Posted by:
anon333
(
)
Date: September 08, 2014 07:49PM
Yesterday, a few stakes in our area had a special stake conference with Elder Holland. I thought some folks here might be interested in hearing what he had to say.
First of all, the spirit was super strong, stronger than I had ever felt before. In this instance, the spirit felt really hot, humid, and sweaty. Everyone around me could see how much I felt the spirit by the sweat stains in the arm pits of my shirt. Of course, that may have just been the result of cramming way too many people in the church.
A member of the 70 spoke first, asking members to give more fast offerings. What shocked me was when he talked about members in Africa who took the counsel to fast for two meals at face value. Since they only ate one meal a day, members ended up fasting for 3 days! He mentioned it as an example of their great faith, but if I was a church representative, I would have been ashamed to bring it up.
Elder Holland then spoke. Overall, his delivery was good. He was humorous, and at the right moments (from an entertainment perspective), emotional.
Elder Holland said that the biggest challenge the church had was dealing with phenomenal growth. He then talked about the many stakes and missions that have been created in the past few years. He also said that they expect the number of missionaries to level off at 100,000 in 4 years.
Delving a little bit into science, Elder Holland said that there were more temples now than at any other point in the earth's 6000 year history.
At that point, Elder Holland prefaced his additional remarks by saying that someone in the audience needed to hear it. I thought it was a great tactic. That way, any one to whom the message pertained would think it was a message to them directly from God, while those that were bored could be consoled with the thought that they just didn't happen to be the person to whom the remarks were directed. Elder Holland then emphasized the following 3 points.
1. You can't deny or argue with the evidence. I agreed with this, until I realized he was saying that the evidence supported the veracity of the church and book of Mormon. He said he wished he had 5 hours to talk about the evidence with us. I would have loved to have heard it, except that he probably would have had to talk very slowly to fill up 5 hours with any purported evidence. He also asked "how hard must a heart be or how calloused must a soul be not to care", referring to the book of Mormon. Yep, I appreciated him characterizing me in that manner to my family.
2. In this church, you get more than you bargain for. I can't argue with that, except, of course, he meant that you get more good things than you expect when joining the church.
3. You can't kill this. Again, he was referring to the church. Almost sounded like a challenge.
It was bad enough getting there an hour before the meeting, sitting in cramped quarters on hard metal seats in a stinking, hot cultural hall for a total of 3 hours, but the clencher was my wife's reaction last night. She was ticked off that I couldn't feel the spirit during the meeting, as though that was somehow my fault. Yeah, that made it worth it to support her by going to a meeting I didn't want to be at in the first place.