We experienced a thunderstorm last night here in Pennsylvania, which had my children up seeking comfort.
When we woke up this morning, we found out that there were terribly destructive, twin tornadoes in Nebraska last night. My Mom emailed us and reminded us to run through tornado safety with our children in a special Tuesday FHE, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to also discuss Elder Andersen's talk "Spiritual Whirlwinds".
We started by watching some of the news coverage of these storms and tornadoes. We talked about how a tornado is a storm that can also be called a whirlwind. Sometimes, as we experienced during our storm last night, these storms can be really frightening.
Elder Andersen said that spiritual storms or whirlwinds will come into each one of our lives, and they will come early on. Elder Andersen said, "The whirlwinds of your youth, like the wind against a young tree, can increase your spiritual strength, preparing you for the years ahead."
How can we prepare now for the storms of life? Elder Andersen gives this advice: "We need the strength that comes from trusting the Lord's prophets."
Elder Andersen promises that if we do this, when ill winds blow, the powers of darkness will be dispersed from before us, we will see the whirlwinds for what they really are, our experiences will confirm to us again and again that Jesus is the Christ, and we will "rejoice that God has placed [us] here to be part of the final preparation for Christ's glorious return."
To further solidify the imagery of a whirlwind in their minds and to keep them busy as we talked about his talk, the children were encouraged to draw "whirlwinds" based on the ones we'd seen in the news footage on TV.
As a family the key words we are memorizing from Elder Andersen's talk is, "We need the strength that comes from trusting the Lord's prophets."
This phrase really stood out to me when I first heard it. I think the word trust is important.
We follow AND we trust these men of God to lead us safely through the storms of life.
I saw this talk online today and thought it was important enough to share. Elder Ballard's talk from the 1999 October General Conference: Beware of False Prophets and False Teachers. Give it a listen!
This is actually the third General Conference Lesson we've done so far, so to review I had Scarlett take this little quiz.
Here are the other lessons we've done based on the April 2014 General Conference:
"Following Up" - Elder Ballard
My thoughts lately as well. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your thoughts and the link to Elder Ballard's talk.
ReplyDeleteThat was great. I haven't been able to check on here in awhile! I admire you for getting so much gospel teaching done with your kids. I love your ideas. We are in Iowa and had tornado warnings. Creepy. So glad that we were ok. It is an interesting thing to talk about with your kids though, storms and life. I wrote about it too, here: http://bellesbazaar-heather.blogspot.com/2014/06/guard-against-storm.html
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