’ve slipped into the I-it thinking and made him into an object.

  00:47:35 If he sees me as a dinner maker or some sort of obstacle in how much I’m going to roll my eyes and how much is she going to spend this month, or a reminder of all the things he needs to fix, if he sees me that way, then we’ve I-ited each other. Even if I see my children as like a project, even if I see them as the source of my personal worth, that’s I-it as well.

  00:48:01 Social media is flooded with this I-it perspective built on treating people like objects, creating idols or caricatures out of real human beings. Sometimes in our public discourse, we speak of entire groups of people as if they’re barely human. If we have a strange relationship, that might be a place to look. If we are treating someone as an object, then maybe we don’t know what’s really in their hearts. We’re not looking at their reality or their divinity.

Hank Smith: 00:48:29 Can I ask you to follow up on one of those, and that is parents who see children as objects? Because I can be blinded by the fact, and it is a fact, that I want the best for them.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:48:43 Yes.

Hank Smith: 00:48:44 But it can still be an I-it

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:48:45 Mm-hmm. I think you want the best for people in the I-thou stance. I think if you are wanting the best for someone, you’re automatically departing from the I-it. I don’t think you’re looking at them as an object.

Hank Smith: 00:49:04 I-it would be I want the best for you because the best for you benefits me.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:49:04 Yes, because it makes me look great. I want you to win the spelling bee because that will make me feel proud and smart. That would be I-iting your child. To say, “I want you to win the spelling bee because I know it means the world to you, so let’s practice the words,” that is an I-thou, “Because I know it matters to you.” It’s mapping them.

  00:49:24 The cool thing about the I-it, I-thou is that the I is connected with a hyphen in both spaces. It really reflects on if I’m treating people, I’m connected to how I treat people is what I’m saying. I’m connected to my perspective on who other people are. So if I’m seeing people as a thou, as a child of God, as divine, as real and legitimate, that makes me, that makes the I that is connected to that a little different. I’m moving through the world differently.

  00:49:53 If we enter into the I-thou orientation, I will see others as a full and legitimate self. I’ll see the divine in people. I’ll know what they want because I’ve asked them. I will understand that they’re separate from me, but they have thoughts and needs and desires and wants that are as legitimate as my own are, that when we read about the happy people in 4 Nephi, we see there are no -ites. There are no others. They didn’t divide each other into groups based on wealth or gender or accomplishments or whatever political party, because -ites don’t exist to Christ. All are alike unto God. This is what we can model if we can …

  00:50:41 How do we move into the I-thou perspective? We slip back and forth between the two of them as we go through our lives. But the answer is you just choose to move into the I-thou perspective.

  00:50:54 I have a friend who taught writing at BYU for years, and she created a really powerful assignment for her students. It captures this move from I-it to I-thou. She had her students write two papers. The first one was to characterize a group of people, identify like a social or a religious or political issue that they disagreed with really strongly, and then write.

  00:51:18 Paper number one was describe the characteristics of the people who hold these different views. Then the students had to interview two people who actually held these different views. The second paper was a write-up of what students learned from the interview. The initial descriptions when students were characterizing other people who believed differently from them had descriptive words in them like, “These people are selfish, extreme, defensive, ignorant, short-sighted, and, frankly, uneducated.” Pretty solidly an I-it perspective.

  00:51:53 The second paper was written after the interview, and they were assigned in the interviews just to listen. They just had to ask questions and try to understand. They couldn’t try to tell them how it was or teach them a lesson or anything like that, and you can hear this shift, this beautiful shift, from I-it to I-thou.

  00:52:09 One wrote, “After listening to her, I realized we had much more in common than I thought,” or, “I learned that she was willing to share her ideas in a kinder way than I believed was possible,” and this is really important, “I can understand now why he holds this belief.” Just by seeing the other people were real and legitimate. Just by listening, they came to understand that people were real and legitimate and even divine. So if we catch ourselves doing this to others, we can change the way we see.

Hank Smith: 00:52:42 I noticed something in verse 15 about the no contention. It said, “There was no contention in all the land because of the love of God, which did dwell in the hearts of the people.” So it wasn’t necessarily they loved each other. It was I love God so I choose to not have contention.

  00:53:02 Sometimes I focus in my house too much on loving your sibling and thinking, “Oh, there won’t be any conflict if you love your sibling.” But really, like you said, contention is a choice. I think we choose contention when we don’t have a relationship with God sometimes. I notice that when I come out of the temple, I don’t feel like fighting. That’s not because I come out loving others as much as I come out loving God.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:53:25 Right. It’s that vertical and horizontal relationship, and that when we love God, that is going to probably permeate the rest of our relationships. It’s going to move this way laterally as well. I think we can learn how to love.

  00:53:39 Jason Carroll, BYU professor, gave a fantastic BYU devotional about love in 2019. He pointed out this. I’m going to quote him for just a minute here because it’s beautiful. He said, “We see the word love appears five times in the Proclamation on the Family, and each time it is linked with action words such as to love and care or to love and serve. Thus, the language of the Lord suggests that love falls within the scope of our agency. Love is something we do, something we can control, and ultimately something we can choose. If not, God could not command us to love one another.”

  00:54:15 Although we might not be able to will ourselves into loving other people, this deep love comes from Jesus Christ. Jason Carroll continues in his devotional and he says, “We can be endowed with Christ’s love, and this involves coming to see as He sees and understand as He understands.” I don’t think that’s something that is out of our purview. That’s something we can accomplish in our relationships.

Hank Smith: 00:54:38 Wow. Wow. No manner of -ites.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:54:43 No manner of -ites.

John Bytheway: 00:54:45 This is October 2021, General Conference. Elder Holland talked about 4 Nephi and he said, “When the love of God sets the tone for our own lives, for our relationships to each other, and ultimately our feeling for all humankind, then old distinctions, limiting labels, and artificial divisions begin to pass away and peace increases. That is precisely what happened in our Book of Mormon example. No longer were there Lamanites or Jacobites or Josephites or Zoramites. There were no -ites at all. The people had taken on just one transcendent identity. They were all, it says, to be known as the children of Christ.”

  00:55:27 I just thought about a moment on my mission. I served in the Philippines. There were seven elders in this room, and I remember looking around and going, “I am the only one from the United States.” There was an Elder from the Philippines, from Australia, from New Zealand, from Canada. We’re not trying to be the same.

  00:55:48 I love the old saying, “Harmony is being different together,” but we all had the name of Jesus Christ on our name tags, and that is what brought us in that same room with this united purpose. It was an interesting moment to think of that.

  00:56:04 I’m just remembering President Nelson‘s three identities for the young single adults. “I’m a child of God. I’m a child of the covenant. I’m a disciple of Christ.” I had that note next to verse 17.

  00:56:18 Now we’re not asking somebody to abandon their culture or their heritage, but I was in that room with all those people from different countries, but we were united as the children of Christ trying to share the gospel with people. It was a poignant moment for me to remember that.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:56:36 I love that. The love of God, it’s a higher unifier. It reaches beyond. These people were unified because they chose to be one in Christ. They didn’t introduce ranks, they didn’t assign value to things Christ said we ought not value, like had happened previously in 3 Nephi 6:12, according to their riches or their chances for learning, their education.

  00:56:59 In 4 Nephi, in verse three, we see the focus is on what they had in common. It doesn’t say that they had to think the same way. It doesn’t say that they had to all have the same job or the same number of kids or the same thing for dinner every night. The point is not sameness, but the point is unity in Jesus Christ.

  00:57:20 Unity like the Father and the Son are unified, unity in purpose and love. Once they stop being unified, things really start to fall apart, and they fall apart quickly.

John Bytheway: 00:57:32 When I think about no contention, it’s just another way of saying Zion, one heart. Then when that ends, in verse 26, they begin to be divided into classes, just like 3 Nephi 6:12 you mentioned.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:57:45 Mm-hmm.

John Bytheway: 00:57:45 Divided, unified, divided.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:57:47 It’s stunning how they lose it. They lose it completely by verse 24.

John Bytheway: 00:57:53 It’s so sad.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:57:54 It is so sad. You’re thinking, “Why can’t you keep this? You did heaven on earth.”

John Bytheway: 00:57:59 “You were so happy.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:58:00 “Why would you let it go?”

Hank Smith: 00:58:02 Speaking of inclusions, look at verse two, “The people were all converted unto the Lord.” Then go to verse 46, “There were none that were righteous.” You’ve got all on one side and none on the other. We go from all to none in one chapter.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:58:21 That is fascinating. That’s interesting that you notice that because verse 24 is right where it breaks, and that’s almost in the middle of those two numbers. In verse 24, “There began to be among them those who were lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel and all manner of fine pearls,” and the divisions have taken hold and things really start to crumble. I verse 25, “Their goods and their substance are no more in common among them.”

  00:58:50 That is so interesting. Back in chapter 27, we heard Christ talk about selling him for silver and gold. It’s putting things ahead of relationships. We know from research today that as societies develop and become wealthier, they tend to become less religious. They tend to turn away from God. We know that marriages that are high on levels of materialism are lower on levels of satisfaction.

  00:59:17 These things can just be a distraction to us. It’s interesting to be aware of that, that when things are going well, don’t let that start to become our focus. That’s one of the big questions here. It’s like how could they have kept it and it’s like, oh, if they just had kept focusing. Then by verse 27, they’re starting to receive all manner of wickedness. I think that verb receive-

John Bytheway: 00:59:39 Accept.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 00:59:41 Yes, bring it in, that there’s something willful about that. By verse 31, the non-believers have hardened their hearts and they’re seeking to harm the believers. They lost it. They lost the happiness. They didn’t have to. I think that’s the important part of 4 Nephi. Like we were talking about, the very beginning, we can continue, that endure to the end. We can remain in it. We can continue to repent and turn back to Jesus Christ.

Hank Smith: 01:00:07 I noticed you could also compare verse 15 and verse 28. Verse 15, we’ve read it a couple of times today. “There was no contention in the land because of the love of God, which did dwell in the hearts of the people.” Verse 28, “Because of the power of Satan, who did get great hold upon their hearts, the love of God in the hearts of the people or the power of Satan takes hold of their heart.”

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 01:00:33 It really is where we focus, how loving we are and choose to be is so important. The gospel of Jesus Christ is one of connection. We can repent and we can reorient ourselves to Christ. We can enter into loving relationships with the divine and with each other, and we can keep on repeating that process. When we take the sacrament each week, we partake of the water and the bread.

  01:01:00 The water reminds me of the living water, Christ and what he has done for and can do for our spirits. It reaffirms that eternal connection that we have with him and our reliance on our relationship with him. But the bread is interesting to me in this way. Bread reminds me of what Christ did for others while he was here on earth. It has mortal significance. Christ multiplied bread to feed hungry people. He broke bread to be in communion with his friends. He shared this with his fellow men. When I partake of the bread, it gives me a chance to re-evaluate my Christ-like relationship with my fellow men and women.

  01:01:44 In essence, the sacrament can be a weekly opportunity and a reminder to strengthen relationships both vertically and horizontally. When we learn to love and connect with the divine and each other through living the gospel of Jesus Christ aiming to become even as Christ is, our relationships are going to be better and we are going to be happy.

Hank Smith: 01:02:09 I love it. Rebecca, thank you so much for walking us through these chapters. I’m always going to see relationships, and I love having a new lens. I think our listeners would be interested in your experience with the entire Book of Mormon in your time teaching English for two decades and now teaching marriage and family. How does the Book of Mormon hold up in those two fields?

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 01:02:36 It’s a beautiful thing. I see relationships and relationship advice everywhere I look. I see the most supreme and healing relationship advice in the scriptures and in the Book of Mormon in particular, because it reveals to us so clearly the nature of Jesus Christ and how he interacts with us.

  01:02:59 I love this little group of chapters, but I think we can extrapolate that to the whole of the Book of Mormon, is how can we be connected? We need to let go. We need to lose ourselves, the weak parts, the ego-driven parts. We need to lose ourselves to have the bravery to let that part go, the part that we think is so important, but might not be best for us. The Book of Mormon encourages us to do that and it shows us what happens when we’re not willing to do it and when we are willing to do it.

  01:03:33 That allows us to enter into those relationships with the divine and with each other. I’m so grateful for the Book of Mormon, the way it tells stories of families and cultures and people, relationships. I think it’s a beautiful place to learn how to love and how to have wonderful relationships with God and with each other.

Hank Smith: 01:03:56 John, isn’t it wonderful what a faithful, educated, loving Latter-day Saint can do with this magnificent book? That’s what you and I experience each week, and this week has been no different.

John Bytheway: 01:04:08 Yeah. Another reminder, these were real people with real problems in this book. There’s no perfect families in this book, beginning with Lehi and Sariah and their interesting assortment going until there’s no more Nephites. The lessons are in there. Look for them. Thank you for showing us that.

Hank Smith: 01:04:28 Thanks for being here.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 01:04:29 Oh, this was wonderful. Thank you.

Hank Smith: 01:04:32 Yeah. Ardeth she made you proud.

John Bytheway: 01:04:34 Woo-hoo.

Dr. Rebecca Clarke: 01:04:35 Mom, I did it.

Hank Smith: 01:04:36 Yeah. With that, we want to thank Dr. Rebecca Clarke for being with us today. It has been a joy. 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 in the Book of Mormon in the Book of Mormon on FollowHIM.