It felt like Sunday Morning’s General Conference talks were variations on the same theme: following the living prophets and apostles. You can read President Eyring, Elder Nelson, and Sister McConkie’s talks here.

They resonated with me. I always feel like when there’s that much repetition in Conference, the message must be vital. And also, three different posts have rumbled around in my heart and my drafts queue, all versions of the same idea: following the prophet. I’ve been trying to write this post for months now. Here are bits from each of my variations.

Take 1: Cheating by using Orson Scott Card’s Words Instead of My Own

A while ago the Ensign published a poem by Orson Scott Card that has stayed with me for years. It’s called “Lonely Men:”

Glory be to God, and for the lives
of lonely men praise Him: for out
of silence come the songs of prophets,
and out of solitude the word of God derives.

From the shadow of his cowl, Isaiah spoke,
flinging strong words like knives of light
into the heart of Israel; though clear and right,
Jeremiah chafed beneath a yoke;

No-man-friended, Moses bore the weight
of a law to last a thousand lowering years;
like a leaf from the wind hiding, Moroni, hate
pursuing, trod a continent alone. Fears

Saul the people? Paul does not. Berate them,
stripe them, crucify them, jeers ringing:
they only die, God’s praises singing.

***
The draft ends there.

I wanted to talk about watching the prophets and apostles speak “strong words like knives of light,” as I see them age before me, on the screen every six months, telling me hard truths. Those telling phrases “berate them . . . stripe them, jeers ringing: / they only die, God’s praises singing” seem so current today, with online jeering and verbal striping.

I didn’t finish the draft. I don’t know how to write the concerns in my heart without coming across as preachy. Does that count, as Elder Robbins talked about, as turning my face away from the prophet?
***
Take 2: The Humblebragging Mommy

Over turkey and cheddar sandwich triangles, my preschooler demands I get out his favorite lunch entertainment: “I want the latter-day prophets!” he says.

I attempt to turn to a different page in the notebook. Why not Moses, or Jesus getting baptized? What about Moroni burying the plates?

He’ll let me turn to those pages later, but we always start in the same spot, with me singing, “Latter-day prophets are number one, Joseph Smith, then Brigham Young…”

Lest you think I’m some kind of religious super mom, let me tell you that my lunch time scripture stuff was born of desperation with my oldest. Because it was boring to just sit there and eat lunch, and I’m not that good at talking to my semiverbal kids. I run out of things to say. So I pulled out those Gospel Art pictures. I need my children to sit still and eat, and I need something to talk about. So here we are again. “John Taylor came third, we know, then WIlford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow…”

We’ve been through the Book of Mormon pictures, the Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants. But right now, my son wants me to sing to him about the prophets.

***
And this draft got too rambly. What I really want to say is not so much about singing “Latter-day Prophets” with my son over lunch. But I still love hearing his three-year-old voice singing “David Ohhhhh McKay was followed by Joseph Fielding Smith!” I like that he is writing the names of the latter-day prophets on his heart, that they are becoming familiar to him. I think this is important.

***
Take 3: In Which I Go Ahead and Preach. Because: those verses in 3 Nephi 9. Seriously.

I’ve been reading and rereading 3 Nephi 9.

3 Nephi 11 gets the most air time, when the Savior visits the new world. As missionaries we read it often with our investigators, that sacred experience of two thousand five hundred people lining up to be personal witnesses of Christ’s resurrection. It is the heart of the Book of Mormon.

But 3 Nephi 9 haunts me. It’s this phrase, over and over, that stays in my mind: “to hide their wickedness and abominations from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints should not come up any more unto me against them.”

Six times 3 Nephi 9 repeats this. Those who received the gift of Christ’s presence were prepared for it because they followed the living prophets.

The sublime joy of 3 Nephi 11 comes after the tragedy of 3 Nephi 9, and the tragedy of 3 Nephi 9 is that many, so very many, chose not to follow the prophets.

I remember years ago when I first started reading bloggernacle posts online, how shocked I was by the criticisms I read of different leaders, especially apostles. I would read a line dismissing a certain apostle’s talk and wonder if that counted as evil-speaking. And then the more witty, learned, or sometimes indignant responses I read, the more I became used to them. As though it were normal, okay, right, to pick apart the talk of a man I have sustained as a prophet, seer, and revelator. Not to understand the talk better, but to justify my own failure to live it. Or maybe tell a story: this commandment, this counsel, is too hard, therefore it should not have been given.

It’s a slow transformation, that edging away from trusting my leaders, hearing their words and sometimes missteps with charity, to picking apart the things they say and making them offenders for a word. And I have needed, for the sake of my own faith, to pull back from reading posts that are critical of the Brethren, no matter how much smarter than me their authors are.

Because I keep returning to 3 Nephi 9. I don’t know all the reasons the people picked up stones and threw them at the prophets. Surely they had a story, a reason why prophetic counsel did not work for them in their lives, or had hurt someone they knew. Maybe one of the prophets had a short temper or did something ridiculous. Maybe the Book of Mormon prophets preached foolish traditions, or painful innovations. In the end, with four hundred years’ hindsight, Mormon writes only that they cast the prophets out. The reasons for casting them out, which must have seemed so important at the time, don’t matter as much as the results.

***
Three half-finished posts and no ending. Because I do struggle with some things the prophets teach, and I feel the disconnect between what I write and how I live. I am prone to wander.

But I cannot allow that disconnect to betray what the Spirit has taught me: God calls prophets to teach us His word. I sustain fifteen men as prophets, seers, and revelators. Thomas S. Monson is the Prophet today.

And as I follow the living prophet, I prepare to meet God.