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The Lord has asked us to walk through the darkness of mortality, but He also provides flashes of light to grow our faith and reveal the way.
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"It is exhilarating to be here with you in this room today. In some ways it seems like we have been together here most of my life. I came here first as a freshman young single adult (YSA). I served a mission with YSA missionaries, then served in the military with YSA-aged soldiers. Then I came back to BYU as a twenty-four-year-old sophomore after a six-year summer vacation of mission and military to serve again with young single adults. I have served in presidencies of seven elders quorums of mostly YSAs, in a YSA bishopric, as a high councilor over a YSA ward, then a bishop of that ward, and in a YSA stake presidency. And then my wife and I were off to be mission leaders with a bunch of YSA missionaries. I came home again and served in a YSA bishopric. I was then called as an Area Seventy, and, of course, my assignment was to serve all of the YSA stakes here in Utah Valley.
It seems I am suffering from a state of arrested development. It is interesting to me that through all of those years and assignments, you BYU students have never changed. I don’t know what you see when you look at me, but I look at you and see contemporaries. It has been a great life, growing up in rooms like this with astonishing people just like you.
To Walk by Faith
Let’s talk about faith. Faith and belief are complicated things. My most recent work with the Children and Youth program has made me especially attuned to youth whose gospel moorings sometimes fray. And it is not only young people but many among us who find ourselves sometimes unsure of the doctrines or of the narrative. We cannot judge each other for what we do and do not know. Belief and testimony come only through gifts of the Spirit, and the gifts of the Spirit are, after all, gifts. They are highly individualized and measuredly dispensed by a Heavenly Father who knows our hearts and needs and administers to them with divine precision.
Heavenly Father purposefully designed and ordered our world to require us to walk in faith. He pressed into place the pieces of this sophisticated jigsaw puzzle of mortality but held back a few of the pieces, which He keeps in His pocket to ensure that faith is required as we come up against the gaps in this puzzle’s spiritual landscape. He has ensured that we will not be able to game the system by thinking our way to heaven-to discover Him through provable math or science, which would obviate faith and foreclose the purposes of mortality.
I have a struggling attorney friend who recently said of the gospel, “It just doesn’t add up.” Well, his is a fair observation, isn’t it? The puzzle is incomplete, so it does not always add up. This should not surprise us. Even in mathematics there are numbers-such as pi-that are irrational but reliably constant.
I once spoke at the Law School across the street about these themes, and I am borrowing from that talk today with permission. There is a principle of law called the doctrine of chances that applies by analogy to our mortal walk of faith here in life. The doctrine of chances is an exception to a rule of evidence. Normally, evidence of a person’s prior crimes or acts cannot later be considered in deciding a person’s guilt. Just because someone committed one crime doesn’t necessarily mean he committed another. But the doctrine of chances essentially asks, “What are the chances that a highly unlikely combination of such facts is mere coincidence?”
The doctrine of chances arose in a 1915 trial when a husband, Mr. Smith, was accused of drowning his wife in a bath. Smith claimed she had fainted and drowned. Normally, under the rules of evidence, a prosecutor could not have introduced evidence of Smith’s prior acts. But the judge was asked essentially, “What are the chances that it was just an innocent coincidence that Smith’s two prior wives had also drowned in bathtubs?” Suddenly Smith’s case went down the drain. He was summarily hanged.
When multiple overlapping sets of data form a pattern that decidedly points toward a certain conclusion, and no other explanations seem to make sense, the truthfulness of the conclusion must be considered."