I like to look for themes in General Conference. This one I noticed a lot of discussion of youth doing missionary work and rescue. My wife noticed a temple-going theme.
I also heard two speakers, back to back, talk about the Great and Spacious Building.
Lehi had a revealed dream 3000 years ago that is highly relevant today. The Great and Spacious Building is one of those revealed insights. Modern thinkers call it the Polygon, the Modern Structure, the Cathedral, That Hideous Strength, the New Class, the Chattering Class, or simply the bipartisan ruling class or elite. But no one has understood it or explained it as well and as simply as Lehi did, with his striking image of a great building, full of the finely clothed laughing and pointing, whose foundations are in the air.
The Great and Spacious Building is a theme of this blog also:
Mean Girls and the Great and Spacious Building
Sister Oscarson said that the GSB is the greatest challenge we face and pointed to this verse:
“And after they had tasted of the fruit they were ashamed, because of those that were scoffing at them; and they fell away into forbidden paths and were lost.”
The emphasis is hers.
Shame is different from guilt. Shame is the feeling that we have done something to lower our status. It is higher-proof embarrassment.
No one would feel ashamed by the fingerpointers in the GSB who did not still accept the GSB as a valid sphere of status. In other words, those who feel ashamed added the gospel to their status system and their social hierarchy, but never rejected the world’s.
How long halt ye between two status systems?
No man can serve two different status systems—for he will either hate the one and cleave to the other, or cleave to the one, and hate the other.
You are neither hot nor cold, so I will spew you out.
Or, as President Monson said a few conferences back, it is easier to be 100% Mormon than 90% Mormon.
Whenever you try to strike a balance with the world—being Mormon but not too much Mormon—you are in danger of being peer pressured out of your salvation. Satan’s lie is that peer pressure only applies to teenagers, and only comes from one’s immediate friends. One way of reading the parable of the Good Samaritan is that it asks the question, “who then is your peer?” and answers that it is a choice.
Brother Wardell points out that those who were not ashamed by the mockers were those who “heeded them not” and “continued to partake.” Not only did they not give mental place to the false hierarchy of the fashions of the world—attention is always dangerous, even without acceptance—they filled themselves with the true values of the gospel. Nature abhors a vacuum.
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