Why I Can't Blog About Every Conference Talk

For a few weeks now, I've been having a hard time coming up with things to blog about. Normally, I like to blog about General Conference talks. They usually have plenty of blogworthy quotes or messages and/or analogies that I can rehash or reinterpret. However, I sometimes run into a General Conference talk that I don't know how to blog about, usually because the message didn't jump out at me as something I need to blog about. For a while, I thought that that was an indication that I wasn't studying them right. After all, these are inspired messages from God. If we seek inspiration as we study them, God should, theoretically, use them to speak to us, right?

Well, not always. One of the main reasons we have modern prophets at all is that people need different messages at different times. If one talk, or even one set of talks, was sufficient for all people for all time, then we really wouldn't need much more than what we get from the scriptures. However, times change, and people change. The challenges and opportunities we face today are nothing like what the Israelites and early Christians faced. Thus, God gives us different messages than the ones He gave them, messages better tailored to suit our current needs.

Similarly, because each person is different than each other person, it's difficult, if not impossible, for any one message to speak to every person's individual needs. Any given message in General Conference may have something for everyone, but it's just as likely to be better suited for some people than for others. A few talks with very specific messages may not be relevant to certain people at all. For example, one General Conference talk may be a strong admonition to pay tithing, but if you already have a firm testimony of the principle of tithing and you pay your tithing faithfully, you may not really need to hear that message.

General Conferences are wonderful, and there is something in each General Conference for each individual who attends it, but because General Conferences are broadcast to all the world, there are going to be a handful of messages in each Conference that were meant more for other people than for you. It is good to listen to and revisit each talk, just in case there's something in there that you need to hear, but if you don't hear anything that really stands out to you, maybe it's because that message was meant for someone else, and there's another message that would be more beneficial for you at this time.

I try to blog about each Conference talk in succession, so I can keep them in order and know which ones I've revisited and which ones I haven't, but sometimes, there are Conference talks I get stuck on because nothing in them stands out to me as being particularly blogworthy. Maybe that's because I'm not studying them right, or maybe I'm just not in the right frame of mind, but it also could be that that's not the message I need to focus on right now, and if that's the case, then I really ought to move on. I'm not sure how long I've been stuck on Elder Ronald A. Rasband's talk, Standing with the Leaders of the Church, but it's been too long. If you study it on your own and find something you think is blogworthy, please feel free to share youre insight in the Comments. But as for me, I think I need to move on to a different message.