Friday, September 10, 2010

The Voice of the Spirit

I watched this video on lds.org this week.  It is one of the most touching and powerful videos I've ever seen or listened to.



After watching it several times, I tried finding the entire talk on the General Conference page, but I didn't find it there. I expanded my search using Google and eventually found it at BYU's speeches site.  The audio of the video was taken from a talk President Faust gave at BYU on September 5, 1993.

You can find the text of that entire talk here: The Voice of the Spirit


Additionally, you can listen to the entire talk (something I highly recommend) by clicking here.

When I read this talk, I had one of those 'wow!-this-is-a-prophet-of-God' moments.  This is the part of his talk when my eyes went wide open and my heart skipped a beat:

In your generation you will be barraged by multitudes of voices telling you how to live, how to gratify your passions, how to have it all. You will have up to five hundred television channels at your fingertips. There will be all sorts of software, interactive computer modems, databases, and bulletin boards; there will be desktop publishing, satellite receivers, and communications networks that will suffocate you with information. Local cable news networks will cover only local news. Everyone will be under more scrutiny. There will be fewer places of refuge and serenity. You will be bombarded with evil and wickedness like no other generation. As I contemplate this prospect, I am reminded of T. S. Eliot's words, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (The Rock [1934], I).

He gave this talk in 1993!  True - the World Wide Web had just been born two years previous, but it was broadly unknown.  It wasn't until 1996 that the real explosion of the information highway took place.  Ever since then, we have indeed been overloaded with "voices."  Read that paragraph over and over again.  It was as if he wrote that in 2003 and not 1993.

Follow the prophets.  Follow the voice of the Spirit.