Hank Smith: 00:02 Hello everyone. Welcome to another FollowHIM Favorites. John and I are sharing a single story to go with each week’s Come, Follow Me lesson. John, we’re in the book of Moroni, which you have wrote a book on.

John Bytheway: 00:15 I did. Moroni chapters one through six.

Hank Smith: 00:18 So since you wrote the book on this, well, Moroni might say he wrote the book on this, tell me what story you had in mind.

John Bytheway: 00:27 Well, I have a beautiful story about the sacrament, and I actually heard it at a CES symposium years ago. They used to give you cassette tapes for those. And it was Elder Gerald Lund. Also Brother Gerald Lund who wrote the Work and the Glory series. He said he had given a talk one time and somebody afterwards stopped him and said, “I want you to read this magazine article. It’s about the Atonement.” He said, “Okay.”

  00:51 He got this magazine and it was called Private Practice. It was a magazine for doctors, and it was about rock climbing, and he thought, “What in the world does rock climbing have to do with doctors?” first of all, and with the Atonement, maybe that’s what doctors do when they can’t get a tee time, they go rock climbing, but he said, “I’m reading this article, it’s about belaying,” and he said, “Belaying is a system of climbing where two guys climb and you’re attached to a partner and you go up to a certain height. You pound some instruments into the crevices of the rock so that they can hold not only your weight, but the weight of your partner, and then you look down and you say, ‘You’re on belay,'”

  01:32 And I remember hearing belay from Star Trek, you know, “Belay that order,” which stop that or something. So I thought, “Oh, I think a belay is a stop or something,” and he said that that’s how they would ascend the mountain. One would climb and then stop and say, “You’re on belay. The other guy would climb, but somebody was always anchored to the rock and attached to each other so they could stop them if they fell.”

Hank Smith: 01:53 John, I got to tell you, this is not something I could do.

John Bytheway: 01:56 Pretty trusting.

Hank Smith: 01:57 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 01:57 He said that the rock climber that they interviewed was named Czenskush, like C-Z-E-N-S-Kush. Czenskush was his name. Czenskush, when they interviewed him, he said, “Some of my best and worst experiences in rock climbing have been while belaying.” He said, “One time, I slipped. I started to fall. It was a sheer rock face. I’m going down pretty fast. I ripped three supports, my belay supports, out of the rock. I started to drag my partner,” and he said, “My partner saved me with the strength of his outstretched arms just holding on to the rock,” and he said, “He stopped me. I was upside down about 10 feet above the ground just like that.”

  02:43 He was so funny, this Czenskush, this man. He said, “How do you respond to somebody who just saved your life?” He said, “You give him a new climbing rope for Christmas.” And then listen to this, Hank. This is where you’ll hear the sacrament in there. He said, “No, you just remember him. You always remember him. You never forget him.” And that’s when Brother Lund said, “Okay, I see why this is talking about the Atonement and the sacrament.” How do you respond to someone who saved your life with the strength of his arms? You always remember him. You never forget him. Sometimes when I hear the priest say that, “And always remember Him,” I think of someone who saved us from the fall.

Hank Smith: 03:27 Yeah, from the fall.

John Bytheway: 03:29 From the fall, right? See how I worked that in there?

Hank Smith: 03:32 Yeah. John, isn’t “Always remember Him,” or, “Remember Him,” the only promise that’s made in both sacrament prayers?

John Bytheway: 03:40 Yeah. The word remember and remembrance is in both of those. We’ve talked about this before, but President Kimball famously said, “When you look in the dictionary for the most important word, do you know what it is?” He said, “It could be remember.” If you want a fun experience, watch for the remembers and the forgets in the Book of Mormon next time you go through.

Hank Smith: 04:00 Yeah. Remember to remember. I love it. That story gives me the…

John Bytheway: 04:05 You don’t want to go belaying anytime soon?

Hank Smith: 04:07 I will keep my feet on the ground. I just feel like being in the air is for the birds. That sounds scary to me. Well, we hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called FollowHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We’re here Dr. Shalise Adams this week. She’s an audiologist, John, and she talks to us about the ear and hearing loss and how to get your hearing back, and she relates that to wonderful lessons in these chapters. So come join us over there, and then come back next week. We’ll do another FollowHIM Favorites.