President Henry B. Eyring: Holy Spirit will help missionaries succeed
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Related stories from the 2011 Seminar for New Mission Presidents:
President Monson: 'Precious commodity entrusted to your care'
President Dieter F. Uchtdorf: Presidents help missionaries reach their potential
President Boyd K. Packer: A voice felt, rather than heard
Elder Russell M. Nelson: Learn, live and teach the doctrine of Christ
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland: Mission president, trainer important to new missionaries
Elder David A. Bednar: Becoming a 'Preach My Gospel' missionary
Elder D. Todd Christofferson: Faith in Christ is an 'upward cycle'
Elder Richard G. Hinckley: Recent changes intended to encourage senior couples to serve missions
PROVO, UTAH
President Henry B. Eyring promised departing mission presidents and their wives that with the help of the Spirit, they and the missionaries they serve will succeed.
President Eyring's message was given Sunday, June 26, during a sacrament meeting that concluded the 2011 Seminar for New Mission Presidents held at the Provo Missionary Training Center.
"More prayers than you can now imagine will invoke that Spirit to come to you, your missionaries, the members who will help them, and the people they will invite to come through the gate that will lead them home to God," said President Eyring, first counselor in the First Presidency.
Like other parents and grandparents of missionaries, the Eyrings have said prayers for family members in the Lord's service.
A granddaughter was called as a full-time missionary. "Within a few weeks, a medical problem appeared. Her ability to continue in the mission seemed in question. Prayers from those of us in her family rose to heaven."
In this instance the Spirit had acted in advance, he said, as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve with no way of knowing what her need would be called her to one of the few countries in the world where there is a proven treatment for her condition, one not available in the United States.
Moreover, the Lord called her to a mission with a president who knew doctors in that country who could treat her, and the hospital where they practiced medicine was near the mission home. There she lived during her medical treatment with the mission president's wife as her companion.
"By the inspiration of the Spirit, there was no pause in her missionary work," President Eyring remarked. After she regained her health, the president got her back to her zone in time for the baptism of a woman she had taught and who had said to her, "I need to be baptized soon, because I'm more in the spirit world than I am in this one."
All of that happened because of an inspired mission president and his wife, who cared for missionaries with inspiration and the Lord's love, President Eyring commented.
"Now, every missionary called of God can be helped to feel successful," he said. "None is doomed to feel that he or she is a failure. You have the gift to make every missionary feel success and to rise above difficulties and failures."
Drawing from the missionary guide Preach My Gospel, President Eyring quoted these words: "Avoid comparing yourself to other missionaries and measuring the outward results of your efforts against theirs. Remember that people have agency to choose whether to accept your message. Your responsibility is to teach clearly and powerfully so they can make a correct choice."
He said, "For me the most certain evidence of approval is that the Lord trusts me by sending the Spirit to testify, guide and help me in the harvest. For me that only comes after prayer, searching scriptures and the words of living prophets, exact obedience, love of others, humbly listening for the Spirit and long and painful labor."
He said he has had the experience as a missionary of being led by the Spirit to a person prepared to receive the message of the gospel and the Restoration. "But that guidance has usually come late in a hard day of speaking to people and being rejected, sometimes in bad weather, after a companion has said, 'We've done enough. Let's stop and rest.' And then, the Spirit has prompted me to feel and to say, 'No, let's keep going.'"
The prepared person is the next one he meets, the next one to come out of a train station or to answer at the last door on the next street, he said.
President Eyring spoke of meeting three mission presidents in one week of visiting missions. Each said that the hardest thing he had to do was to answer the question of a missionary who did not see one baptism he felt was his and wondered whether the Lord had accepted his offering.
"The tragedy is that the presidents had not taught the missionaries how to recognize the Lord's approval and His measure of success," he said.
They could have known they were successful as they went along, he said. "They knew when the power of their testimony and their teaching went down into the hearts of the people they met on the street. They could see it in the eyes and faces of someone they taught when their power to testify by the Spirit was increasing. They knew their love for the people was increasing when they felt greater joy each time an investigator kept a commandment out of faith. They knew when they felt pain and sadness when an investigator faltered and gave up on the commitments, which would have moved them to the happiness of the kingdom of God.
"And they could tell that their love was increasing when the intensity of that joy and that pain became greater. ... And each of them knew of at least one person they had met and taught who entered the waters of baptism."
