My name is Shaelyn Brown and I just came back from my
mission in Chicago and I’d like to start out by sharing why I’m here today; why I went on a mission, stayed on a mission
long enough to come home and give this talk. I never wanted to go on a mission.
I know lots of girls that have grown up planning to go on a mission and that
was not for me. But one day I was in institute, which was a rarity at the time,
to be in institute, but I was there and the teacher was talking about the
Lord’s timing but he was mostly applying it to marriage, I wasn’t paying any attention
to that because that wasn’t in my plans either, right? But as I was listening I
felt the impression that I was supposed to go on a mission. I laughed it off
because that was ridiculous, but the thought wouldn’t leave my mind, it kept
coming and because it was so against anything that I ever wanted I knew that it
was something I needed to look into a little bit. So, I studied. I studied it
out. I talked to my Heavenly Father about it. I read my scriptures and I
fasted. I went to see my bishop the following Sunday and I didn’t go with the
intention of opening my papers, but it happened. I was so scared. It was the
scariest time of my life, until now. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to do what
my Heavenly Father wanted me to do, but I didn’t want to go on a mission. So I
got ready and I went to the MTC and the first day in the MTC I told my companions,
“I don’t want to be here. I’m here because I am supposed to be, but I don’t
want to be.” I’m so glad I did. To this point in my life, it has been the best
experience I’ve ever had. I was told by President Wallis before I left on my
mission that there were people that I was supposed to find. People that I
promised before this life that I would find them and I would help them find
their way. And I can promise you that that happened, that I met people that
needed me, not because I am anything special, but just because I could connect
with them in a way that other people can’t. I know that’s why I was supposed to
go on a mission. That’s why I know I couldn’t just stay at school and let all
those other girls who always wanted to go on missions go on missions.
Today I want to talk about what I learned on my mission
about missionary service, not what it means to be a full time missionary, but
what it means to do missionary work in our everyday lives. I want to start out
by reading a verse in the Bible, in John. It is right after Jesus Christ died
and was resurrected and He came to the apostles and He found them fishing. They
had gone back to what they knew. He took the head apostle, Peter, and He talked
to him. “So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more
than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He
saith unto him, Feed my lambs. He saith to
him again the second time, Simon, son
of Jonas, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I
love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep.
He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter
was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he
said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee.
Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.” (John 21:15-17). We know in the
scriptures when we hear something repeated, it is important, and here it is
repeated three times, “feed my lambs, feed my sheep.” We see that again in the
Doctrine and Covenants, it’s in 112: 14. It says “Now, I say unto you, and what
I say unto you, I say unto all the Twelve: Arise and gird up your loins, take up
your cross, follow me, and feed my sheep.” So that was a commandment to the
apostles, but it is also a charge given to every one of us, to feed Christ’s
sheep. But first we have to know who are the sheep? Who are the sheep we are
supposed to feed? The answer is everyone, obviously. We are all children of
God. We are all part of his flock, your family members, your friends, your
neighbors, and yourself. You are a lamb of God. He cares about you and He loves
you. So that is who the sheep are, but how do we find them? I had that question
a lot in Chicago. Chicago is the third largest metropolitan area in the United
States with 9.8 million people, 9.8 million sheep in the metropolitan area.
Just because they are sheep doesn’t mean they are ready to be found or to be
fed or to be saved. So how do we know? How do we know if the people that we are
surrounded with are ready, if they need us, if we need to feed them? The answer
is often times we don’t. We just need to try, but the Lord will guide us.
Heavenly Father knows every single one of His lambs, He knows every single one
of His sheep. The flock is made up of individuals and He wants every single one of His sheep to return
to Him.
There were a lot of experiences I had on my mission where I
really saw that God wanted His sheep to be found. That He knew them and what
they needed and where they were. One such experience didn’t happen to me, it
happened to one of my companions. We were learning a lot about prayer at that
time and how prayer is really something we really don’t understand, even as
missionaries and members of the church. That prayer is a literal conversation
with our Father in Heaven. He will answer us. And it can apply to anything. And
so my companion applied it to missionary work, where we needed to go to find
the people that needed us. She got down on her knees and she asked God where to
go, when do we need to go, is there someone we need to find? She was given an
answer. She was given a time. She was given a place. She was given a day. She
was given the idea that we needed to find a mother. So that next day we went to
that apartment complex that she thought of, at the time she was told and we
found a mother, a young woman who was about to give birth in a couple of weeks.
She needed us at that time. She needed to be fed, she needed to be saved. Our
Heavenly Father knew that. He knows it for everyone and he will tell us. You
don’t need to be a missionary to get these answers of who you need to help, of
who you need to save.
I have a lot of stories about people that are ready. That is
a huge testimony I gained on my mission that there are people that are ready
for the gospel, that are ready to be fed. I saw it a lot in the women that I
found, that I taught and I saw accept the gospel. There was one woman who was
in her fifties, her name is Imelda. She was a Jehovah’s Witness which is a
difficult religion to teach. She was a referral, we knocked on her door and
that day she set a day to be baptized. She didn’t miss a single day of church
from the moment that we knocked on her door. She is the only member of the
church in her family now. She was baptized six weeks after we knocked on her
door. All she wants is to go to the temple. All she wants is for her family to
join the church. She has terrible arthritis in her legs and her arms and she
can hardly walk. She had to miss a couple of weeks of church because of it and
it killed her. She got super depressed. She had only been a member for a month.
She knew that coming to church and taking the sacrament was something vitally
important to her salvation.
There is another woman who I taught named Liz who has a son
with autism and a mother in law with severe Alzheimer’s disease. She was having
a difficult time. She is an illegal immigrant. She doesn’t speak any English.
Which were some pretty big trials in her life. She didn’t know what to do so
she went to her husband and said “We need a church, we need God.” He said “I
think I was baptized Mormon.” And so she looked up the church on line. She
looked up Mormon.org and showed up to church the next week. She sat by me in
church and she said, “How do I get baptized?” I said “I can help you out with
that, don’t you worry.” She was baptized a week and a half later. She is the
most poignant example I can think of of someone that has seen the gospel truly
bless her family, bless her life. Her trials haven’t gone away. She still has a
son with severe autism, she still has a mother in law with severe Alzheimer’s,
she still can’t speak English, she is still trying to find a job without any
legal status, but it is easier. She can feel her Heavenly Father’s love and she
can feel the Savior’s atoning sacrifice in her life.
There is a young girl named Nathaly who came to us and said
“I’ve been going to church for a while with my aunt and I want to be baptized
now that I’m 18.” She was, and all of
her family disowned her, except her aunt. She is 18 years old. She is still in
high school. She is still working on her papers. Her mother threatened to cut
her off. She didn’t know what she is going to do. She didn’t know if she is
going to be able to graduate from high school. But she was ready for the gospel
and she knew she needed it. Her Heavenly Father knew she needed it. He told us
to go to her house on that day that she needed it. There are countless stories
like that. The sheep are all around us. They are our family members. They are
our friends. They are members of our church and they are non-members of our
church. They are ourselves. We are the sheep. We need to be fed. So how do we
feed the sheep? How do we take care of these people who need our help? We do it
exactly as our Savior did it. The Savior is a perfect example. Elder Ulysses Soares said in this October 2005
general conference, “Jesus showed patience and love to all those who came to
Him seeking relief from physical, emotional or spiritual illnesses, who felt
discouraged or down trodden. To follow the Savior’s example each one of us must
look around and reach out to the sheep who are facing the same circumstances,
and lift them up and encourage them to continue on their journey toward eternal
life. This need is a great as or perhaps even greater than when the Savior
walked on this earth. As shepherds, who we all are, we must understand that we
should nurture each one of our sheep and bring them to Christ which is the
purpose of all we do in this church. Any activity, meeting, or program should
focus on the same objective. As we stay in tune with the needs of the people we
can strengthen them and help them overcome their challenges so they will remain
steadfast in the way that will lead them back to our Heavenly Father’s presence
and help them endure to the end. The gospel of Jesus Christ is about people not
programs. Sometimes in the haste of fulfilling or church responsibilities we
spend too much time concentrating on programs instead of focusing on people,
and end up taking their real needs for granted. When things like that happen,
we lose the perspective of our callings, neglect people, and prevent them from
reaching their divine potential to gain eternal life.” That is what we are
supposed to do; we are supposed to love people. Our callings in the church are
important to keep the church going forward, but the whole purpose of the gospel
is to save sheep. We can’t do that if people feel like they are a
responsibility, if they feel like they are just a job. We need to truly love
them. Elder Soares continues, “People are most receptive to our influence when
they feel that we truly love them, and not only because we have a calling to
fulfill. As we express true love for people, they will be able to feel the
influence of the Spirit and may feel motivated to follow our teachings. It is not always easy to love people for what they
are.” That was also true for me. So on my mission, surprisingly, I did not love
every single person I met immediately, but I tried. There one woman in
particular that we were teaching and that I had a really hard time with
honestly. I didn’t want to go her house, I felt irritated whenever we were
there and I felt she was taking advantage of us, but she needed us. I turned to
the scriptures and to my Heavenly Father for help and in Moroni 7:48 it says, “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father
with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he
hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye
may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for
we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified
even as he is pure. Amen.” This woman didn’t change. She stayed the same. But I
was able to see her in a different light. I was able to see as our Heavenly Father
sees her, as His daughter, as someone precious. I came to love her. It was hard,
but I really love her. That’s what we need to do. We need to pray, we need to
pray to love these people that surround us so that we can help them. Many of
the sheep and lambs in our lives, especially in the lives of all of you, are our
children. I know that’s something that I am concerned about, as I face the next
stage in my life, which is probably to have a family. How do we raise or
children in the gospel? We can teach them, we can take them to church every week,
but it’s not a guarantee and that’s scary. But there is another scripture that
is in 2 Nephi 25:26 that tells us the way that we can teach our children, that
we can do our best. It says, “We talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach
of Christ, we prophecy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies,
that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of
their sins.”
Example is the best way to teach and the best way to lead.
Our Savior will help us if we are doing everything we need to, he will make up
the difference. Something else I have learned, though, is that it is not after
everything we can do He will fill in the gap, He is there every step of the way
to help us do what we need to do, to help us return to Him, to help us help
others. Often times in my mission I felt like I needed more help than those
that I was helping. How was I to go out and teach the gospel when I myself was
struggling, when I myself didn’t know how to continue. There are many answers.
We need to follow the fundamentals of the gospel. There is a scripture in Alma
which says, “Behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great
things brought to pass….by small means the Lord doth confound the
wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls. ” (Alma 37:6-7) By small things we will be saved, but we need
to do all of the small things. It’s like a spiritual house. We need to have
prayer. We need to have scripture study and going to church. These make up our
walls, our ceilings and floors, our foundation. But without one of those things
we are not protected from the evil outside, from the spiritual winds that bring
snow and rain. We need to be sure we are doing those simple things and then we
will be protected. But more than anything what I learned on my mission is that
when I needed help, to help others, helped me more than anything. That I would
go to people’s homes with a lesson prepared and they would need something else,
we would give that lesson and that lesson was what I needed. The scriptures
that we shared were what I needed. I know that helping others helps us more
than we can even imagine. I know that feeding Christ’s sheep is a commandment.
It was a commandment that I knew I needed to follow, especially on my mission.
But there was always the question of how do I find these people amongst 9.8
million? How do I feed them? How do I save them? There is also the question I
have had the last couple of months, what do I do after my mission? How do I
continue being the kind of person I want to be and what’s next? General
conference was coming up and I went to general conference with questions that I
wanted answers to. The questions I had were where should I live? What should I
study? Who am I going marry? Where am I going to meet him? What’s his name? I
didn’t get those answers. But I did get a very powerful answer from Elder
Holland’s talk which was actually about feeding the sheep, saving the lambs. He
gave his own “non-scriptural elaboration” is what he calls it, to the story of John 21
where the Savior came to Peter and asked him to feed His sheep. Elder Holland
said, “After the third time Peter said “Lord though knowest that I love thee”.
Then the Savior may have said “Then Peter, why are you here? Why are we back on
this same shore, by these same nets, having this same conversation? Wasn’t it
obvious then and isn’t it obvious now that if I want fish, I can get fish? What
I need, Peter, are disciples—and I need them forever. I need someone to feed my
sheep and save my lambs. I need someone to preach my gospel and defend my
faith. I need someone who loves me, truly, truly loves me, and loves what our
Father in Heaven has commissioned me to do. Ours is not a feeble message. It is
not a fleeting task. It is not hapless; it is not hopeless; it is not to be
consigned to the ash heap of history. It is the work of The Almighty God, and
it is to change the world. So, Peter, for the second and presumably the last
time, I am asking you to leave all this and to go teach and testify, labor and
serve loyally until the day in which they will do to you exactly what they did
to me.”
My answer to my questions was that it didn’t matter what I
did as long as I continued. As long as I loved God and did what He asked me to
do which was to be His disciple, to feed His sheep and save His lambs. Elder
Holland continues by saying, “My beloved
brothers and sisters, I am not certain just what our experience will be on
Judgment Day, but I will be very surprised if at some point in that
conversation, God does not ask us exactly what Christ asked Peter: “Did you
love me?” I think He will want to know if in our very mortal, very inadequate,
and sometimes childish grasp of things, did we at least understand one
commandment, the first and greatest commandment of them all—“Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
strength, and with all thy mind.” And if at such a moment we can stammer out,
“Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee,” then He may remind us that the
crowning characteristic of love is always loyalty.
“If ye love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus said. So we
have neighbors to bless, children to protect, the poor to lift up, and the
truth to defend. We have wrongs to make right, truths to share, and good to do.
In short, we have a life of devoted discipleship to give in demonstrating our
love of the Lord. We can’t quit and we can’t go back. After an encounter with
the living Son of the living God, nothing is ever again to be as it was before.
The Crucifixion, Atonement, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ mark the beginning
of a Christian life, not the end of it. It was this truth, this reality, that
allowed a handful of Galilean fishermen-turned-again-Apostles without “a single
synagogue or sword” to leave those nets a second time and go on to shape the
history of the world in which we now live.”
Elder Holland says “I testify from the bottom of my heart,
with the intensity of my soul, to all who can hear my voice that those
apostolic keys have been restored to the earth, and they are found in The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To those who have not yet joined
with us in this great final cause of Christ, we say, “Please come.” To those
who were once with us but have retreated, preferring to pick and choose a few cultural
hors d’oeuvres from the smorgasbord of the Restoration and leave the rest of
the feast, I say that I fear you face a lot of long nights and empty nets. The
call is to come back, to stay true, to love God, and to lend a hand. I include
in that call to fixed faithfulness every returned missionary who ever stood in
a baptismal font and with arm to the square said, “Having been commissioned of
Jesus Christ.” That commission was to have changed your convert
forever, but it was surely supposed to have changed you forever as well. To the
youth of the Church rising up to missions and temples and marriage, we say:
“Love God and remain clean from the blood and sins of this generation. You have
a monumental work to do, underscored by that marvelous announcement President
Thomas S. Monson made yesterday morning. Your Father in Heaven expects your
loyalty and your love at every stage of your life.” (The First Great
Commandment, Jeffery R Holland, General Conference Oct 2012)
I want to add my testimony to that of Elder Holland’s that I
know that this work is true. I know that this is what we have been called to do
is to be disciples. I have had a life changing experience and I cannot go back
to fishing. I have been called to love my Savior and to love Him forever.
Yo quiero compartir mi testimonio en Español para ustedes.
Yo sé que este es la iglesia de Jesucristo. Sé que es la misma iglesia que Él estableció
cuando Él estaba en la tierra. Que tenemos el sacerdocio que necesitamos por las
ordenanzas sagradas que nos pueden llevar a la exaltación. Yo sé que El Libro
de Mormón es escritura sagrada. Que fue traducido por un profeta, José Smith.
Que él es el profeta de la restauración. Y que nuestro Salvador, nuestro Hermano,
Jesucristo nos ama. Que está esperandonos con sus brazos abiertos. El quiere
que lleguemos todos. Que siguen en esta obra. Estoy muy agradecida por la
oportunidad que tuve de server al Señor. Digo estas cosas en el nombre de Jesucristo,
amén.
Airport fotos:
Homecoming at airport!
Sisters
Father and daughter
Together again!
Happy!!
More fotos:
Hermanas forever!!
zzzzzz…..…….
reunion
