Farewell Talk...

Laying the Foundation of a Great Work:

Hello Everyone, for those of you that don’t know me, my name is Kolbe Mason and I have been called to serve in the Bolivia, Cochabamba mission. As I have been getting prepared for my mission I have had the wonderful opportunity to go to the temple multiple times and have had some wonderful experiences in there. As I started to prepare this talk I was very anxious because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to talk about. I was in the celestial room praying about what I should share with you today and a thought came to my head to share the story of my personal conversion and how I came to the point I am now. When I was younger I was really solid in the church. I really liked going to church and being a part of everything that was going on. My family tried our hardest to read our scriptures together and to say family prayers. My parents taught me the things that they knew and believed and set good examples to me of how a Latter Day Saint should act and live. Freshman year came and I started seminary and I absolutely loved it. My teacher was really awesome and I was on fire in the class. However, some time that year everything seemed to change for me. I started to worry more about being “cool” and popular than staying true to what I believed. The time came when I needed to stop relying on the testimonies of others and start to build a testimony of my own. Growing up in the church I never had to really think about if these things that I had been taught my whole life were true because everyone around me seemed to believe them and that was enough for me. As I started to progress through on to my sophomore year, seminary and church started to become a chore for me and I started to drift away from them.  I would still go but it was no longer for me but rather for other people. My standards began to slip as I chased popularity. Many of the people I associated with were doing the same things so it was easy for me to justify. As I continued to do things that I shouldn’t have been doing I continued to drift away from the church. Junior year came and I was arguably in the darkest stage of my life. I had further drifted away from the church and I had completely stopped doing the things that are so basic in our faith. I no longer said any personal prayers or even considered opening up my scriptures to read. I was continually angry with many of the things that were happening around me and I was driving the spirit away from me which only made those feelings worse. I was really struggling with everything that was going on but I hid it from everyone around me. I became very bitter about a lot of things, including the church. I knew what I was doing was wrong but I still cared more about being popular than owning up to that fact. I would still go to church but it became a social thing for me. I would go to church and to seminary to be with my friends and to make my parents happy but I was having a hard time feeling anything because I was blocking myself off from doing so. I had multiple times where the spirit was there and that I had the opportunity to make a change but I never opened myself up to it. I would feel the spirit and have a moment where it looked like I would pull out of the rut I was in but I would eventually slip back into old habits. Then my parents came to me and told me that my dad had taken a job out here and that we were going to move at the end of my junior year and I was really angry with this for some time. I had no clue at that time that the move to springville would completely change my life. When we made it to springville I felt very alone. I didn’t have many friends and I was really missing a lot of my friends from back home. My brother and his friends were enrolled in EFY. The morning of EFY my mom woke me up and asked if I wanted to go to efy with them and I told her no. However, as soon as she walked away I had the feeling that I really wanted to go and it was weird to me. So I jumped out of bed and yelled Mom I am coming. We drove up to UVU where the efy was being held and asked if I could still sign up. The lady told us that she would have to talk to some people and make sure it was okay and a little while later she came back and told us that I would be able to attend. At EFY I was surrounded by some of the strongest people that I had ever met. My company was amazing and for the first time in a long time something was stirring inside me. For the first time in a long time I was starting to recognize the spirit again. Our session director, Brother Toma, got up one day and gave a talk that really struck me to the core. He started talking about the plan of salvation and how we all need it in our lives and that no matter how far lost we are or no matter how much wrong we've done that we can be saved and brought back through the atonement of Jesus Christ. I was nearly in tears when he finished and I had felt like he was speaking directly to me and I knew in that moment, that that is why the Lord wanted me to be at that EFY session. I found brother Toma after that talk and I opened up to him about some of the struggles I had been having and I told him about my decision to come and how I knew that it was to meet him and let him influence my life for good. We talked for an extended time in which he told me that from day one that he had been extra conscious of me and that he knew that I was here for a reason. Immediately following EFY I started to take care of the things from my past and I was starting to feel a lot better about myself and my situation. I opened up to the Lord and really turned to him for help and that is when I started to feel at home in Springville. I once again started to enjoy going to church and seminary but I still struggled with doing the basic things like saying prayers and reading my scriptures because for a long time it hadn’t been a habit of mine. The time came when I needed to make a decision if I was going to serve a mission or if I was going to go to college. I knew that I would have to wait some time to serve a mission and so I decided that a mission wasn’t for me and that I was going to go to college. I went and told my parents my decision that I was going to go to college for a year and then proceed to serve a mission. The reality of it though was that I had no plans to serve a mission. I didn’t feel like I knew enough about the gospel or that I had a strong enough testimony to go. About three months after I had made the decision to go to college we had a missionary month for mutual. We were all sitting in the relief society room watching videos about missionary service when the spirit struck me hard with the thought, “You need to serve a mission before going to college”. I was so confused why I was feeling this because it wasn’t my desire to serve. I went home and couldn’t stop thinking about it so I went to my parents and told them what I was feeling. We talked about it for a while and I went back to my room but I couldn’t sleep because of the thought. I had read through my patriarchal blessing which talks about me serving a mission and I decided that I needed to ask God if this was truly what I needed to do. I knelt down and prayed and in my prayer I told God that I didn’t feel like I was prepared for a mission and that I didn’t think I could do it but if it was his will for me then I would serve. The most unmistakable feeling that I knew from the beginning what I needed to do came over me. I knew in that moment that I needed to serve a mission.

Alright I’m going to now try to tie this in with the topic that I wish to share with you today. The topic I will be speaking on is laying the foundation of a great work. Elder Steven R. Bangerter of the seventy gave a talk just this last conference where he talks about this subject. He states in his talk: “As parents in Zion, we have a sacred duty to awaken within our children passion and commitment to the joy, light, and truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. While raising our children, we establish traditions within our home and we build patterns of communication and behavior within our family relationships. In doing so, the traditions we establish should ingrain strong, unwavering characteristics of goodness in our children that will infuse them with strength to confront the challenges of life.” He shares revelation given to Joseph Smith in D&C: 64:33 which reads, “Wherefore, be not weary in well-doing, for ye are laying the foundation of a great work. And out of small things proceedeth that which is great” He poses the question, “What are the small and simple things that, when established, will perform a great work in the lives of our children?” I am sure many of you have good traditions in your families that help draw your family closer to christ. My parents have always tried to make family scripture study and prayer a central part of our day. Now I am not going to stand up here and pretend like we are perfect in doing so because the reality is that we are often so busy that we forget to do these things. However, when I was a young child we made a habit of doing so every day and did pretty well with it.

In the talk, Parents teach your children, Paul H Dunn shares the thought, The second way parents can teach would be through the power of parental example. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “What you do thunders so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” Will you remember this little couplet: Parents can tell but never teach, until they practice what they preach. Though my family hasn’t always been perfect in our efforts to read and pray together my parents have always been amazing examples to me of the way I should live my life. My parents helped lay the foundation that would eventually lead to my great work of serving a mission. This tuesday Sean Holloway invited me to come with him to his grandpa’s man cave and to have a quiet place where we could study the scriptures together. The funny thing is that all day before he had asked me I had the impression that I should go through and really dive into the book of Mormon before I leave on my mission. I had never read through the entire book of mormon by myself with pure intent that I could think of and I really desired to have a knowledge of the goodness of the book that my parents had taught to me to be a true book. A good friend of mine Griffan Slavens in his farewell talk 2 weeks ago shared with the congregation his story of how he came to know for himself that it was true. He said in his talk, “How can you know that this book is true if you haven’t read it for yourself?” That really struck me hard and when Sean asked me if I wanted to go with him, I knew that it was ultimately the Lord telling me that I needed to do as Griffan said and read the book for myself so that I could come to know the truthfulness of it. I pledged myself to sean that I would read the entire book of mormon before I left on my mission 14 days later. Now I promise that I am not just going off on a tangent and that this relates to my talk. As I have been reading through I have seen multiple examples about how the parents of the great prophets of the Book of Mormon have shaped their lives and have helped build a sure foundation. Potentially the most read verse in the Book of Mormon, for me at least, is one such example of this. The first verse of the book of Mormon states, “I Nephi having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father” One of my favorite prophets was taught by a father that loved the Lord and that helped lay a sure foundation for his family. In the book of Enos we have another example. Enos 1 reads “Behold it came to pass that I enos knowing my father that he was a just man for he taught me in his language and also in the nurture and admonition of the lord and blessed be the name of my God for it” Enos was very grateful towards his father for showing him the ways of righteousness and for teaching him the ways of God. As I continued to read from the Book I found that I couldn’t put it down. In just 24 hours I had read from the beginning of the book to Mosiah. I was so involved in the stories and the teachings that were in the Book. In Helaman 5 as Helaman is talking to his sons he shares this thought with them in verse 12, “And now, my sons, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer who is Christ, the son of god, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.” Helaman teaches us that we cannot rely on others alone and that we must each build our foundation on Christ that we cannot fall. In Alma 56 we read about the 2000 strippling warriors, verses 47 and 48 read, Now they never had fought, yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their lives; yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it.” This is one of the few times in the book of mormon that we hear about the mothers teaching the children but it is also one of my favorite stories in the whole book. We often don’t hear much about the mothers but I know that they were all influential in the lives of those in the book of mormon. My sweet mother has been the greatest example of what Christ-like love truly is. She cares so much for everyone that she comes in contact with and she is so selfless. Her actions have taught me more than she could ever imagine. All of the prophets which I talked about were taught by the parents and their parents helped lay the foundation for them. But it was up to those prophets to build their foundation and to build upon that foundation. Each of them had to discover for themselves if these things that their parents had taught them were indeed true and rely on their faith. The realization that these things are true is a beautiful thing and something that will bring happiness into the lives of those that truly seek them. I invite each of you, that if you haven’t had to opportunity to read and to know if this is true, to read and pray to know if the Book of Mormon is really the word of God. Without the Book of Mormon, none of this can be true. The book of mormon truly is the word of god and teaches of Christ and I can say with a surety that I know that the book is true and the happiness that the Gospel brings me is immeasurable. I am so excited that I have the opportunity to go to Bolivia and serve the people there and help bring to them the happiness and joy that I have in my life.