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

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:00:03             While we were living there that first month, a guy moved into the house next to us. He had just gotten out of prison and he was on his front porch smoking. You know, I looked over and I thought, all right, this is my new neighbor. So I say, hello, how’s it going? He’s a little gruff. We’re about the same age. Little did I know that he would become one of my best friends.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:29             Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with my cohost whose name is John Bytheway, a choice young man and a goodly. And there was not among the children of Israel, a goodlier person than he. John, I’m reading 1 Samuel nine. I went, I know exactly what to call you this week.

John Bytheway:               00:00:55             I was born of goodlier parents.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:57             They were goodlier.

John Bytheway:               00:00:59             They were the goodlierest. I’d like to be a fly on the wall in the King James translation room when they-

Hank Smith:                      00:01:05             They said, let’s go with goodlier.

John Bytheway:               00:01:07             Let’s go with goodlier.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:08             Goodlier. Well, we’re going to see how many times we can say it today. John, we are privileged to be joined by my friend, Dr. Geoff Wright. Dr. Wright, if I can call you Geoff.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:01:18             Call me Geoff.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:19             Thanks for being here. Thanks for taking time for us.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:01:22             It’s a privilege to be here. Hank, we’ve been friends for a long time. John Bytheway I’ve known on cassette tapes for a long time. If listeners know what a cassette tape is.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:33             Right. Yeah. You might have to stop the show and, you know, look it up if you were born after 2001. John Bytheway cassette, that’s an item that has blessed many lives John.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:01:45             All the dating insights he gave us, yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:47             Dating 911. I remember that talk.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:01:50             Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:50             Dating 911. John, we’re talking about Saul today. Israel makes a decision to move away from the Lord and toward kings. What do you think of when you think of this transition?

John Bytheway:               00:02:06             I think of the same stories as the Book of Mormon. It’s just kind of, ooh, kings. Ooh. Surely this thing leads to bondage. Sometimes there’s good kings like King Benjamin, but it’s kind of rare. I kind of have that, ooh, this won’t end well type of feeling.

Hank Smith:                      00:02:21             There’s this heartbreaking moment I’m sure Geoff will talk about, which is the Lord says they haven’t rejected you Samuel. They have rejected me. They don’t want me to be their king. Geoff, as you’ve been preparing, what do you want to do today? What are you hoping to walk us through?

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:02:40             I remember Hank, when you asked me, we were at a missionary homecoming.

Hank Smith:                      00:02:44             Yeah.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:02:44             You were sitting behind me and it was a kid that I had coached on the football team. I remember sitting there and just being so impressed with this young man. He came up to me and he said, hey, Geoff, would you consider being on the podcast? And my initial response I think to you was, no, like, I teach engineering and technology. I don’t study the scriptures like you. I was intimidated. You know, like John introed being born of goodly parents, I really was born of goodly parents. I was raised in a home where the gospel was taught. We had family home evening and my dad was a great teacher. You’d act out the stories in the Book of Mormon with little army men and when he wasn’t around, my mom made sure that we were reading scriptures. I was raised with my agency, but also I was raised in a culture where I knew that I had a loving, heavenly father.

                                           00:03:33             And over these 49 years, my faith roots have gone deep and I know and I can testify that I have a loving, heavenly father that we all do and he’s aware of us. I was excited by the challenge to study the Old Testament. I really should say thank you, Hank, for inviting me to dig into these chapters. You know what I find interesting about the Old Testament that I didn’t observe before? These first books in the Old Testament are complete stories. It’s rare, like later in the Old Testament, you don’t have stories of people that flow through their entire life. So I really enjoyed reading it because it was a story. After you get past the story, you start looking for gospel connections and you really see the voice of Christ in these chapters. I can honestly say I know more about the Old Testament, but more importantly, I can see the connection to our life and how God is central to it. I love having these moments in my life where I can feel him wrapping his arms or touching my mind, touching my heart with his spirit.

Hank Smith:                      00:04:40             I work over in the JSB at BYU and the name Dennis Wright is an important name there still. Dr. Wright out there, the other Dr. Wright, if you’re listening, just know we and the JSB, we still adore you, sir. John, I know Geoff. I’ve known him for 16 years, but I don’t know if our listeners besides those engineering students at BYU are going to know who Geoff is. So what do we know?

John Bytheway:               00:05:05             You’re going to hear a phrase in here you have never heard on a bio in almost five years of followHIM. Are you ready? Geoffrey A. Wright is an associate professor of technology and engineering studies. He’s been at BYU since 2006, so two decades. His areas of teaching involve media, communications, instructional design, digital prototyping, coding and innovation. His research involves STEM education. Now that means, I think, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, innovation and entrepreneurship, coding, and wait for it, Hank, underwater robotics.

Hank Smith:                      00:05:42             That’s so great.

John Bytheway:               00:05:43             How cool is that? This is our first underwater robotics professor that we’ve had here. Dr. Wright’s originally from Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s married to his wife, Leah. They have three children, Isaac, Lucy and Kate. As you just mentioned, his father, Dennis Wright, was part of that Saints at War project with Robert Freeman. We’ve had him on here before and that’s important to me. I remember sending all my dad’s stuff over to the archive that Dennis and Robert created, but also in our talking before we started recording, Geoff, you talked a lot about coaching. Tell us all the different sports you have coached.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:06:21             When we were first married, Leah and I, we moved to California. I was teaching computer science part-time and coaching volleyball as the head varsity volleyball coach in Chino, if you know where Chino is, not too far from Anaheim. I also coached basketball and track. Since then, I’ve always stayed coaching basketball and done some football. Recently, I was the Maple Mountain High School volleyball coach when volleyball was sanctioned here in Utah. We were state champions. We’re defending state champions two times in a row. It’s awesome to work with youth however we can. You can be a mentor.

Hank Smith:                      00:06:58             Geoff is the real deal. One of the things I love about Geoff is we both were new in the stake and he came right over, introduced himself, shook my hand, made you feel important, a lot like his dad did, actually, when I got to BYU. Geoff, I’ve looked up to you for a long time and I’m excited you’re here. And Leah, Leah comes from a church education family as well, Leah Sherry.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:07:23             Yeah, Tom, her dad, he was the institute director at Oregon State University for most of his career. He was at Penn State for a little bit at the beginning and he’s done a lot of work with JST and Joseph Smith Papers and is just an unbelievable teacher himself. Leah’s been raised by goodly parents too.

Hank Smith:                      00:07:42             Oh, fantastic. Well, we set expectations high with two solid CES families. I think we found the right guy. Let’s jump into the Come, Follow Me manual and then Geoff, we’re excited to learn from you and your expertise. The lesson this week, the Lord looketh on the heart. We’re in 1 Samuel. Saul was a keeper of donkeys. Sounds like my house a little bit. Though tall and handsome, he was little in his own sight and self-conscious about his family heritage. On the day he was presented before Israel as their king, he didn’t show up. He was so nervous he hid himself. Looking at Saul, you might not have guessed that he would lead the Israelites to victory over their enemies, or that he would later become prideful and rebel against the Lord. David was a keeper of sheep. He wasn’t as physically impressive as his seven older brothers.

                                           00:08:34             On the day Samuel came to choose a new king for Israel, it didn’t seem worthwhile to include David among the possible candidates. So he’s left out in the fields with the sheep. Looking at David, you might not have guessed that he would have the faith and courage to defeat a giant and become Israel’s most successful king. But the Lord sees past our labels. Our physical appearance, our insecurities. He looks instead on the heart. And even when our heart isn’t quite right, if we’re willing, he will give us another heart. Beautiful. All right. Geoff, with that, how do you want to go about this?

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:09:09             I think all good teaching starts with an anticipatory set. So I have a question for you and John. I’m flipping the script here. You probably know who Rosa Parks is and JK Rowling. I’m going to put them in the same sentence. And Malala Yousafzai, do you know who she is?

Hank Smith:                      00:09:28             I think so.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:09:29             She was a young girl who was speaking up for education in Pakistan. She was targeted and attacked and, but she kept advocating for education. In fact, she became the youngest Nobel Prize winner. And Rosa Parks, we all know her story. She was a very quiet seamstress and wasn’t a famous leader initially. And then she refused to give up her seat in defiance of the Jim Crow segregation laws and really sparked the bus boycott in Alabama. And then JK Rowling, I don’t know if you know her background, but she was struggling financially.

                                           00:10:03             She was a single mother. She was rejected many times by publishers. So she’d go and write in cafes whenever she had time and eventually she created one of the most successful books ever. So my question to you, what do these three women have in common that really connect with these chapters? What do you think?

Hank Smith:                      00:10:23             Oh, wow. I love having a wise older cohost who always knows the answer to these type of things.

John Bytheway:               00:10:35             I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking, but not what you expected. You would not have seen that coming the success that they had or the impact that they had.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:10:44             Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:10:45             I was going to say that same thing. John, now that you’ve said it, I’m like, oh yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah, totally. Me too. No, but I think when I read the manual, you wouldn’t look at that person and think, oh, they’re going to change the world.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:10:59             That’s exactly it. There’s probably other descriptors, courage, conviction, trust, effort. They took a lot of effort. I love thinking about this need for courage and conviction and maybe not being the one that’s noticed, you know, at first. As the hook, then that kind of leads to a pretest. So in my classes, I really like to always pretest. I think it’s a good way to kind of warm up the student thinking. Here are my pretest questions for you guys. Were you or do you know of anyone who didn’t immediately get picked for a team because they didn’t look impressive? I have kids, they probably tried out for sports or music productions and were they picked right away? But then over the season, they worked hard. They were coachable. They became maybe one of the most reliable players. You know, like I coached a lot, so I’m going to make these kind of connections.

                                           00:11:52             Obviously it isn’t about looks right away. Sometimes kids become very coachable or they grow or they mature at a different rate. So that’s the first pretest question. The next one I’ll let you answer. Have you ever noticed someone who’s chosen to be a leader because they were popular or funny and one of those cool kids or whatever, but turns out they actually weren’t that good of a leader. And then maybe a quieter student, if you think of maybe in a class that needs a student leader who was quiet but worked really hard and they kept their promises and were diligent, ended up earning the respect and really made a difference. Have you ever noticed someone like that in your life? And then I have two more questions. Here’s another question that I think fits that I came up with. Have you ever been tempted to take a shortcut on a project, shortcut on work to get ahead quickly?

                                           00:12:45             And at first it might even work, but in the end it kind of backfires. We know later on and for Samuel he’s taught to obey is better than to sacrifice and so I thought of that. And then the final one, did you ever have a coach or a teacher who really truly saw you for who you are, who believed in you and therefore helped you grow more than what you thought you could? There’s a strong connection in these scriptures about the idea of seeing people for who they really are and investing in them, because God invests in us. We’re more than what we could be as husbands, as fathers, as mothers and disciples, right?

Hank Smith:                      00:13:29             These are great questions and you’re right, they do get students thinking. I’m definitely thinking-

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:13:35             I think this is interesting how this fits the timeline. This happens late 10th century BC, so they say around 1,000 BC. Moses left Egypt around 1300. So you have this 300 year period for Samuel, I guess in the research it says it was written maybe around 1100 BC. So initially what we’re studying right now, the Israelites really were under Egyptian rule for 450 years. They’re shown all these plagues and the plagues weren’t just for Pharaoh. The plagues probably were for the Israelites to convert them to remind them. I think it’s interesting for how long they’ve had these judges. They were born and raised, we have probably 300 years of these judges. Everyone else has kings. They’re not necessarily growing stronger. In fact, they have wars and battles, and so I think eventually they’re wondering, why don’t we try something different? That context is interesting. I also noted that in Greek, the Septuagint, it actually refers to 1st and 2nd Samuel as the books of Kingdoms.

                                           00:14:45             So if the book of Kingdoms, at first God was apprehensive to call these kings, but really it’s this path towards training them up, reminding them that they are the children of God. They have divine nature. Their king is He, our Savior Jesus Christ and ultimately our heavenly Father. This book of Kingdoms is an interesting idea to label it as this training and this growth, this evolution towards accepting He who is our king where Samuel then becomes a kingmaker he’s kind of labeled as, or he’s inaugurating this Davidic dynasty, if you will, establishing this new flow.

Hank Smith:                      00:15:29             I want to come back to your questions here. John, you probably remember the story of President Kimball. He’s at a stake. I think he’s in Arizona somewhere. He has an assignment there to make some changes in the stake. He’s got to choose a stake patriarch. I guess he was struggling asking the Lord. He was interviewing people and nothing was really coming to him. And then he was sitting in a meeting, the evening meeting of a stake conference, I think Saturday evening meeting or something. He sees this man two thirds of the way back and he turns to a stake president and says, that is your stake patriarch. The stake president was pretty startled, I guess. He said, that’s James Womack. He had been terribly injured in World War II. He’d lost part of an eye, he’d lost his hearing, he’d lost both hands and one arm.

                                           00:16:27             President Kimball brings him in and says, you know, you’re going to be the stake patriarch. And Brother Womack said, Brother Kimball, it is my understanding that a patriarch is to place his hands on the head of a person he blesses. As you can see, I have no hands to place on the head of anyone. Anyway, President Kimball sat down in a chair. He said, I’m a pretty short guy. Come on over. See if your, the stumps of your arms will reach the top of my head. And they did. And President Kimball said, if you can reach me, you can reach anyone. I will definitely be the shortest person you’ll ever give a blessing to. I thought of that when you said, can you think of someone who didn’t look super impressive, didn’t look the part, but was chosen anyway? In our hearts, we love stories like that.

John Bytheway:               00:17:15             Yeah, I love your question, Geoff. I was thinking of Rudy Ruettiger. Everybody loves the movie Rudy that he was much shorter than everybody else, but what’s the old saying? It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. He’s there every day, he works every day. And I’ve always loved the mentoring stories of Paul with Timothy and I love that Ammaron would find a 10-year-old boy. That’s not something you would expect and say something you wouldn’t say to a lot of 10-year-old boys. I perceive that thou art a sober child and are quick to observe. I suspect he saw things in Mormon that maybe Mormon didn’t see in himself. I mean, I think Ammaron was probably quick to observe. Gave him a, I want you to watch this people when you’re 24 years old. That’s another one that I think of. You saw this congregation and you chose the 10-year-old to give that assignment to, that’s pretty good.

Hank Smith:                      00:18:14             I love it. The names that come into my mind when you said, did you have a coach or a teacher who saw you? It’d almost be a disservice to start to list them because I know I’d miss some, but I had a high school football coach, Coach Jacobson called him Coach Jake. I’d known him since I was just a kid. I’d run through a wall for that man. To this day, I’d do anything for him because he saw something in me I absolutely did not see in myself. I’ve heard he occasionally listens to the show. If you’re out there, coach, sure love you. And there’s been many other names I could talk about and it fills your heart to think of those people.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:18:53             Yeah, I think ultimately our Heavenly Father sees something in us too, or we want to be where we are on a more local level. As you guys were giving examples, I mean, I didn’t prepare this idea, but our spouses to some effect. We always use that idiom like, you married up. But the reality is I did. I mean, for my wife to be patient with me and to see through a lot of my strange habits or whatever, I’m Canadian. She said she had never dated a Canadian. And now she’s married to one. How’d that happen?

Hank Smith:                      00:19:28             Yeah, that probably wasn’t on her list of things she’s absolutely has to have in a spouse. Geoff, I’m interested in this story because this is so … Hmm, I don’t know exactly how to put this, but they’re making a poor decision in choosing a king, but the Lord has not left them. There’s a, like, oh, the Lord is helping. They’re also heading in the wrong direction, but who’s the guy who’s, they’re going to go west with the saints or, you know, the trek West. And he said, this is not a good idea to go, but I’ll go with you. Who was that?

John Bytheway:               00:20:06             Levi Savage and I’ll go with you and I’ll die with you and I’ll help you all I can. And once I saw that 17 Miracles movie, I thought, okay, I got a new hero in my hero Hall of Fame and it’s Levi Savage.

Hank Smith:                      00:20:21             That’s incredible to me. The Lord is saying, this is a bad idea. I’ll walk the road with you. I’ll help you along the way. Geoff, let’s keep going.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:20:30             On that point, I think it’s interesting, you know, in chapter eight, God tells Samuel to warn the people what a king will do. I love first, because that testifies that Samuel’s communicating with God. He’s being trained. It highlights how he is a prophet and then he goes and tells the people, hey, they’re going to take your sons in war. They’ll take daughters for service, land, crops and all this. He goes, he tells the people he warns them and yet they still want it. This really echoed with me in this one example of my life when I was coaching in California, so I was the varsity head coach for the girls high school volleyball team. The team, they were solid. They were good, but we had this one player who played a lot more club and just was an excellent player and we were playing this team early in the season and the rest of the team wasn’t playing well.

                                           00:21:19             I told the girls, okay, time out, we’re, the ball’s only going to go to Tracy. And so I told the setter, everything goes through Tracy. And the other players were like, well, what about us? What do we do? I said, don’t worry, that’s my decision. That’s way we go. And a couple of girls were like, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea, coach. I was like, trust me, that’s what we’re doing. So the setter listened and they only set Tracy. Well, then what does the other team have to do? They only have to block one player. We get destroyed that game. Afterwards, the girls are like, Coach, we told you. And I was like, you’re right. You know, I should have listened to you guys. Hindsight’s 20/20 and grateful they had it because then with this Maple Mountain team where we won state, again, we had a great player, unbelievable player.

                                           00:22:06             He plays for BYU right now. Trey and we could have just set him the whole time, but instead I remembered that and I thought, okay, you know what? We need to develop some other players. Everyone needs to contribute. This is a team. It’s a team sport with this kid, Johan, he’s from South Africa and he had never played volleyball and he came and tried out and he was just this really great athlete, but he could not play volleyball. But Trey took him under his wing and he would come early and stay late and come on days when we didn’t have practice and he worked so hard. By the end of the season, he’s starting and he’s pounding the ball. The team just rallied around that kind of mentoring, having someone to mentor and to build and you see this team come together as a family and then that becomes our motto and the family stands for, forget about me, I love you.

                                           00:22:56             That’s what we said in all our cheers and it really changed the dynamic of the team the second half of the year we come together. They just had a lot of trust in each other. You see this in the scriptures where we’re warned but we don’t listen. Imagine if we did listen, imagine what would have happened to Israel had they listened. What would have Saul’s life been like? Yeah, I just share that story because it kind of is similar to Martin Harris. Martin Harris goes to Joseph Smith, hey, I need to show these transcripts to my wife and to some friends. I’m investing heavily in you. Can you go ask God?

Hank Smith:                      00:23:34             Right. Help me out.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:23:34             Joseph goes and asks God and God gives an answer. No. How many times did he go back and, you know, he’s a third time and finally God’s like, okay, you’re not going to listen, so yeah, I guess do what you want. We know the story. They’re lost and it didn’t help his relationship one single day in the end anyways, meaning Martin Harris and his wife. There is that kind of buyer’s remorse, that cognitive dissonance that we all experience when we’re asked to listen and we don’t, this idea of pride and humility. When I was thinking about that story, I looked up Doctrine and Covenants 3 and I love this scripture says, “The works and the designs and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated. Neither can they come to naught. Behold, thou art Joseph and thou wast chosen to do the work of the Lord and because of transgression, if thou art not aware, thou wilt fall.

                                           00:24:28             Nevertheless, my work shall go forth.” That’s not just a testament but a promise. God’s work will go forth. In spite of our pride, in spite of our inability to see clearly and be myopic, it goes forward. I love that promise and that testimony that God gives us in the scriptures and it’s highlighted again in this book in 1 Samuel.

Hank Smith:                      00:24:51             How wonderful. I think that does happen here. They choose kings and John, you can help me with my facts here. They choose kings. It’s going to be a long time until Israel’s going to take its place back as the people that will bless the whole earth. In fact, we’re still rebuilding from this decision and then the scattering that comes after it and then the millennia, the Lord is waiting and then 1823, it’s time to gather Israel. I think a lot of it starts right here. That tells you how patient the Lord is. He’s not saying, hey, don’t do this. It’s going to take me 2,500 years to come back from this. But okay. Okay. I can work with you. I will never force Israel to be Israel. Well, I will walk you along your path. I have a question for both of you. We want a king so that we may be like all the nations.

                                           00:25:48             That desire to fit in or to not stand out. I’ve been through times in my life where I didn’t want to stand out. I wanted to fit right in. I remember there’s times where I’ve told Sara, I don’t want to do that. It’ll look terrible if I do that thing, you know, at this whatever corporate event. That desire to fit in can blind you to consequences.

John Bytheway:               00:26:11             Yeah, I think you’re looking at 1 Samuel 8:5, is it?

Hank Smith:                      00:26:15             Yeah, the 8:5 and then 8:20. Yeah.

John Bytheway:               00:26:18             Make us a king to judge us like all the nations, kind of a, we want to be like them. Everybody else is doing it right and we’re not. Maybe that’s the hard part to think, we don’t want to stand out that way. I like the way you put it. What did you say? We don’t want to stand out or we want to-

Hank Smith:                      00:26:38             I want to fit in. Yeah.

John Bytheway:               00:26:40             I want to fit in.

Hank Smith:                      00:26:41             Kings are trending. Don’t you know that, Samuel?

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:26:44             Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. I really like the ESV to compliment the King James version, you know? And it reads, “Appoint a king to lead us such as all the other nations have.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, how I was born into the easiest generation that has ever existed to be raised. I think of my dad. My dad, when he was born, they had an outhouse. They had a pump of water. You compare that to our kids nowadays. They have technology that we couldn’t even imagine and the temptations and the rewiring that happens because of it. And then you have us, these kids that were born in the 70s, raised 80s and 90s, we had indoor plumbing and no technology. So it was this easy time period and these kids nowadays where there’s so many competing voices, it’s not just appoint us a king, it’s, whoa, this is really important.

                                           00:27:42             This is really important. This is really important. So when you think about a generation being saved, this generation had to be saved for these latter days. They’re way more talented and capable than we are. They have to be because they have to decipher what is important. They have to decipher what is truth. With all the AI, they have to be able to dig deep and find what is truth and say, I don’t need a king appointed for me. I know who my king is. My king is my father in heaven. My king and my prince is Jesus Christ. This is an amazing generation where they can clearly state, I don’t need a king appointed. He’s been appointed and he’s saved me.

Hank Smith:                      00:28:28             Yeah. That’s beautiful. Geoff, I don’t know if you ever went through this as someone in Canada. I’ll have students who say that there was a time in their lives where they got tired of waking up at dark 30 in the morning when no one else was doing that. I’m tired of looking for modest clothes when no one else has to do that. I’m tired of being the odd one where everybody kind of looks at me sideways. I’m tired. I’m tired of that. I come back to this story. I’m tired of being different. Let me be like everybody else. And this was the beginning of the end or a part of the end, I should say, for Israel.

John Bytheway:               00:29:06             Yeah. I can’t remember who this was. It was either Brad Wilcox or Randal Wright that talked about showing up at school one day. I think it was Brad with a lunchbox, like in high school. Saying, no, you can’t sit at this table unless you have a lunchbox. Somebody did something funny like that. And just completely changed the trend with the whole school because what people perceive as cool.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:29:33             I remember kindergarten. This was a big moment. For some reason it was important to have big feet in my kindergarten class. People were always comparing shoe sizes because you’d take off your shoes to sit on the red carpet and have a story read to you. I was just normal stature, I guess, and other kids had bigger feet than me at the time. And so I remember, going home and coming up with a plan and my plan was I put a little bit of masking tape on my toes, pull on multiple pairs of socks and show up with big feet. Somehow I managed to get my shoe on at home, but then when it was red carpet time, I was all proud. I pulled off my kangaroo, my roo shoes and my Velcro and pulled them off and just flaunted my big feet, my fake big feet and sitting there just with those dogs hanging out and it was time to go out to recess and I tried to get my feet back in those shoes I could not get them in. So ultimately my teacher said, well, you’re going to have to stay inside for recess. So it backfired. Which it backfired for the Israelites, right?

Hank Smith:                      00:30:39             Yeah. That’s funny. I might have to use that on you next time I see you.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:30:46             Yeah, yeah. Normal shoe size here.

Hank Smith:                      00:30:50             Yeah, yeah. It happens to all of us. And when it does happen to our kids, because it will, I think it’s a very normal thing for a young person to think, I don’t want to be different. I want to fit in to come back to this story where the Lord says, let me be your king.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:31:08             On that point, Hank, I’m glad you brought up kids because, you know, if you look at Come, Follow Me for our youth and how it’s been redesigned to help us be better parents. I remember my daughter coming to me several years ago. She’s assigned to Tahiti. She’s in the Provo MTC right now and she really wanted social media. Since I teach technology, I was very apprehensive. It wasn’t something that I was excited about giving her access to Instagram, you know? I kept putting it off. I was like, well, wait till you’re 16. And then when she turned 16, she’s like, well, what about now? I said, you know, maybe 17 would be a good time, right? Eventually she came to me and my wife with a PowerPoint, like a Google slide presentation with an argument of why it would help her life.

                                           00:31:55             Slide one, slide two, slide three, slide four. I think about what God tells Samuel to do. He says, go back to the people and warn them and say, okay, you want a king? Here’s what’s going to happen. I remember this exact thing happened with my daughter. I said, okay, you really want social media. Here are the things that I’m worried about, just so you know. The constant comparison, the endless scrolling. And so I made a list too. I think it was a good list. I don’t think I did it the right way. I think I needed to maybe spend some more time thinking about it and talking with Heavenly Father and going to for the strength of youth and then having a better, honest conversation with her. But I did appreciate that she listened and I think that’s really what the strength of youth brochure booklet training invites us to do as parents is to have a conversation with your youth and to involve God in that conversation. And in the end, it worked out.

Hank Smith:                      00:32:51             As our teenagers are going towards young adulthood, there has to be that conversation where maybe when you were younger it was your brain’s not fully developed and so until it is, I’m your brain. But as your daughter, 16, 17, 18, you’re saying, okay, here’s what I’m worried about and here’s what I’d hope you would do. I see the wisdom of that here.

John Bytheway:               00:33:17             There’s a certain amount of because I said so that, and that works for a while. And then you have to start developing PowerPoint. I’ve never thought of that before, but boy, does the Lord get out a PowerPoint right here. Okay, slide one. This is going to be the manner of your king. All right. He’s right. He lets them know. I guess the humility of knowing, I think maybe God knows stuff that we don’t know.

Hank Smith:                      00:33:45             Right.

John Bytheway:               00:33:45             He also is going to say, okay, I will let you learn this for yourself. And they do. And we get to talk about it and act like we’re smarter than they were.

Hank Smith:                      00:33:56             Yeah. That’s funny is my kids are much better than I ever was and I find myself being critical. I think Sara sometimes leans over and says, they’re five times the people we ever were.

John Bytheway:               00:34:11             I served my mission in the Philippines and this is the 80s, this is a long time ago and things have just grown there tremendously and I love the Filipinos so much, but people would come to church with a beer T-shirt on or something like that. Guess what we said? Thank you for coming. Because that’s all they had. And maybe we have a different expectation for someone else and maybe the Lord has a different expectation for us, but boy, can we start with acknowledging all the good as you’ve talked about, Hank, with your kids? I mean, I need to do that too. You guys might remember brother Randal Wright. He taught seminary forever down in Texas and he taught at especially for youth and things like that. He talked about I think it was a challenge he gave to a kid in his seminary class to wear these pants called Dickies.

                                           00:35:01             It’s a brand. I’ve seen it before. So he had to wear these pants. They were not cool. They were not fashionable. And if I remember Brother Wright’s story correctly, Randal Wright, if anybody said anything to him about his pants, like why are you wearing those? he had to turn to them and say, because I like them. That was the deal, because I like them. And there’s a couple of things I remember about the story and one of them was how, man, it taught him something about this be like the nations as far as fashion goes that was really surprising and sobering to this kid, how much there was a force of, you got to look this way or dress this way.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:35:47             That’s all we wore on our mission. It was our mission pant because they were so hardy.

John Bytheway:               00:35:52             They’re so tough. Yeah, they’re like mailman pants or something.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:35:55             We were, yeah, a biking mission. He set the trend.

John Bytheway:               00:36:01             And yeah, there was a force to that and you wanted to be like the nations or like the other people were dressing so I guess that you wouldn’t stand out. Boy, the Lord I guess is asking us, you tie your identity to me, not to the other what everybody else is doing. Easy to understand, harder to do, tie your identity to me, not everybody else what they’re doing.

Hank Smith:                      00:36:24             Yeah. And then it’s hard to do. Even for adults.

John Bytheway:               00:36:28             Easy to say, hard to do. Sure. It was pretty depressing when my wife said, we need to update our kitchen. I was like, well, what does that mean? Well, this, this, these colors are all wrong. Well, look, this cupboard, you open it, it works, you close it, it works. You want to update it? Everything’s just fine here. When I learned that kitchens also have to follow fashion. That was a hard day.

Hank Smith:                      00:36:50             As a religion teacher, I remember a girl came up to me, it was a few years ago and she said, your ties are way too wide. And I was like, what? They’re way too wide. They look, I don’t know, you look, it looks kind of frumpy, I think the word was or something. I said, oh, and I remember going home, Sara, I got to change all my ties. You got to redo the ties. I don’t want to be the weird religion teacher with the tie that doesn’t trend. I think we can all understand this and maybe instead of looking at these people with a judgmental, I can’t believe they did that, to I wonder if I’m doing that.

John Bytheway:               00:37:30             Exactly. What’s hard for me to believe is it sounds like such a convincing case you read he’s going to do this, he’s going to take your sons, he’s going to appoint for himself, he’s going to take your daughters, he’s going to make them bakers, he’s going to take your seed, your vineyards. And he has this super convincing case, probably some really impressive PowerPoint slides. And what do they say? No, we want a king so we can be like the nations. It’s just in one ear, out the other, picks up speed during the trip and they didn’t hear a thing. Amazing.

Hank Smith:                      00:37:56             Yeah. I wonder how often I’m like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, yeah, I get that. No, I’m not, I’m going to do it my way.

John Bytheway:               00:38:04             Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:38:05             Thanks for your help. Thanks for your input, Lord. And I like Geoff, you’ve taught us that with Martin Harris, with these people and with us, he’ll say, okay, I’ll go with you and it’s going to be a longer journey.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:38:17             Yeah, absolutely. If we just show a little more trust.

Hank Smith:                      00:38:21             Geoff, this is fantastic. I knew you would be great. You have some Dennis Wright scripture knowledge in you. Let’s keep going. Should we move on to chapter nine?

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:38:29             Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great chapter. Chapter nine, one verse that pops out there that I thought was really interesting was, “I will send you a man, anoint him to be captain or ruler over my people, Israel.” That verse really jumps out at me because here is God saying, okay, I can see all things, I’m omniscient, you really want a king? All right, well then I’m going to send you somebody. Here is a great person. We’ve all read Saul, tall, handsome, impressive. Hank, you were saying that about John earlier. He is the Saul goodlier. Saul looked the part of a king that Israel would accept. Even though he was of a tribe that might not have been recognized as the tribe to come from, he was tall and handsome and impressive and he was a hard worker evidently. He was taking care of the donkeys.

                                           00:39:26             He was worried about the donkeys. Had to go find them and he knew where to search and he knew to go to a prophet. There was the prophet Samuel. Why don’t you go ask him, his servant says, and he’s willing to do it. He had some background of faith and some belief. God sends this great person with lots of potential to him. I love that intro and it did make me think of a personal story. This comes from my time living in California and I was teaching part-time while I was coaching and I was teaching this computer class on the first day of class in walks this taller, handsome, impressive young man, those words that we see in, about Saul. He was a Hispanic kid and he’s just one of those kids when you see him, you’re like, okay, that is someone that all the kids probably like and respect. And he came up to me and he gave me this handshake said I couldn’t follow along and he’s like, my name’s Greg. I was like, pleasure to meet you.

                                           00:40:24             I’m so glad to have you in class. He’s like, thank you. Thank you for being a teacher. He was just like a really cool kid. He sat down and other kids were coming in and it was time to get class started and they were being loud and usually as a teacher, you try and get their attention. Instead of me doing it, Greg stood up and said, hey, you guys, listen up. All of a sudden I deputize him as my helper here every day, same thing. He’d come on time, he’d give me this handshake that I never quite figured out. And he’d always look me in the eyes like, how you doing, Mr. Wright? I love this kid. He was just impressive and all the other kids respected him and liked him too. About halfway through the semester he disappears and I wondered where he was.

                                           00:41:11             He’d never missed class and I called up his buddy, one of his buddies AC, and I said, AC, come here. I said, hey, where’s Greg? And he just shook his head, he’s like, don’t worry about it. And I said, I am worried about it. And he said, don’t worry about it. And he turned and sat down. So a couple days go by and I’m worried. He didn’t come back. So I decided to drive to his house, I look up his address, no one’s there, I didn’t know what to do. And then, you know, the next week rolls around and he shows up and he’s got a hoodie on, pulled over his head. He doesn’t come up to me. He goes right to his computer, his desk, he sits down and has his head down and I was like, whoa, okay, what’s going on?

                                           00:41:57             Little dark cloud coming over him. So I try to go to him and then we had like a no hoodie policy at the school and I said, hey, Greg, you know the rule you got to pull your hood down and he shook his head. Didn’t say any words to me. I said, hey, Greg, are you doing all right? You got to, you know, take the hood down.

                                           00:42:15             So he slowly pulls his hood back and he was visibly beaten, bruised. And so I said, hey, are you okay? And he just shook his head and he just said, leave me alone. So I went back, sat down and I called up AC again. I said, AC, what’s going on there? And AC said, I told you to leave it alone. I said, hey, you know, what’s going on? And he said, can’t you see? Can’t you see what happened? Are you so blind? And I said, yeah, I guess I am. He said, well, he just jumped in. And I guess, you know, that’s the, he got jumped into a gang and he had to get beat up to make it in the gang. He’s just infrequent at school then. He would never come and say hi, he didn’t help with the class and his grades fell off and I just worried about him and then he disappears completely and I don’t see him again for the rest of the school year.

                                           00:43:17             End of the school year comes and I’m just packing up and all the kids are gone and it’s the last day and it’s, you know, maybe four o’clock I’m ready to leave and who walks in? Greg walks in and he looks like his old self. He comes in, he gives me the handshake. He says to me, hey, I just want you to know I’m out. I ran away, ran away to Long Beach. I’m living with some cousins and he said that life was not for me. He looked at me and he said, I got to tell you something. Thank you. Thank you for believing in me, knowing that this was not for me. Unlike Saul who really falls into the trap of the world, this young man, he rose above the trials of the day, the temptation to fit in.

Hank Smith:                      00:44:17             Wow. Thanks, Geoff. Thank you. I’ve spent my life with young people. Not a lot of those stories have happy endings. That’s beautiful that he comes out of that because Saul doesn’t. You said earlier, what could have Saul’s life been like? It’s so heartbreaking to me that Israel wants to fit in and in their fitting in, they take a good kid out of where he probably would have just lived his whole life. They make him a king and they watch him nose dive and they just get another one. Let’s just go pick someone else. John, you’ve heard me say this before. I think we do this as a culture. We find a singer out of some small town that we love. We raise them up and we watch their life nose dive and we just go get another one. We make them a king basically or we make them a star.

                                           00:45:19             Some stories turn around, but usually we watch them nose dive into drugs and problems and then rehab, and then we go get another one. This is an example of that. What could have his life been like? Saul’s almost as much a victim of this as anyone else. So sad.

John Bytheway:               00:45:37             Well, Hank and Geoff, choosing a king for Israel, got President Nelson in my head. Israel means let God prevail or be willing to let God prevail. Here, they weren’t. We want a king. We’re not going to let you prevail. We’re going to go get a king and look what’s happening.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:45:55             This is kind of random, but it makes me really think about Article of Faith number five. I don’t know if I’ll quote it exactly right, but we believe a man must be called of God by prophecy and by the laying of hands, by those who are in authority to preach the gospel and administer in the ordinances. Imagine if that was the method. We not just called people to church callings and so forth, but we looked at, to the world, right, where we say, okay, God, you are our king. So help us understand.

Hank Smith:                      00:46:26             This scares me when I go to look for other kings and I do it in different ways in my life. I know I go to social media or sports, maybe some influencers. That’s who I’m going to follow. I really like this person. I’m going to listen to them. There is an opportunity cost where the Lord says, you have rejected me. You do not want me to reign over you.

John Bytheway:               00:46:52             What’s the theme for the youth this year? Walk with me. It’s not walk with social media influencers. It’s walk with me.

Hank Smith:                      00:47:04             Yeah, and when we choose an influencer or any other star or athlete, whatever it may be, when we choose them as our king, we automatically reject our heavenly king. Geoff, this is fantastic, so far, let’s keep going.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:47:21             When people are selected, sometimes you’re a little bit hesitant about accepting the call and we see that with Saul. I think he was a little bit surprised. He knew he was tall, but he also knew he was from the tribe of Benjamin. So he was a little self-conscious about himself. Maybe the family heritage or maybe he just wasn’t well spoken at first, who knows? Sometimes that happens when we receive callings in the church. You’re called to serve and you think, well, I don’t know if I could do this. You feel maybe some of that imposter syndrome, but your idea where, John, that you brought up, let God prevail. Sometimes that show of faith is even in ourselves. And I realize that there’s some issues of timing. Sometimes you extend a call and the timing isn’t right. But even that, there’s some beauty in that.

                                           00:48:07             I remember recently we were extending a call and the timing wasn’t right for this individual. They wanted to say yes, but their life was really, really busy. They felt bad and I said, don’t feel bad. I think a lot of times when we extend calls, it’s just so you know that God sees you. And I think that’s really important for people to understand is God is aware of you and he wants us to serve and consecrate, but at the same time with, in regards to callings, maybe the timing’s not right, but he does still recognize your talents and your abilities and your willingness and people should know that God sees you and he’s grateful for your willingness to serve. And in this case of Saul, maybe it was hard to say, I’m going to be the king? Are you…? This is a hard situation. I’m going to be the first king after these judges. Maybe he was pretty knowledgeable and thought, this is going to be disrupting to my life. Maybe he was. We should give him a little more credit in this early part of his life.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:06             How do you maintain that type of humility? He says, I’m nobody. Be confident in yourself, move forward, but man, he loses this humility. I sometimes bookend that reference you just read 1 Samuel 9:21. Who am I? Throw a cross reference in there, 1 Samuel 18:18, where you can say, okay, here’s how he started. Here’s how it ends. He’s so upset because women are saying Saul hath slain his thousands but David, his 10,000s. Saul is, it says he was very wroth and saying, and the saying displeased him saying they talk about David and his ten thousands and to me they have ascribed but thousands. What happened to this guy? I’m just a Benjaminite.

John Bytheway:               00:49:57             The fact that we are reading this, this is why it’s so nice, like Geoff said, to be raised in the scriptures and seeing this because you’ve seen this lesson play out so many times before. If I start getting all full of myself, the Lord can do anything he wants and he has a way of humbling people. These scriptures that we all love, how many stories are there of somebody that takes themselves too seriously and here’s the Lord saying, you got to consider yourself fools before God in the Book of Mormon. In chapter 15, we’re going to hear Samuel say, when thou wast little in thine own sight and somehow he became big in his own sight. One time Hank and Geoff, I’m watching a video called Faith of an Observer about Hugh Nibley that, I can’t remember, understood or spoke or could read 33 languages, was it?

                                           00:50:52             And at the end of the video, I know, he’s walking up to these hieroglyphics in Egypt just reading them like we would read a chalkboard. He’s like, yeah, the prince of the two lands will come down. And he jumps away from the cameraman. The camera dude’s like, where’s he going? It’s so funny because he didn’t care about accolades and stuff. At the end of this video, Hugh Nibley says, you know, none of us is very smart. None of us know very much, but the thing the angels envy us for is we can forgive and we can repent. That was Hugh Nibley. We love these stories, but boy, learn the lesson that stay little in your own sight. If God gives you a gift or if you have gifts, he can take it away. Samuel recognizes that when he said, remember when you were little in your own sight? You were better back then.

Hank Smith:                      00:51:38             I liked you more back then. I remember President Uchtdorf said there’s a reason that almost every lesson goes back to the 121st section of the Doctrine and Covenants. We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men.

John Bytheway:               00:51:57             As soon as they get a little authority, and I love this, as they suppose.

Hank Smith:                      00:52:02             As they suppose they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:52:07             Let’s move to chapter 10. There’s really interesting twist to the story, I think. When we look at chapter 10, as I studied it, Saul is chosen by God, not just the people because he’s anointed. I think verse nine is very poignant. In the King James version, we read God changed Saul’s heart and all these signs were fulfilled that day. In another way, God gave him another heart, I guess the, we should read it as, and it’s a big deal. I teach a material science class where we do plastics and metals, some of the fun projects that we build skis in that class. I love snow skiing and so I wanted to change how the class had been taught traditionally and I decided, well, let’s make skis, you know, we’re in Utah. That’d be something unique. It brings in design elements and we teach the engineering design process and the students research the perfect ski for them, for their height, their weight, their style of skiing, or for someone that they want to give the ski to.

                                           00:53:09             When you’re working with plastics and metals, when you’re making skis, if we use a lot of form and jigs and fixtures and what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to form the plastic into the shape that you need, right? And so when you’re building skis, you’ll have a baltic birch core, that’s what we use and then you’re going to use a lot of fiberglass on top of the ski, you’ll have a PTEX, which is like a polyplastic on the bottom. We’ve created an aluminum jig that you put it in and then we’ll have a vacuum that once you put all your layers of resin and fiberglass, it sucks it all together. So you’re really molding this to be a certain style that you design to be built. And what we see in chapter 10, what’s happening to Saul is that his heart is being changed.

                                           00:54:00             Saul really has good intention early in his career. He’s trying to follow the prophet. I love that we see that his heart was changed. As a good leader, you’re looking to the people and I’m sure he was looking to the people. I guess that’s kind of my intro is this idea that God, in spite of us, he’ll put us in contexts where we can be molded. A lot of times callings do that for us. Was it President Hinckley? That said every new member needs three things, and one of those three things was a calling. Callings help us do that. And we have callings in all parts of our life. A calling as a father, as a husband, or mother, as a daughter, as a son. These are all callings. You get callings in church too, but if you allow yourself with humility and through humility to be kind of formed, I think you can become better than what you thought you could be. That apprehension that Saul initially had allowing himself to follow Samuel the prophet, he was starting to be formed into something that was great initially.

Hank Smith:                      00:55:06             It was on its way and you have high hopes for him in these chapters.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:55:11             Yeah, high hope. One of our other projects actually that you say that Hank is in the metal section we were building drift trikes. We teach the students about different types of welding and then they’re given a project and one of the projects we decided to build was drift trikes and then donate them to kids. And a drift trike, if you remember big wheels back in the 80s where you sit low and they would, you know, you could skid out. The students, they’re learning to weld and they’re bending metal and they’re taking apart a bike and using the parts to Frankenstein and weld up this drift trike. I mean, that takes a lot of heat. When you’re welding, I mean, you’re putting a high volume of heat to break down that initial layer on, and using a MIG welder, for example, you’re changing it into something greater.

                                           00:56:00             There’s a lot of heat and pressure that you’re using to form these materials and certainly there was heat and pressure on Saul as a new king. They just had judges for 300 years at least. So there was heat and pressure put on him. Luckily, he had a prophet that he could follow that he could listen to. I like watching my students put heat and pressure to make these drift trikes or whatever they make and it doesn’t always turn out perfect. What’s nice about metal is you can go back and you can add heat again and rebend it and reweld it. There’s a great parallel to repentance and the grace of God, which you see a little bit of that come up with Saul. He received some grace and he had some opportunity to repent. Did he take all the opportunities? I don’t think he took it all, but it was offered. And I think that’s a nice parallel that in my classes we do talk about that. We talk about the power of repentance and grace and how that ties into the material science of the materials that we’re working with.

Hank Smith:                      00:56:59             That’s great. At a place like BYU, you can bear your testimony over your plastic fiberglass skis.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:57:06             Right. Yeah. You’ll have to try them out, Hank. They’re good.

Hank Smith:                      00:57:11             Ok.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:57:11             They’re the best skis you can ride.

Hank Smith:                      00:57:12             You can come and, you can tell me the best ski for me. Could you make one that I never fall down? Could you, could you do that?

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:57:21             Yeah. Okay, that might be a sled.

Hank Smith:                      00:57:23             Okay. Yeah. All right. I’ll take it. One of my favorite moments is 1 Samuel chapter 10, verse 22. Where is the new king?

John Bytheway:               00:57:35             He’s hiding.

Hank Smith:                      00:57:35             I don’t know. Let me go find him. They inquired of the Lord further if the man should yet come through there. And the Lord answered, behold, he hath hid himself among the stuff.

John Bytheway:               00:57:45             Among the stuff.

Hank Smith:                      00:57:48             He really does not want to be king. You’re going to have to put up with me here. There was a sacred meeting that was about to begin. A mother could not find her son anywhere. She searched and searched, finally located him, sitting outside on the curb with his head in his hands. She said, son, we have to go in now. Sacrament’s about to start. He said, Mom, I can’t go in there. Nobody likes me. No one will talk to me. She said, son, but you have to go in. You’re the bishop. So…

John Bytheway:               00:58:19             I thought that’s where you were going.

Hank Smith:                      00:58:22             Geoff, I know you’re a member of the stake presidency. Did that ever make you want to go hide, right? When they said, hey, by the way.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:58:28             Yeah, it was a little overwhelming when you receive the call, right? But I don’t think it was any more overwhelming than when you’re a deacon and you’re first asked to pass the sacrament and you’re nervous.

Hank Smith:                      00:58:40             Yeah.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            00:58:41             I was thinking about this a little bit about a friend of mine, if I can share a story. He’s one of my best friends. His name’s Brian Martin. Years ago when we moved from California here to Utah, we moved in. We bought this old house in South Provo and was restoring it while we were living there that first month, a guy moved into the house next to us. Turns out it was, it was his house. He had just gotten out of prison and come home and he was on his front porch and he was smoking. You know, I looked over and I thought, all right, this is my new neighbor. So I said, hello, how’s it going? Little gruff. We’re about the same age. Little did I know that he would become one of my best friends. And how it happened, it aligns here with Saul.

                                           00:59:30             We are anointed as sons and daughters of God and this was my chance to be a good friend and to remind this buddy of mine that he was a son of God. Really, it was my son that broke down the bear. He was just a little kid, maybe three or four, and he’d go over every day and say, hey, Brian, you want to mow your lawn? And he’d have his Fisher Price mower and he’d just walk him back and forth on his lawn and Brian then would get out his mower and they’d mow together and then they’d go watch Elf. They must have watched Elf 50 times that year.

                                           01:00:04             He was just such a great guy and we just became good friends. Every day I’d go over and talk to Brian and just talk about life and what he had been through. Eventually I say, hey, do you want to go to church this Sunday with us? Just sit with us? No pressure, but I’m telling you it makes me a better man. He said, sure. And so he came to church. He was born in the church, but he hadn’t been back for a long time. He’d lived a rough life, obviously, if he was getting out of prison. It was just this beautiful relationship over the next couple of years. Eventually he received the priesthood and here you have a 40 plus guy going to pass the sacrament for his first time. What I love is in verse six, the Spirit turned him into another man.

                                           01:00:53             He was changed. Brian was changed just as Saul was changed as we talked over the years. I said, well, what’s next for you? And he said, I’d love to be married and be sealed in the temple. I know that’s important. I’d love to make that covenant. And I think at first he was like Saul. He hid. He was scared of these covenants. He was scared of coming back to church. In fact, passing the sacrament as a 40-year-old, that’s a little nerving maybe. Having this hope to be sealed in the temple, not having any prospects, having a hard time finding a job because of his life up to that point. But he prayed about it and I remember fasting with him. And then he met someone. He taught her the gospel and baptized her. It was just this unbelievable miracle I saw unfolding and then they get married and they get sealed in the temple.

                                           01:01:50             It was just this unbelievable experience and it ends though rather abruptly. He develops cancer, gets a brain tumor. I remember sitting at lunch with him. I said, I’m so sorry. And he said, in some ways I am because I am now who I always wanted to be. But, and I remember he also said this to me, he said, but I am so happy I can look my Father in heaven in the eyes and say thank you. I can look to my Savior and say thank you. And it’s a big deal that I can look him in the eyes and say, I’m better now. I love that verse. The Spirit can change us. We highlight a lot of time about how Saul changes in the negative, but he changed to something great at one time and I think we all experience that.

                                           01:02:49             We have this excitement about the gospel when we join the church or these spikes of spiritual highlights and I think we have to be careful that we don’t forget those, that we hold onto them dearly. What happens with Saul is he forgets. He forgets that he was an anointed king. He was set apart to do something great. Spirit did change him, but just as the Spirit can change us, Satan is strong and temptation is strong.

Hank Smith:                      01:03:16             John where is it in the Doctrine and Covenants, the wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth. You had it and you can keep it. Saul could have kept it. I love that story. Geoff, you could have just said, he and I don’t have a lot in common and then just kind of lived your lives next door neighbors, but not really ever talking. I love that you’re like, you know what? This is my neighbor. It’s going to be fun. I’m going to go over and say hi. Never knowing that that could be such a story, such a friendship.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            01:03:47             Well, I think there’s another verse in there that maybe applies to that. It said something along the lines that the Spirit rushed upon him. That’s there for all of us. The Spirit can rush on us. One of it is just trying to be Christian, trying to see your fellow man as God sees them. When we do that, it can rush on us. I just pray that it happens a little more often in my life because it is unbelievable to feel that and just to know that he’s there.

Hank Smith:                      01:04:16             Coming up in part two.

Dr. Geoff Wright:            01:04:18             I’m digging through, the Spirit comes to me and it says, don’t do this. I was like, don’t do this? We’ve been doing this for years and I love doing this. I’m doing this. So I keep digging. The Spirit says clearly to me, and I don’t feel the Spirit strongly like this hardly ever. It says, don’t do this.