The Greatest Need

Just after the always-short introduction to Conference from the prophet, the first full-length talk of General Conference  was The Cost - And Blessings - of Discipleship, by Elder Jeffrey R Holland. Elder Holland is always a powerful speaker. He usually covers heavy topics, and he is almost always very bold in his speaking. This Conference, he spoke of Jesus Christ and His prophets and followers being persecuted because of their message, and of our need to "Defend your beliefs with courtesy and with compassion, but defend them." But for the purpose of this blog post, I would like to focus on a single paragraph from near the end of his talk.

Christlike love is the greatest need we have on this planet in part because righteousness was always supposed to accompany it. So if love is to be our watchword, as it must be, then by the word of Him who is love personified, we must forsake transgression and any hint of advocacy for it in others. Jesus clearly understood what many in our modern culture seem to forget: that there is a crucial difference between the commandment to forgive sin (which He had an infinite capacity to do) and the warning against condoning it (which He never ever did even once).

First of all, the first sentence of that paragraph needs to be a meme. It probably already is.

Well, how about that?

I could, and probably should, write a blog post just about that before moving on to the next topic I wanted to discuss from that paragraph. I had an idea for what I wanted to blog about today, but now I feel that I should give that sentence its own blog post, so I will. I was going to initiate a semi-political discussion about the legalization of immoral activities VS the attempts to stamp out sin through the use of (legal) force, but I guess I can save that for tomorrow.

It's interesting that Elder Holland said that Christlike love is our greatest need. Not food. Not water. Not even air. I suppose that that could be because we (as a planet) already have sufficient amounts of food, water, and air, by we (again, looking at the global scale) suffer from a deficit of love. Many people do not love themselves, their God, or their neighbors as much as they should, and we could all stand to feel more love from others. Human hearts were made to feel and share love, but for many people, that doesn't happen nearly enough, and there seems to be only one solution to that problem.

Love travels in a circle. It passes from person to person, eventually coming back to each person who helped it along. We spread love by being righteous; by being kind, generous, caring, and supportive, we show our love for other people, and by being righteous and faithful, we show our love for God. In return, God showers His love upon us, and the people to whom we've shown love usually tend to pay it back or pay it forward. Essentially, one way to receive more love from God and others is to show more love for God and others. This will increase the amount of love in the world, and since most true expressions of love are righteous actions, it'll improve the world's overall righteousness as well. And with the increase of righteousness, there will be an increase of blessings (God's expressions of His love for us) for everyone. This makes love a sort of perpetual motion machine, continuously recycling all the love that's put into it.

But like all perpetual motion machines, this process sounds great in theory, but in reality it takes some effort to keep it going. Some people don't express as much love as they receive. In fact, when we take into account all the love God shows us in the form of the many wonderful blessings He gives us, including the gift of the Atonement, the promise of resurrection, and even our own lives, I'd be surprised if any human being expressed that much love, for God or for anyone. According to the laws of thermodynamics, when energy is transfered from one object to another, some of that energy is almost always lost in the process. As God transfers love to us and we transfer love to each other, there are going to be times when some of that love "goes to waste." As people express less and less love for each other (mostly by being unrighteous despite being blessed), God is morally obligated to show less and less love for us by withholding blessings, leading to the deficit of Christlike love, the filling of which has become our greatest need.

The solution is for each of us to try to share with others as much love as we receive. We won't succeed because the more we show love for others, the more love God will show for us, and we just can't dish out as much love as He can. But we can try. And the more we try to share as much love as we receive, the more love there will be in the world, which will translate to more righteousness, which will be answered by more blessings, which translates into more love. It's a perpetual energy machine, made possible by a God who unvaryingly gives out more love than He receives, and it is, in my opinion, one possible way for us to fill what, in Elder Holland's opinion, is our greatest need.