How do I fight today's battles?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: June 15-June 21
With the help of the Lord, I can overcome any challenge.
31: The king who trusted a shepherd (1 Samuel 10-17)
1 Samuel 17:47 And that all this assembly may know that the LORD saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the LORD’s, and he will give you into our hand. (ESV)
One person with faith in Christ can make a difference.
In this conversation with Father Jim, we talk about the difference between kindness and people-pleasing, about staying connected to religious institutions that can both nourish and wound us, and why he believes doubt is a natural part of a living, growing faith. In a moment when so many public voices feel reactive and divisive, Father Jim stands in conviction without losing compassion—offering a steady, grounded wisdom that feels deeply needed right now.
Listen to our conversation with Brian McLaren on his book, Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. This book is an empowering call to action and an invitation to do the kind of inner work that makes us brave in the face of real fear and uncertainty. Brian asks, “What if it doesn’t turn out? How will we face the future if things get worse instead of better?” He offers gentle encouragement to reach deeper into ourselves and find a stronger, more resilient type of hope: the kind that, as Václav Havel said, “is not the certainty that things will turn out as we wish, [but] is the conviction that some things are worth doing, no matter how they turn out.” We think this episode offers real wisdom and a fresh perspective on how we can navigate these challenging times with faith, hope, and love:
“Jonathan loved [David] as his own soul.”
32. Two boys who decided to be brothers (1 Samuel 18-20)
1 Samuel 18:3 Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul.
Forgiveness is the sure path to peace and healing.
We need compassion, but we also need to have a way of naming when we harm other people, and we need a way of restoring. And when no one is really responsible, no one is really forgivable.
There’s this sense that no one is really responsible, but also you can’t be redeemed. There’s a gracelessness about our public conversations. There’s a gracelessness, and a resistance to the idea that anyone can really change.
The radical claim of my faith is that anyone can change. No one is beyond the reach of grace. It’s my most controversial opinion. And our desire to externalize evil from ourselves into other groups and other people means that we resist that, because “evil is out there, not within me,” is a much more comfortable position psychologically. …
I think part of the reason I want to reclaim sin and its healthy liberatory form is it might help us re-find our way back to forgiveness for ourselves and for each other.
—Elizabeth Oldfield
The Lord can give me direction.
The term “epistemic confidence” refers to a person’s confidence in their own ability to know what is true and false—they recognize themselves as having the authority to know independent of others. Anderson contends that women often lack confidence in their own knowing, as well as their own ethical commitments and practices. She observes, “Confidence as a social phenomenon, but also as a practical disposition of trust in, or faith with oneself as another, remains vulnerable to personal contingencies,” such as gender and other factors that socially shape bodies.1 To have confidence is to be able to say “I can” in regard to knowing and acting in a way that is congruent with that knowledge; yet too often, gender and other factors of embodiment leave a person feeling that within their social context they cannot know and act in accordance with that knowledge.
Women are often at a remove from their own knowing and, as result, from acting with integrity in accordance with that knowing, precisely because they lack this epistemic confidence. They doubt even their own experiences, including spiritual ones, because they believe their knowledge and epistemic confidence must be mediated by others. As the post-Christian feminist theologian Mary Daly put it, “Women have been unable even to experience our own experiences.”2 In order to protect not only women but all people from such detrimental circumstances, we must allow God to mediate our relationship to the Church and also recognize that just as with Hannah, sometimes it is those in power that need to re-examine their assumptions and perceptions, rather than just the less powerful people whose views may come into collision with them. If I had better understood this more than half of my life ago, I believe I would have made better decisions, ones that were more in line with my understanding of my personal revelation, and been willing to stand my ground when the legitimacy of that revelation was called into question by others with male bodies and institutional power.
—Deidre Nicole Green, “Envying Hannah”
Camille Johnson taught in the April 2023 General Conference that the yoke is a covenant relationship. The yoke is a tool with four critical elements.
The first element of a yoke is proximity, meaning closeness and familiarity. The oxen are measured and the yoke is designed to keep them comfortably near one another. The distance between the two oxen is crucial so neither loses sight of or a sense of relationship to the other. A good yoke has the element of safety; when worn correctly, the yoke protects the young ox from pulling too hard or quickly and risking injury. The weight of any one task might be too much when pulled alone, so working within a yoke protects the oxen from harm. Another crucial factor of a yoke is its ability to provide direction. The oxen can guide each other within the yoke and sense each other’s movements. When it is time to change direction, the younger ox can feel the experienced ox turn through the yoke. The final critical element of a yoke is that it is enabling; the yoke allows the oxen to do more than they could do alone. They can do the master’s work with more strength, for a longer time, at a better pace when they work together.
Covenant relationships are likewise enacted to create proximity to the Savior, safety from the harms of sin, direction and purpose, and enabling power.
—Brooklyn Miller, “Burdens and Yokes”
When I encounter a crisis in my own life, my first inclination is to put my head down and get to work—I feel like I just need to do something. However, the Lord doesn’t often give me a laundry list of things to do or fix, but more often quietly whispers, “Be still.” “Be still and know that I am God” is its own kind of action (Ps. 46:10; D&C 101:16). And sometimes it is the most difficult thing the Lord asks of us. That was true in the 1833 crisis: The Lord assured Joseph and the Jackson County Saints that in a future “day when the Lord shall come, he shall reveal all things,” but for now, their charge was to be still (101:32).
Joseph’s waiting did not paralyze him. He did what he could for the Saints in Jackson County with the information and the direction he already had. And sometimes, as we wait and lean into the darkness, we find our own answer by doing the opposite—the principle of indirection.
—Janiece Johnson, “Divine Silence and Indirection”
Good friends can be a blessing from God.
My life is richer because of good friends. Friendship is a relationship that asks for renewal, but which also renews. And even if time, distance, and circumstances weaken bonds, I still believe there is something that lasts, something that leaves its residue on my soul, something pulling at a subatomic level to remind me of the times I have purely given and received love from members of God’s family whom I have, at various times of my life, called the blessed name of friend. And not only to remind me, but to find ways to bring heaven now, wanting all of us linked together.
—Megan Armknecht, “A Heaven of Friends”
I find it striking that Jesus referred to himself as our friend. It signifies friendship as a holy, divine love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” he said toward the end of his earthly ministry. “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:13–14, KJV). Christ’s invitation to friendship is an invitation to see ourselves as he sees us—as worthy of love. It is also, I think, an invitation for us to see Christ as he wants to be seen—as approachable and open.
Friendship binds our selves to others through attention, care, fun, and joy. This binding is not limited to linking ourselves and others; friendship connects us to places, communities, to our pasts, and to our futures.
- Megan Armknecht, “A Heaven of Friends”
Jesus Christ is my Eternal King.
Straight out of the wilderness, before anything else, Jesus preaches the good news of the kingdom of God — a kingdom that, contrasted with the kingdom of Augustus, blesses the meek, the merciful, the hungry, the poor, and the powerless.
—Jon Ogden, “Finding the Gospel by Seeing Differently”