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

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:00:04             With finding out that I had a different dad, I ended up having to get a new birth certificate because that my birth certificate had the wrong dad on it. I got a new name. I changed my last name. I inherited the name Brunson. Also, I got new family. My dad had six children that I had never met that was now, I knew these were now my siblings and I inherited this new family.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:33             Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode to followHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with John Bytheway, who is a great follower of righteousness. John, I was reading Abraham chapter one. Abraham says he was hoping to be a greater follower of righteousness, and I thought, that’s John Bytheway. He’s trying to be more like John Bytheway.

John Bytheway:               00:00:55             I’m a couple of hundred miles behind. I’m not tailgating righteousness, but I’m trying to follow it. Yeah, thanks for that.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:01             It’s up there quite a ways.

John Bytheway:               00:01:02             It’s way up there.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:04             John, we are blessed to have Dr. Jenae Nelson back with us. Jenae, welcome back to followHIM. It’s been a couple of years.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:01:11             Yeah, I’m so excited to be back today.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:13             Yeah, we love having you. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’ve had you on the schedule for quite a while. John, we are in Genesis 12 through 17, Abraham one and two. Abraham is a much bigger deal than I thought. When I first started reading the Bible, especially the book of Genesis. I thought, oh, it’s a story of Adam and Eve. It really isn’t. This is the story of Abraham.

John Bytheway:               00:01:36             That’s what I’ve been thinking, because I know you always ask me what are you looking forward to. In the past, what would you say decade? We’ve just been talking a lot more about covenants, about Abraham. Hank has a brilliant presentation about Abraham and who we are in the Abrahamic Covenant. Greater covenant consciousness, which I’m grateful for and excited to talk about it today.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:56             Yeah, here’s this name that comes up all the time throughout scripture, even in the temple. Jenae, what are we gonna do today? Are we gonna get to know Abraham?

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:02:05             Yes, we are. Because I’m a developmental psychologist, I’m really excited to look at his story as a process, to look at his story of development and learn how we can become better followers of Christ.

Hank Smith:                      00:02:21             John, you were right when you said earlier that I love this story. I frequently tell young people, if you wanna know why you came to Earth, you better know the story of Abraham, right? If you wanna know why you’re here, hopefully that’s a big deal to someone out there. Why am I on Earth? Well, John, someone might not have been with us two years ago when we studied the book of Helaman with Jenae. What do we know about her? Introduce her to our followHIM audience.

John Bytheway:               00:02:51             Well, I’d love to. I was excited when she was coming back because I remember what a great time we had last time. Dr. Jenae Nelson is a developmental psychologist and assistant professor in the psychology department at BYU. She focuses on positive youth development, relational virtues, such as compassion and indebtedness, faith and character education in sports. I wanna talk to her about that and the role of spirituality in psychological well-being. Her PhD is from BYU. She is a post-doctoral research fellow at Baylor and a research affiliate at Harvard. We’re just glad to have you back because I remember I read that impressive bio, but what it doesn’t tell you, I mean, Jenae is so unique. She actually had a period of time in her life when she was homeless. I’m excited to hear more about that today, will we?

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:03:44             Yes, we will. And I did share a little bit last time, so I’ll try not to repeat too much. I do think that some insights from my story about finding my father, being homeless, repeating a lot of the themes of Abraham will be applicable, and I hope it can speak to others who, um, have similar experiences, and maybe not the same, but maybe struggle with feeling of belonging or trying to understand how they fit in.

Hank Smith:                      00:04:09             Yeah. I remember there were quite a few mothers that came up to me after we talked to Jenae last time, John, and said, I love that she talked about her teenage years. Now I feel more hope for my daughter because Jenae decided she was gonna be a bit of a rebel early on.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:04:28             It’s true. It’s true.

Hank Smith:                      00:04:30             That blesses a lot of lives when we open up like that. Hey, let’s get started. I’m gonna read from the Come Follow Me manual, and then Jenae, John and I are excited to learn from you again. The title of the lesson this week is To Be a Greater Follower of a Righteousness. Because of the covenant God made with him, Abraham has been called the father of the faithful and the friend of God. Millions today honor him as their direct ancestor, and others have been adopted into his family through conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ, yet Abraham himself came from a troubled family. His father, who had abandoned the true worship of God, tried to have Abraham sacrifice to false gods. In spite of this, Abraham’s desire was to be a greater follower of righteousness, and the account of his life shows that God honored his desire. Abraham’s life stands as a testimony that no matter what a person’s family history has been, the future can be filled with hope. Beautiful. Jenae, where do we wanna start?

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:05:30             I wanna start with a bit of an analogy, a little historical story that I think can teach us a lot about covenant and what it means to be part of the House of Israel. I came across the story of the Foundling Hospital. This hospital was a children’s home in London, England founded in 1739. It was established to care for orphans and abandoned children. And children were seldom taken after they were 12 months old, so many of the orphans were infants. At first, no questions were asked about the child or parent, but a note was made of any particular writing or other distinguishing mark or token which might later be used to identify a child if reclaimed. These were often marked coins, trinkets, pieces of fabric or ribbon, as well as verses and notes written on scraps of paper. There’s a museum that has one of these tokens, it’s a silver heart.

                                           00:06:24             On this heart, it reads the following: You have my heart though we must part. Born September 6th, 1759. And as the historians have noted, sadly, this token did not get associated with a child. The child that it belonged to remains unknown, so in the event that the mother came to reclaim her child, she would have not been able to do so. I wanna use this story, again, like I said, as an analogy, and like matter as children of the covenant, we have eternal tokens or covenants that identify us and enable us to be reclaimed and return to our heavenly parents. And President Nelson, of course, has emphasized the importance of remembering our true identity as a child of God and a child of the covenant. This image of these little tokens, I wish I could show you guys. This one in particular really struck me in terms of what tokens do I carry, what marks of discipleship do I have that I could be recognized as part of the House of Israel. I hope to talk about that today, and I think Abraham starts to tell us, through his life story, what it means to be a member of the House of Israel and how we can be recognized as such.

John Bytheway:               00:07:35             I remember that the Bible Dictionary with the definition of Israel says one who prevails with God or to let God prevail, and that’s the one that President Nelson really talked about a lot. Willingness to let God prevail as a identifier of Israel, which is interesting.

Hank Smith:                      00:07:56             Think how many religions look back to Abraham. Think of how many people look back to Abraham. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, that is a large portion of the world’s population. Looking back to this one prophet and his wife, Sarah.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:08:16             With that, let’s go ahead and go to Abraham chapter one, verse two, so we can get a sense of this developmental journey that I talked about and where we’re going to go today. Abraham says, In finding there was greater happiness and peace and rest for me, I sought for the blessings of the Fathers and the right where and two I should be ordained to administer the same. Having been myself a follower of righteousness, desiring also to be one who possessed great knowledge and to be a greater follower of righteousness and to possess greater knowledge and to be a father of many nations, a prince of peace, and desiring to receive instructions and to keep the commandments of God, I became a rightful heir, a high priest holding the right belonging to the fathers. Over and over again, we see the word greater. We get the sense that he was a follower of righteousness and he did have great knowledge, but he wanted more.

                                           00:09:10             That’s important when we’re thinking about what is the point of the covenant, what is the point of the restoration. So much of the restoration was giving more. The body of Christianity, broadly speaking, has Christ. They have an understanding of his life. For those who come into the church, they’re often looking for something greater, for something more. This is what we see pattern in the life of Abraham. I also want to talk about why Abraham is so important as an exemplar and why he’s somebody that we should try to look to as a pattern. Scholar E. Douglas Clark, there’s a book that he’s written, The Blessings of Abraham Becoming a Zion People. It’s really good. He says that according to Jewish tradition, Abraham’s entire life prefigure the future history of Israel. It’s important for us to understand Abraham’s life if we want to understand Israel. He also says he’s a model for anyone and everyone aspiring to Zion.

                                           00:10:11             According to Brigham Young, when we conclude to make a Zion, we will make it, and this work commences in the heart of each person. Right away, we start talking about hearts again, which is interesting because we talked about that on the Helaman podcast, but Abraham himself begins by talking about how his fathers had turned their hearts from righteousness in Abraham 1:5. Then in six, he says that they were wholly turned to the God of Elkenah. And in seven, they turned their hearts to the sacrifice of the heathen. We have this turning, this heart turning, but they’re turning in the wrong direction. We know that prophecy and the words spoken to Joseph Smith through Moroni, the words of Malachi, that we’re supposed to be participating in the work of turning the hearts of the children to the fathers and the hearts of the fathers to their children. This is a different kind of turning, so it’s a turning to children, a turning to fathers, instead of turning to these false gods that were common then, but are still a problem today.

Hank Smith:                      00:11:17             Jenae, I don’t think we could overemphasize what you talked about. With the gathering of Israel, it’s not necessarily about restoring Christ’s New Testament church, although it does that. This is more about Abraham. Restoring a people. John, isn’t that Section 84? Right at the opening. This restoration is about restoring my people. Jenae, that’s perfect, turning their hearts to God.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:11:45             Yeah. To understand a little bit more who the Fathers are, here’s another one. This is Israel, the Lord’s chosen people by Dallas W. Lee. It’s super thick. The pages are very thin but really, really good. So I’m gonna be referring to him as well. He says, The fathers, Adam, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph is another topic intimately related to the subject of Israel. These are the fathers and the children of Israel are part of that heritage. In the last days, we know the Lord would send Elijah the prophet for the very purpose of turning the hearts of the children to these fathers. When we’re talking about fathers, we’re talking about hearts turning to covenants, hearts turning to these ordinances. And essentially, all of that pointing to Christ. That’s what we mean when we say that. There’s other interpretations as well. We oftentimes talk about fathers as in our genealogy, our ancestry. It’s really important that we don’t lose this idea that the fathers are connected to covenant.

Hank Smith:                      00:12:50             It’s almost as if Abraham is reaching a couple millennia into the future saying, remember who you are. Remember our family.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:12:58             Yeah, that’s right. Abraham says that he sought for the blessings of the fathers and the right whereunto he could be ordained to administer the same. He’s very clearly tying the fathers to the priesthood here, and he became a rightful heir. Hank, I’ve heard you explain this before. Can you describe what the Abrahamic covenant entails?

Hank Smith:                      00:13:21             I try to make it as simple as possible for my students so they can remember it, wrap their minds around it at first, and then, you know, get to know the details later. But it seems that Jehovah says to Abraham, we are going to use your family, Abraham, to bless all the families of the earth. You’re the chosen family, not necessarily because you’re better, but you are chosen to do the work. I love all the families of the earth, so I’m gonna have a chosen family to bless everyone. I am going to give you and your family some very unique commandments. If you keep those commandments, you will have incredible blessings, which you can do the P alliteration, right? Priesthood, property or promised lands and posterity, including Christ himself will be part of this family. With those blessings, you are to bless every other family on the earth. I give you unique commandments, you keep those commandments, you get blessings, with those blessings, you bless the whole earth and invite them in to be part of this same family. Pretty soon, if we do it right, everybody is now in Abraham’s family. How did I do?

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:14:35             That’s really great. The Abrahamic Covenant also gives us a process of how to return into the presence of God. I would add those two, and we’ll talk about that in more detail. The other thing that I wanna do is talk about how oftentimes when we start talking about the priesthood and the blessings of the priesthood, we forget how this relates to women and how women can also access that. First, I want to talk about the distinction between authority and power, because I think this is really important. There’s a great quote from Boyd K. Packer, your authority comes through your ordination. Your power comes through obedience and worthiness. I love that thought. And then Spencer W. Kimball says, There’s no limit to the power of the priesthood which you hold. The limit comes in you if you do not live in harmony with the Spirit of the Lord. Likewise, there’s a connection for women in their righteousness and their access to priesthood power.

                                           00:15:32             Russell M. Nelson, president and prophet, talked so much about this and talks so much to women. He said, Every woman and every man who makes covenants with God and keeps those covenants and who participates worthily in priesthood ordinances has direct access to the power of God. Then he says, Those who are endowed in the house of the Lord receive a gift of God’s priesthood power by virtue of their covenant, along with a gift of knowledge to know how to draw upon that power. As we talk about the priesthood, I want us to think about the power and the blessings that can come. And those blessings that you talked about, Hank, are not just for the men, they’re also for the women, and they lay out that process that we’re to follow to come into the presence of the Lord.

Hank Smith:                      00:16:14             Don’t you think, Jenae and John, as a church, we are a true and living church, and learning things grow and understand things better. Do you think this is something maybe in the last 15 years, something that we’re understanding more clearly than ever before?

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:16:34             Absolutely. I mean, having grown up without the gospel really actively in my home and not having a father in the home, I often reflected on that and thought to myself that there was no father in the home, there was no priesthood. And we used to talk like that, that if there’s no dad in the home, there’s no priesthood. Really, the lack that I had in my home was a connection to covenants and was a connection to the church by being actively involved in covenant keeping because I hadn’t taken some of those covenants upon me, although I had been baptized and I did have the gift of the Holy Ghost. I wasn’t really living worthy of those blessings in my life. It’s no longer accurate to say that single women can’t have the priesthood in their home that they can’t have the priesthood blessings in their home.

Hank Smith:                      00:17:22             This is from Sister Aburto, who we’ve had on our show before. She said priesthood authority is the permission or license to perform specific priesthood duties and comes from ordination to priesthood office and from being set apart for callings in the church. Priesthood authority is conferred by the laying on of hands under the direction of those who have priesthood keys. Women receive this authority in the form of a calling. President Dallin H. Oaks made that clear when he said, Whoever functions in an office or calling received from one who holds priesthood keys exercises priesthood authority in performing her or his assigned duties. Both of my sisters are single mothers. Someone would say, oh, you don’t have the priesthood in your home. That was wrong to say. It was an incorrect thing to say. My sister is endowed in the temple. She has priesthood authority.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:18:21             Yeah, I love that. And I think it’s important for us to understand that those differences that you pointed out between what it means to be set apart, ordained, versus having that power in your life. Interestingly, Abraham early is faced with this problem where we see this imitated order of the priesthood with Pharaoh. Pharaoh has priests and they’re doing what they would think of as ordinances and rituals, but they were imitated order. There was no priesthood associated with them. We contrast Pharaoh with Melchizedek, Melchizedek having that authorization, having the priesthood. Whereas Pharaoh was taking life, you have Melchizedek giving wine and bread and offering and blessing, just a different way of relating. And Abraham has these two contrasted orders.

John Bytheway:               00:19:15             When President Oaks gave that talk and he talked about a sister, I think he used the example of a sister missionary being set apart. He said she’s given priesthood authority and then he said, What other authority would it be? And I thought, Well, yeah, you’re doing the work of God. What else could it possibly be? I think of the phrase in, is it section 121? Well, that it may be conferred upon us, it is true, but when we undertake to gratify our pride, cover our sins, well, you may have been ordained, but it doesn’t mean you have priesthood power.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:19:49             This reminds me of something that happened to me recently at BYU. I was on my way home. I came to my car. I realized the battery to my key wasn’t working. And I was like, oh man, this is, this is like a really big problem because it’s one of those new cars that there’s no, like, key to get in. It’s just a battery. I’m like, what am I gonna do? I’d have to walk to the store to get the battery to be able to make this work. Well, I looked online and found that there’s actually like a hidden key inside the door handle. I, maybe I shouldn’t be telling people this, but I won’t tell you what make my car is. Anyways, so I had to take apart the handle, find this key, I get the key to open this thing in my other key, to force open this. Then this person comes out and says to me, that’s my car. What are you doing?

                                           00:20:33             And I realized this actually wasn’t even my car. So I had removed this handle. I had gone through all this and it wasn’t even my car. And so that’s why my key wasn’t working. But then I just, I was so embarrassed because it was so, it was so dumb. I put her handle back together and then I just left, found my car, and then all of a sudden my battery’s working and I can open my car and I can get in. It turns out if you have the right car and the right key, you’re going to be okay. I think this is an important lesson for when we think about authorization and priesthood and imitation versus the actual authority. We need to have the right key so we know that we’re getting into the right car. We want to be in the car that is the car associated with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We want to be part of the covenant. We don’t want to be in just any old car.

Hank Smith:                      00:21:27              BYU professor tries to steal car.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:21:31             I know. I know. She was so confused and not very nice either. I can’t blame her though. I would be, I would be, like, frustrated too seeing my car being taken apart.

John Bytheway:               00:21:42             It really helped me the day that I realized that Abraham wanted the blessings of the fathers. And I’m like, wait a minute. Abraham is one of the fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But then when you realize God had made the same covenants with Adam and Seth and Enoch, you go, oh, okay, those fathers. But then maybe Abraham lived the covenant, modeled it so well, we started calling it the Abrahamic Covenant, kind of like we refer to the Melchizedek priesthood because he was such a great High Priest, although the real name is the Holy Priesthood after the order of the Son of God.

Hank Smith:                      00:22:22             Also, I would say, John, that we focus so much on Abraham because the scriptures themselves, the book of Genesis really says, let’s talk about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their family. I assume it’s there before, but it’s really outlined in the life of Abraham. He does indicate that he knows this was happening before. I was looking for the blessings of the fathers.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:22:46             That’s right. And he’s not talking about his biological father in this case, and he talks about how his fathers had turned from these promises and that they had turned to these other gods. Martin Luther said, Anything on which your heart lies and depends, I say, that is really your God. Calvin said, The heart is a perpetual idol factory. We’re constantly creating idols. This is where Abraham found himself. He found himself with traditions of his fathers that were not righteous, they were imitations, they didn’t have the keys, and he couldn’t become a greater follower of righteousness. The other thing that I wanna focus on is that who we listen to becomes our God. It’s not just what our hearts are set on, but who we follow, who we listen to. President Russell M. Nelson taught, If any label replaces your most important identifiers, the results can be spiritually suffocating. Elder Patrick Kearon builds on this, and this was really enlightening to me.

                                           00:23:49             He said, Little by little, the more we invite his goodness into our hearts and cast out the self-defeating voices in our heads, we become his people because we truly make him our God. Here, he’s posing these self-defeating voices as false gods, which I think that’s really interesting. How many of us have these types of false gods, these self-defeating voices? I think a lot of us struggle with that, and I know I do. A big part of those self-defeating voices is that sometimes they seem like they’re our own. So we listen to them, but we don’t have to listen to them. Patrick Kearon is saying, Elder Kearon is saying that we need to be listening to God. We need to be listening to what he has to say about us. But sometimes in order to do that, in order to hear him clearly, we have to do what Abraham did.

                                           00:24:42             He left his home country. That was something that required separation. It required a great sacrifice. It wasn’t just a physical move, but a radical severance from his past security relying entirely on God. The command and his journey began with the specific directive from Jehovah, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, and unto a land I will shew thee. The severity of this request needs to be understood. This was massive for an ancient person because there was loss of identity and safety. In Abraham’s era, a person’s identity, their livelihood, and legal protection was rooted in the house of their father. To leave his father’s house was to leave himself at the mercy of strangers without protection. He was asked to sever the most intimate bonds imaginable and to leave those safety nets. Sometimes our survival and safety and security involves leaving behind what was once safe and what was once secure.

                                           00:25:48             I want to talk about a little bit, if you guys don’t mind, Hank, you can decide how much you want to share here, but I want to talk a little bit about people who become change makers like you. I talked about in your Come Back podcast, Hank, when you make the decision to break off these traditions that aren’t helpful, it’s important to think about our past, especially for those who have survived trauma, abuse, that were malformed in any way. You create what psychologists called a survival style. Hank, I think you called it you got some toxic skills. What that means is that you learn how to survive within that environment that you grew up in, and it served you well. Those survival skills that you acquired were actually malforming because there were certain needs of yours that were not met. This happens to anybody who is coming from a home like this, but the main human needs that every child should have are connection, attunement, being able to meet your own needs and have your needs met. Trust, autonomy, love, and sexuality.

                                           00:26:56             There’s specific things that happen when those needs are not met. There’s survival adaptations that happen. For example, when you don’t have the connection that you need, the adaption is foreclosing connection, disconnecting from your body and social engagement. And what happens is children give up their very sense of existence, disconnect, and attempt to become invisible. That’s how they survive in that particular environment, but then once they become adults, that no longer serves them. There’s other examples. So attunement, the survival adaption is foreclosing awareness and expression of your own personal needs. What that looks like is children give up on their needs in order to focus on the needs of others, particularly the needs of their parents. The final one, there’s five here, but the final one I’m gonna focus on is when you don’t get your needs of love met. You foreclose on love and heart connection.

                                           00:27:54             And what happens is children try to avoid rejection by perfecting themselves, hoping that they can win love through looks or performance. These are ways in which we, survivors of these types of environments have acquired in order to survive. As psychologists, we know that those adaptive survival styles, they don’t work once you get into a normal home environment. So if you carry those on into your marriages and try to have a healthy relationship, try to be a good parent, and you’re using those survival skills that they will no longer serve you. You need to make the decision, like Abraham, to leave your home country, to leave the false traditions, and you need to change your style. It’s important for us to understand that human beings are adaptive, we’re resilient, we’re flexible, but that means sometimes we have adapted to the neglect or the abuse that we’ve experienced.

                                           00:28:55             We need to then change. For those who have suffered from trauma or abuse or just, you know, malformation, it’s a good idea to do this type of work with a therapist. It’s not always needed, but I will say that one thing that the Gospel of Jesus Christ offers is a way to heal some of those malformations. Particularly the covenants. So I’m gonna talk about how the covenant structure can offer a healing to some of those malformations that we have. And one of the first things you do when you’re on the healing journey from this developmental trauma that you may have endured is you learn about yourself, you learn about who you really are because you have maybe become somebody that isn’t you. You try to become the perfect child or whatever, you rebel. Those, either side of those, whether you’re people pleasing to the extreme or rebelling to the extreme, neither one of those might be actually authentic to who you are.

                                           00:29:53             He knows you might just be running from the past and how important it is for us to get it right when we talk about our identity and the covenant, particularly the Abrahamic Covenants, helps us get this identity right. John, you talked earlier about wanting to know a little bit about like faith in sports that I study. I’ll just briefly say that actually we talk about this with athletes, but this applies to everybody, people who don’t have their identity right for whatever reason. But athletes are really prone to this because so much of athletics has to do with winning, with performance. It’s kind of built into the logic of the sport that you get rewarded for winning, right? But people outside of sport are also doing these things. So what we try to teach them is that there’s a false identity, which is merit-based, and then there’s a true identity, which is love-based.

                                           00:30:47             If you don’t mind, I’ll quickly walk through what that looks like. And then I’d love to hear your guys’ feedback on this. The first thing is you need to understand why you’re loved. With a false identity, you think that you’re loved because you’re good or better than others. With a true identity, you understand that God loves me no earning needed. It’s just a given. Now, with a false identity, your starting point is that your worth depends on effort or your choices, but with a love-based true identity, you understand that your worth starts and ends with God’s love and his grace and mercy. It’s not going to be dependent on your choices or on your performance. The other thing that we find is within a false identity is that people gain worth from different things. The false identity, you gain it from popularity, prestige, or possessions.

                                           00:31:41             I am what people think of me. I’m only worthy if others think I’m good, attractive, smart, athletic, et cetera. Prestige, I’m better than others because what I do or achieve. I derive my worth from my status. And then possessions, I am what I own. What I have shows my value. That’s a merit-based, but we want a love-based identity. We want your primary identity to be your priority, which President Nelson taught us, and that we have infinite worth. And what God thinks about us is what matters most. We also know that power is important. We receive power from Jesus Christ’s Atonement and keeping our covenants. And then provision, I belong to God. You can see how the covenant provides every single one of those. It helps you understand your identity. You can receive power in your life and provision, and that God will provide for you because you belong to him.

                                           00:32:37             And there’s more, but those are the only ones that I’ll share with you here. But this is a whole chart that we give to our athletes so they can look at what merit-based identity versus a love-based identity looks like. I think every adult, child, teenager should think about how they view the love of God and how they derive their worth. Is it from these other gods, those self-depreciating voices from chasing perfection that likely came from having malformed ideas of who you are, or is it from God, from Christ, from your identity in the house of Israel? So I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts on that.

John Bytheway:               00:33:14             I remember Hank when Adam Miller was here. He spent a significant portion of his episode on love is a law, not a reward. A lot of people were blessed by that idea. Like 30, 40 years ago when Hank was a toddler, I was at an education week. And I remember, I think it was Dr. James MacArthur. He had the do box and the be box. And he said, sometimes people get a lot of praise in the do box based on what you did, performance. And then he said, but the be box is based on your value as a human being, just the fact that you be. And he said he presented this at the prison once. One of these prisoners said, do you mean to tell me that I have worth beyond what I’ve done? He was like, that is exactly what I’m telling you.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:34:07             That’s perfect. Yeah. It’s tricky for us because we’re talking about a potential paradox here in that when we know who we are, we will act in a certain way. There’s certainly going to be works that come out of this. We’ll talk about the works of Abraham in a minute. We need to begin with this foundational truth that our worth doesn’t depend on those things.

Hank Smith:                      00:34:30             Jenae, I appreciate you bringing up that episode I did with Ashly Stone there in the Come Back podcast. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I wanted to help out Ashly. I think what she’s doing is fantastic, but that episode has brought out emotions in people I did not anticipate. A few times this has happened, but one in particular, I had a very large Samoan man who came up to me and I thought, oh no, I’m in trouble here. And he started to weep and he said that episode saved my marriage. I was stuck and I’m here I am hugging this enormous football coach. I think what you’re talking about, and what I tried to talk about, you said it much more eloquently, is you develop skills to survive. I developed the ability to talk my way out of things because I didn’t want to get hurt.

                                           00:35:26             I developed a sense of humor, kind of an extreme sense of humor to cool down situations and to make my siblings laugh. Some of these serve me well, some of these skills serve me well, and then others can actually do harm in future relationship. What was happening to this man that I, that I talked to. And we can link the episode in the show notes, in his mind, he was thinking, I’m a bad person. I respond in these ways to my wife, or I respond in these ways to my children. Once he was able to see, no, this was a survival skill when you were younger, and now the Lord, like he is with, here with Abraham, is calling you away from that. My name is Jehovah. I have heard you and I come down to deliver you and take you away from thy father’s house or take you away from maybe the trauma or the skills you developed from your childhood home.

                                           00:36:22             And I wanna be careful here. I tried to make that clear on the show. My parents were making every effort to give me a better life than they had, and they did love me. And now our home did have a lot of toxic traits and abuse and problems, and two things can be true at the same time, that my parents did love me and were trying, and also that it was an abusive childhood. I adore them. I love them. I intend on honoring them by trying to live the commandments. They wanted me to love the Lord. I know they both did. They wanted me to love the Lord and to serve him. Abraham’s, I think his situation is different in that his father’s trying to kill him. He said, I saw that it was needful for me to obtain another place of residence. I love what you’re doing here with Abraham chapter one, Jenae, is you’re taking it and making it very real in the lives of people who had difficult childhood homes and that they can, through the Lord, they can be healed and they can move on.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:37:31             I wanna be careful here in that we don’t entirely know what happened to Abraham growing up, so we don’t have his whole story. And also, I want to make it really clear that as we continue to talk today about the covenants and how so much of that can be healing, also therapy can be really good as well. I was sitting with a student just this past week. She was telling me that she grew up in an abusive home and that it was really terrible. She was, became a convert to the church, so she resonated with my story. We were talking about this and she said, I went on a mission, but I struggled. I couldn’t get along with anybody and I couldn’t get along with my companions. I ruined all my friendships. I was just thinking about a friend the other day that I love so much. I lost her as a friend because I’m a horrible person. And she said, was saying to me, I repent every single day because I’m just not getting this right. I said, I want you to know that there’s a difference between being righteous, righteous living and the capacity for righteous living. Let me explain that.

                                           00:38:40             We know what we need to do, but sometimes we just can’t do it, especially if we didn’t learn certain skills. Quite honestly, that’s one of the reasons why I went into psychology, because I wanted to understand how can I do these things? I knew I converted, I wanted to be like Christ, I wanted to be the best mom and wife. Then once I became a mom and I realized it was so hard, and I didn’t really have the tools, I didn’t know how to be a good mom, even though I knew what the gospel was telling me, people would say, you can get every single answer you need in the Book of Mormon and through the gospel. I found that that was true for the most part. It told me how to live and what I should be doing, but I couldn’t get certain skills. My word of caution here is that some things are best learned from therapy, from intervention. That’s one of the best things that you can do for yourself if you grew up in a situation like this.

Hank Smith:                      00:39:36             Just to be vulnerable, the therapy I’ve been through, it’s been years of therapy, and it’s been very, very good, very good. If you can find a therapist, in every industry, you’ll find people who aren’t helpful, but there are therapists out there who understand this, they do this on a daily basis, and I’m a product of good therapy. Been wonderful.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:40:01             Yeah, me too. I wanna segue back to your thought, because what you, when you were talking, Hank, I was thinking about a particular survival skill that I’ve acquired. I didn’t even realize that I had acquired this, but I was talking to my therapist one day and saying, I have the hardest time making a dentist appointment. This is so silly, but I just can’t get myself to do it. It’s like, I’m going on two years now, my mom is a dental hygienist or was a dental hygienist, so I know how the virtue of going to the dentist on time, but I just, I literally can’t do it. I don’t know why. I just put it off. And, and then my therapist said, well, let’s just unpack this a little bit. I’m like, there’s nothing really to unpack. I don’t know why. There’s nothing deep here. As we started to talk about it, she asked me a really important question. She said, is it possible that you adapted so much to neglect that things that look like taking care of yourself, you put off because it’s not familiar to you? And I just thought, that’s a really weird question. But she said, the things that are familiar are the things that are easiest, even if they hurt us, we do them.

John Bytheway:               00:41:19             Wow.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:41:20             Abraham leaving what was familiar for a new life and heading into the uncertainty, heading into the unknown, this is an important spiritual lesson for us to think about in our lives. What is God calling us away from? Which home countries do we need to leave? What things are no longer serving us that we need to leave behind? We need to be comfortable with starting anew because the familiar is what we most frequently do because it’s the easiest, even if it continues to cause harm.

John Bytheway:               00:41:53             Jenae, you talked about earlier that definition of what we rely upon, and I can’t help but think the stories are not the same, but of Nephi having to leave in 2 Nephi 4, what that must have… I… Sorry, dad, I can’t stay with Laman and Lemuel and their posterity. I’ve got … I have to go. And then saying, oh, wretched man that I am. I, for one, would love to be as wretched as Nephi. And then to say, But I know in whom I have trusted. My God hath been my support. He’s relying on, I think it’s such a perfect example of what do I rely on when I have to, when I have to leave that way? Having to leave must have been tough.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:42:39             This is Emily Belle Freeman talking about walking in covenant relationship in her general conference talk. She says, his is a mission of condescension. Jesus Christ will meet us where we are. This is the why of the garden, the cross, and the tomb. Staying there won’t bring the deliverance we seek. Just as he didn’t leave Jacob there in the dirt, the Lord doesn’t intend to leave any of us where we are. His is also a mission of ascension. He will work within us to lift us up to where he is and in the process, enable us to become as he is. Jesus Christ came to lift us. He wants to help us become. This is the why of the temple. It within the deliverance is not only him reaching down and saving us, but pulling us up.

John Bytheway:               00:43:21             But lifting us up. I love that.

Hank Smith:                      00:43:24             Jenae, I noticed that Abraham has to entirely leave his father. I don’t think he’s going to ever speak with him again or talk with him again. In my case, I didn’t have to do that. I never felt that that was completely necessary. There were times to distance and take some time on my, by myself, but I wanted my children to know their grandparents. In your work, and I know this can be very sensitive, so we wanna be as careful as we can, but in your work, when have you seen there comes a time where you think, you know, I cannot be in this situation anymore, versus, maybe I’m, I wanna hurt the person who hurt me, so I’m gonna punish them by never seeing them. It’s a very delicate subject, I realize that.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:44:12             I’m not a clinical psychologist, which means I don’t actually work with patients through these things, but I do the research that helps the clinicians. As I understand it, one of the goals of therapy is to help clients to be able to be in these difficult situations. The eventual goal, you might set up a boundary for a while until you can learn how to self-regulate in that person’s presence. So the boundary might serve as a safety or protection for a while until you can learn how to have those self-regulatory skills, but the goal is to eventually incorporate you back into those environments. Obviously, exceptions would be like in the case of ongoing abuse, and that can take many forms. I think it’s really important to be making this decision with a trained therapist, to also be making this decision through prayer and with the Lord, because it’s just not something that you can handle on your own.

                                           00:45:05             Even Abraham, I mean, he didn’t leave until the Lord told him to leave. That was when he was given permission. And not everyone does. You see Daniel, who’s never called to leave, he stays with his people, and then he has dire consequences of that. Some people are called to stay, and some people are called to leave, and that’s a decision that is best made in counsel with other people, including the Lord. But talking with bishops, therapists, those are good places to start.

Hank Smith:                      00:45:32             Excellent. Sometimes we get into a false dichotomy that I can use my religion and my relationship with the Lord, or I can use a therapist. That’s a false dichotomy. Those things can absolutely work together.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:45:47             And they often do. They work better together. We find that because in general, anytime you can get somebody to connect with something transcendent, you see this in AA, that it’s really important to have a higher power, transcendent, precisely because we need to have a transcendent source of identity and purpose that will not change. And that’s what Abraham gets through the covenant. He gets this idea of who he is and the work that he has to perform. Then he’s able to build a life around those new identities and this new purpose. The real work of mortality is remembering who you are and coming to finish the work that God sent you to do.

Hank Smith:                      00:46:29             Hmm. I wonder, both of you, if part of the reason Abraham gets chosen for this is because of the difficulties he’s been through. In verse 16, Jehovah says, Abraham, Abraham, behold, my name is Jehovah. I have heard thee. Something was causing Abraham to look to God. So it’s another one of those, John, it’s 2 Nephi 2, right? I could turn your afflictions for thy gain. Is that right? Did I get that right?

John Bytheway:               00:47:00             Talking to Jacob.

Hank Smith:                      00:47:02             Yeah.

John Bytheway:               00:47:03             Lehi talking to Jacob because he grew up totally different than Nephi did. He, Jacob had never seen Jerusalem. He saw a dysfunctional family in action every day. Let’s kill dad. Let’s kill Nephi. That’s a good comparison.

Hank Smith:                      00:47:19             He can consecrate, that’s the word, consecrate thy afflictions.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:47:23             Yeah, I think that’s a really good thought that will bless a lot of people, Hank, because growing up in the family or lack thereof that I grew up in, struggled with. I had a difficult time in the church trying to figure out where I fit in a family-centered church. Like, how can I make sense of my story? And people would tell me all the time, like, God can turn a bad thing into a good thing. Look at what God did. He just turned, you know, your parents one night stand how I came into the world and he turned it into a good thing, but then it always made my life feel like a plan B. Again, I can’t remember if I shared this last time or not, but, we had a really wise stake president when my son’s mission got changed from the proselyting mission to the service mission, it was devastating to him.

                                           00:48:12             There were parts of his patriarchal blessing that he thought were not going to ever come to pass. As it reads, it really is hard to see how that’s going to work out. We were sitting in the office with the stake president and he said, you need to know that with the Lord, there is no plan B. That actually really was ministering to me. I was just, I just started crying as he said that because it just, it felt really true. Like, so my life isn’t a plan B. This life has been so hard. It’s not a plan B. Like, this is what God wanted for me. Thank you for sharing that, that maybe it was Abraham’s life that qualified him to be Abraham because sometimes when you have a hard childhood or you have hard things happen in your life, you feel like those things disqualify you, that they’re the reason why you shouldn’t be doing the things that you’re doing or that you’re not good enough and you carry those false gods of those, the self-deceptive voices in your brain.

                                           00:49:21             Remember when, I believe it was Elder Cook said that more than half of the church is single? That really shocked me. And so we need to be thinking about non-traditional families. We need to be thinking about single parents. We need to think about fatherless children. We need to think about people who don’t have that ideal family. What does the gospel look like for them when they may never be sealed to their parents? I’m not sealed to my mom. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that privilege until the next life, and I think God will work that all out. But for right now, there are a lot of people who might feel like they don’t have a home in the church because their family life doesn’t fit that happy family.

Hank Smith:                      00:50:05             Yeah. Jenae, thank you for that. And we’re grateful for your vulnerability because we know that we have listeners who are in very difficult, dark situations, and to have someone like you testify that the Lord can give beauty for ashes, and it was his plan all along.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:50:28             Yeah. It didn’t surprise him. Somehow in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t surprise him that my parents made the mistake that they made. I don’t get how that works. Like Nephi said, I don’t know the meaning of all things, but I know that God loves his children, and I’m learning to believe that he loves, He loves me. I know he does, but it’s a, it’s a continual process to really believe that.

John Bytheway:               00:50:52             Going back to 2 Nephi 2 again, it’s one of my fallback verses, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knowest all things. And there’s a exhale that comes with that. Whether or not it’s clear to you, John, things are unfolding as they should, and that helps me.

Hank Smith:                      00:51:11             Yeah. In the temple, the phrase overcome the blood and sins of this generation caught my attention once. I thought, blood and sins, it’s probably my DNA that’s in my blood and the sins of the parenting. Everybody harms their children as parents in one way or another, right? Some more than others. But I think the Lord says, you can overcome. You can overcome your DNA and you can overcome the way you were parented, and I’m gonna help you get there.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:51:43             That is such a perfect segue, actually, to what I wanted to talk about next, kind of building on that idea that covenants give us identity. It can, even like you’re saying, overcome our DNA, our biology, our inherited characteristics and traits. I talked last time about finding my dad for the first time, but one of the interesting things about that experience is that I actually had a case of mistaken identity and that I grew up thinking that this other guy was my dad the whole time I was a child. I didn’t actually grow up with him. I actually only had a picture of this man who I thought was my dad. The interesting thing about that is I would have to ask my mom, what was he like? Tell me about him. And she would give me facts about who he was. She said that he was really attractive and that he was athletic and super smart.

                                           00:52:34             He was a mechanical engineer and he lived in Hawaii. And again, I didn’t know him at all and he didn’t wanna have anything to do with me, but I had this idea of who he was and that idea of who my dad was gave me an idea of who I was. When I would be chosen last for whatever sports team, because I’m super clumsy, I would think to myself, well, my dad is really athletic. I can probably learn how to do this. Or when I really struggled in school a lot, I would think, well, my dad is really smart. Maybe I can be smart too. I built a whole identity around who I thought my dad was. But then when I was 16, through a DNA test, as I mentioned last time, I found out I had a different dad. And the interesting thing happened from that with finding out that I had a different dad, I ended up having to get a new birth certificate because my birth certificate had the wrong dad on it.

                                           00:53:36             I got a new name. I changed my last name. I inherited the name Brunson. Also, I got new family. My dad had six children that I had never met that was now, I knew these were now my siblings, and I inherited this new family, a stepmom. My dad had a home. Another part of becoming his daughter was knowing that I could go to his home because all of these things happen in conjunction with learning who my dad was. Now, think about the analogy we can draw from that with the covenant. When you now identify with Christ as being a child of Christ, there is a new identity. You take on a new name. You have a new home, a new family, new responsibilities. There are new family rules that I had to learn. When I went through that, I also had a major identity crisis.

                                           00:54:38             Who am I? Who actually am I now? Because I had built this whole identity around this other idea of who my dad was. I literally, because I, now I had a new dad, I didn’t know who I was. So one of the first things that my dad did for me, once we found out he was my dad, is he sent me a manila envelope filled with family history stories and pictures of my new family and instantly connected me with the stories of our past. And I learned that I had pioneer heritage. I learned about some incredible people, Seymour Brunson, who’s in the Doctrine and Covenants, who I was related to. I reconstructed my identity around this new idea of who my dad was. We are called to do the same thing. And so I want us to just pause for a moment and think about when people come to the church, when we are bringing people, when we’re participating in the gathering of Israel, when we are proselyting, are we thinking about missionary work at this depth?

                                           00:55:49             Are we thinking about people gaining a new home, a new name, a new identity? Are we thinking about all of the things that they’re going to have to leave behind? You’re gonna have a new home, God, from, you’re gonna have a new dad. You’re gonna have someone that will care for you. You’re gonna have a congregation of people, a new family that’s gonna bring you in. What if when we’re doing the gathering, we’re actually bringing home a brother or sister? How different would it be when we think about the gathering if we thought about that process?

Hank Smith:                      00:56:23             Hmm. It’s beautiful. Isaiah frequently gives the image of missionaries or really anyone picking up the daughters and sons of the house of Israel and carrying them home upon their shoulders and upon their backs. It’s a beautiful image. I’m here to take you home.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            00:56:48             Yes, I love that. I think that a lot of times when we’re trying to share the gospel with people, we’re trying to, like, prove to them why we’re right, or we’re trying to show them all the things they’re missing out on. Let me explain why you’re getting this wrong. Like Abraham, there’s a lot of really great people. There’s a lot of good people out there, but they just need more. Abraham recognized he needed more. I had to get really clear about what it was that our church offered that was greater, that was more when I started sharing the gospel with my friends and colleagues, particularly at Baylor. I can’t wait to share this story with you guys because I’ve been waiting to tell you. Last time I was on the podcast, I told you I had a friend and scholar that was helping me prepare. He was not of our faith. He’s, he was Episcopalian, a theologian working at Baylor. I got him reading the Book of Mormon because of this podcast. He started reading the Book of Mormon, and it wasn’t long before he gained a testimony that it was the word of God.

                                           00:57:54             He just knew it was different. He told me there’s something different about this book. This is not written by Joseph Smith. He recognized the voice of God. He recognized the voice of the Good Shepherd in the Book of Mormon. It wasn’t until he came to BYU. We collaborate together. He came to BYU. He met several BYU professors. He just happened to land among some of the most incredible people. They started fellowshipping him. He said to me one day while he was out here on a work trip, he said, I just feel different here. I just feel something different. It feels like home. That is when things started to change for him when it went from, he did get a testimony of the Book of Mormon. That part was delicious to him, but then it was the nurturing that came from other people, the nurturing of the seed that came from other people, where he recognized that this was something that he was missing in his life, that he needed more.

                                           00:58:56             He needed greater righteousness, greater knowledge, greater peace, greater truth. It was because of that familial connection, I believe, that he was able to feel that. The best part is that he ended up getting baptized in October. That was a real treat. Just as a little bit of a backstory, you cannot be a Latter-Day Saint and work at Baylor, anywhere at Baylor. It’s just their policy. But especially in the seminary where he worked, because he’s a theologian. It’s really difficult to get a job anywhere at all if you’re LDS as a theologian, because their seminaries just won’t accept you. My friend got baptized with this knowledge, knowing that he was going to lose his job. He was a tenured professor. It caused family disturbances. He lost friends. He did all of this not knowing what was ahead, going into that uncertainty like Abraham, not having the way mapped out, but having the promises of the Lord that eternity as his covering in the wilderness, so to speak. That is what gave him hope and peace and then it wasn’t until after he was baptized that he ended up getting a job offer at BYU, which is incredible and remarkable. I really believe that he needed to demonstrate that faith in order for that blessing to come. It was an incredibly remarkable experience to be a part of.

Hank Smith:                      01:00:18             That is unbelievable.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            01:00:20             Yeah, it really is. Another good friend of ours at Baylor, he said that he similarly noticed something different about me. He started investigating the church and then he sent me a text one day and he said, oh, I just wanted to let you know that I’m taking the discussions from the missionaries and I’m getting baptized. I’m like, what? Just what? It just totally surprised me. And I had this image come in my mind of being in the vineyard. People who have had fruit trees are familiar with this. Sometimes the fruit is so ripe, you just have to brush past the branch and the fruit just falls off. I feel like that’s the way it was with my friend. He was just so ready. My other friend who had to lose his job, he was a little bit more work. That’s the thing you just don’t know. But when you’re sharing the gospel, when you are sharing how it has given you a home, how it’s given you a name, an identity, purpose, that’s the stuff that brings people to the truth. The doctrine matters. The doctrine serves the function of bringing us to Christ to know who our Savior is and to know who it is we’re coming home to.

Hank Smith:                      01:01:36             And I’m sure he’s listening right now, Jenae, so we just want to tell him. Wow. Yeah. The admiration we have for someone. I’m a tenured professor. So put that on the altar and say, I’ll give that up. All that time, all that effort. That is very similar to what we’re seeing here in Abraham one and two. Abraham, it’s time to leave. Get thee out of thy country, from thy kindred, from thy father’s house, to a land I will show thee. A land called BYU.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            01:02:14             It feels like the promised land for him. He’s so grateful. He felt called here and not everyone can work at BYU, but there is something wonderful about being with the saints. There’s something wonderful about being gathered home and know that you’ll be around people who wanna join in the work of building Zion.

Hank Smith:                      01:02:32             Isn’t that interesting too, that it started with the Book of Mormon? It speaks to modern Israel.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            01:02:38             It does. Elder Gerrit W. Gong said, The Book of Mormon is evidence we can hold in our hand of covenant belonging. The Book of Mormon is the promised instrument for the gathering of God’s children prophesied as a new covenant. The Book of Mormon speaks by ancient and modern covenant to you who are the children of Lehi, the children of the prophets. Your forefathers received a covenant promise that you, their descendants would recognize a voice as if from the dust in the Book of Mormon. The voice you feel as you read testifies you are children of the covenant and Jesus is your Good Shepherd.

Hank Smith:                      01:03:16             Wow. The book speaks out of the dust.

John Bytheway:               01:03:19             Yeah. I love the phrase that you started with, with talking about, I’ve heard this so many times, I bet you both have, that I felt like I was home. It felt like home. Abraham’s gonna bless all the families of the earth, and Moses sees all the children of men. Why not? We’re a family. It’s not, oh, I feel doctrinal clarity. Nope. It’s, I feel home. And the doctrinal clarity is there too, but I feel like I’m home with brothers and sisters and covenant belonging. What a great phrase.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            01:03:53             Yeah. It is funny because when my friend bore his testimony, even though he’s a theologian and things had to make sense to him, I mean, we talked for two years. I was literally giving him discussions for two years until he met, finally met with the missionaries, but by then he was ready. He was the fruit that just needed to be bumped and he fell off the tree by then. Things had to make sense to him. So it’s not that God asked us to leave our brains at the door when we walk into a church. It’s the congruence between the heart and the mind that matters. And if you don’t have the heart being in congruence with the mind and you don’t feel that belonging, then it’s going to be very difficult for you to want to stay and for that to feel like a home.

John Bytheway:               01:04:37             We have a former mission president in our ward and I remember hearing him say once that people in London where he served didn’t join the church because they were dazzled by the brilliance of the missionaries. They felt what you’re talking about. Here’s a theologian meeting with these missionaries, but I’m sure he felt something.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            01:05:01             Yeah, it was really interesting. I was able to observe one of them. He was still in Waco, so I was over Zoom. And the missionaries were talking to him, giving one of their discussions, and the whole time I’m like, they have no idea who they’re talking to.

Hank Smith:                      01:05:13             Yeah, who they’re talking to.

Dr. Jenae Nelson:            01:05:17             Then afterwards, I talked to him and he was like, that was great. And he was like, I just felt the Spirit. They’re so humble. They did have some fumbles in terms of, like, they just didn’t understand his education and his background, but that’s not the point. The point is that they brought the Spirit and that Spirit is what created the belonging, what helped him to recognize the covenant and that they were true messengers. It was really a humbling experience for me too. There’s a reason why we have these set apart missionaries. There’s also a reason why they need member missionaries because we prepare them and he required a lot of preparing before those missionaries could come in and before he would be ready for those next steps. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind. Missionaries are supposed to come at the end.

                                           01:06:09             They kind of wrap that up and they can’t spend years working with people. We need to be the ones that are reaching out and talking and fellowshipping and doing that work so that when they’re ready, the missionaries can come in, they can do their job, and that’s what they’re set apart to do. Faith requires a certain amount of uncertainty. Alma talks about this when he’s talking about the seed, that once you know something, it’s no longer faith, it’s knowledge. And I think what he means by knowledge is it’s really, it’s certainty. It turns out our brains don’t like uncertainty because one of the things that our brain loves doing is predicting things, and so much of what we do is trying to predict what’s coming next. When we don’t know for sure, when we don’t have that certainty, that’s when it requires faith. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the faith.

                                           01:07:03             This is exactly what Abraham is called to do. He’s called to go out into the unknown, into the uncertain, the unfamiliar like we’ve been talking about, but one of the ways that we can handle some of the anxiety that comes from uncertainty is by placing our thoughts on the broader context, by thinking about God and having eternity as our covering. I found this interesting story. It’s in that book the Blessings of Abraham that I mentioned earlier. There’s some Jewish rabbis that tell this story, and who knows if it’s true or not, because we don’t have this in the Bible, but they tell the story that Abraham invented this tool to help people to plant their seeds in a way that the seeds would be covered. The reason why he invented this tool was because birds kept coming and eating the seeds. Apparently, according to this tradition, this made Abraham quite famous.

                                           01:07:57             As a young lad, he became renowned for his tool. But I think this is really interesting as we think about some of the symbolisms in the story. You have this seed, which we know Abraham is associated and connected with posterity and seed, and this covering that he invented this tool that would be a covering from this, the seeds to prevent the birds from ravaging those seeds. Think about what we use to cover ourselves, and this was talked about in a previous podcast, but the word for atonement means one of the translations for it means to cover. Eternity as our covering, covenants as our covering, God’s love as our covering, God’s perspective as our covering, those are the things that can help us when times are uncertain. When we can’t predict what’s coming next, we can rely on our covenants and we can rely on our promises. Something interesting happens when there’s a gap between our promises and our reality.

                                           01:09:02             This is precisely what Abraham finds himself confronted with, this gap between what God has promised him. So he’s promised land and he’s experiencing famine and other things, and he’s promised children. And of course, we know that there’s a long period of time where he’s not able to have children. There’s a scholar that calls this particular conundrum a wilderness trial. It’s when the promises of God don’t match your current reality. I’m pretty sure that all of your listeners can think of a time where they had some kind of promise or expectation from the Lord that hasn’t come to pass yet. This would be a wilderness trial. This is what Father Abraham and Sarah had to struggle with when they had fertility problems. I think that God actually gives Abraham a way to deal with this. And so I wanna read from Genesis now, Genesis 17. This is often referred to as the context of the Abrahamic Covenant. The Lord’s initiating a higher level of relationship with the 99-year-old patriarch by saying to him, I am the Almighty God, walk before me and be thou perfect.

                                           01:10:19             I know we’ve had a lot of people talk about perfection and how, as modern readers, we imply or impose on the text that perfect means flawlessness. I think we’ve had enough talks about this that we’re trying to walk, we’re trying to turn away from that interpretation, that it’s not flawlessness, that it doesn’t mean. When we have some kind of promise that is not being fulfilled or doesn’t seem like it’s fulfilled in our life, whether it’s that patriarchal blessing, the perfect family, the husband that hasn’t come yet, or the children, whatever it is, there’s a line in many people’s patriarchal blessing that says that these blessings are predicated upon our faithfulness. We also hear that in the temple. We are tempted to think that it’s because we haven’t been flawless, we haven’t been perfect in the way that we think about it, but that we have disqualified ourselves for those blessings because we’ve made mistakes. There are people who do walk away from their covenants. There are people who do choose to not keep the commandments, but I think for most faithful Latter-Day Saints, even the type of Latter-Day Saint that finds themselves committing the same sin over and over again, that is not what the Lord is talking about.

                                           01:11:33             I don’t think that God ever wanted us to be flawless. My friend and scholar, the one that just got baptized, actually was telling me another way to understand the root for that word tamim. There’s multiple ways of thinking about it. Of course, President Nelson taught us about it meaning complete or whole. The shared root is also used when Christ says it is finished, complete as in finished. Another interesting way, there’s no, like, right, perfect way of understanding every word in the Bible, but maybe another interpretation that will help us understand this idea of becoming perfect, because God is commanding this, and he repeats that in the New Testament. What if we were to think about being perfect as finishing, as finishing the work you were sent here to do, as in don’t give up. Don’t stop.

                                           01:12:33             Be determined, be loyal. That, to me, feels like something that I can do. Anthony Sweat says, I can’t be flawless or perfect, but I can be loyal. Loyalty is also akin to this principle that you’re unfailingly devoted. You just keep coming back. You keep standing up when you fall over and over and over again. That’s the type of perfection that we’re called to, that we are continually working with Christ. I love this quote from President Jeffrey R. Holland. He says, and this is from one of his most famous talks. He has so many. He says, Don’t give up, boy. Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There’s help and happiness ahead. A lot of it. You keep your chin up. It will all be right in the end. Trust God and believe in good things to come. I testify that God lives that he is our eternal Father, that he loves each of us with the love divine. I testify that Jesus Christ is his Only Begotten Son in the flesh and having triumphed in this world is an heir of eternity, a joint heir with God, and now stands on the right hand of his Father. I testify that this is their true church and that they sustain us in our hour of need and always will, even if we cannot recognize that intervention. Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don’t come until heaven. But for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come. Of that, I personally attest. I love that thought. If you’re in a wilderness trial and you find yourself saying, God, you haven’t done what you said you would do in my life. God tells Abraham to be perfect. I think in some ways he’s telling him, Don’t give up. Don’t stop. Finish the work that you were sent here to do. We can be finishers.