Very recently I was in a training meeting where the featured speaker was Elder Ronald A. Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Everyone in attendance received wonderful counsel from him regarding leadership, delegation, and balancing various aspects of life.
Towards the end of the meeting was a short Q&A session, where audience members could freely ask Elder Rasband questions related to the topic in focus. One guy raised his hand, Elder Rasband called on him, the guy stood up, was handed a microphone, and he proceeded to put forth one of the most classic questions of all time:
"What advice would you give your younger self?"
Elder Rasband gathered his thoughts for just a couple of seconds, and almost immediately as soon as he began to talk, tears began shining in his eyes. The first words he uttered in reply: "Try to love more."
Elder Rasband put clear emphasis on the importance of "love and tenderness." I don't know why, but as soon as he spoke the word "tenderness," I latched onto it fast and firmly, and a massive chain reaction of thoughts exploded into existence in my mind.
So I don't have to try to regurgitate the chain of ponderings, I'll just copy and paste what I jotted down into my phone's note-taking app:
What advice would you give your younger self? "Try to love more. ...love and tenderness." Those are the things we give small children while they're in their growing years. Is it a key to growth no matter how old the child gets? Do we naturally slow down giving tender lovingkindness to people simply because they are getting older, and appear to be no more childlike? But we are all still growing. I don't think we ever stop growing. We continue to have growing pains, even though we've been out of grade school, junior high, high school for a long time. Life was hard in the formative years, but the more I continue to age, the more I realize my "formative years" don't seem to be over yet. But I find that when somebody else is gently heart-to-heart with me, or is simply just genuinely happy to hear me out, it means a lot, and I feel like I have been nourished and fed with good things. The growing gets a little easier.
It's what we want to do when we have a baby or a toddler in our midst. It's our instinct to want so much for them to learn what's good and true, to grow up learning to do rightly and justly. We want them to find joy as they live from year to year. Our hopes for them -- and faith in them -- are bright. So what do we do? In what attitude do we often attempt to teach them, especially when they're tiny? Gentility. Encouragement. Tenderly guiding.
But as we, as people, get older, we're sometimes prone to get ruder. Sometimes we get cruder. We are now far beyond the age when we weren't actually accountable for our actions. It can be considered a pity of life that, as we garner more and more rotations-around-the-sun under our belts, we, as people, who once shone as bright pure silver, can be viewed as more and more tarnished. Sometimes we can be viewed as being defaced, simply because we're no longer precious, innocent "little children."
It is true: we do tend to get rougher around the edges, the further and further we move away from the days when we were little kids. But here's where we are the same as little kids: we are still learning. We do still experience many, many, many growing pains. The pains merely vary in type, but they're pains just the same... I see it in the elderly; they have their own challenges associated with their age... I see it in middle-aged married couples; things like having to relocate or having to let their children move from home and go off to college or even get married themselves -- those can be tough changes to face... I see it in young adults who are in my age group; there are issues and hurdles EVERYWHERE.
I'm now 30, and I am now personally trekking across some fresh new "adulting" territory I'd never known before. A lot of the stuff related to said territory is blowing my mind pretty thoroughly, and every now and then I am finding so much solace in simply having some other adult listen to me voice my concerns and opinions -- and I love, love, love hearing what they have to say about it, and the conversations are just so gall darn edifying. The friends and family with whom I am conversing about all these things -- they're not being "gentle" with me in the sense that they think I am fragile and I could shatter to pieces at any moment; they are being "gentle" with me in the sense that they are simply being calm and kind with me...
Calm, kind, and authentically interested in one another... Maybe that's one way to describe what it means to be "meek" with one another. In the grandest scheme of things, we're all still just kids who oh so often yearn for guidance in life, who always still have oh so much more to learn. It's what being mortal is all about. And so -- pretty much exactly like our tiny little children who are learning to crawl, walk, eat solids, understand the alphabet and arithmetic, play nicely with others -- we are learning a million things as well, and sometimes it's just hard. The little children need the gentle, tender nourishment. Why would we adults not need similar gentle, tender nourishment? Again, it doesn't have to be in the form of high-pitched, airy tones of voice -- like you are talking to a 1-year-old or a labradoodle puppy. We can be gentle just being normal with each other, with kindness, calmness, love, and genuineness. With a hug here and there, if you and/or your friend is the hugging type of person. ;)
But anyway, to me, this is what Elder Rasband's mention of "love and tenderness" made me think of. One detailed thought after another after another! Thanks, Elder Rasband! And now, to finish off this rambling post: SCRIPTURE REFERENCES! (*and a quick song reference*) I love all of these:
Titus 3:2 -- To speak evil of no man, to be no brawlers, but gentle, shewing all meekness unto all men. <--- This is maybe my favorite! "Don't be a brawler!"
1 Thessalonians 5:11 -- Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also ye do.
Mosiah 18:9 -- Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life—
Doctrine and Covenants 25:5 -- And the office of thy calling shall be for a comfort unto my servant, Joseph Smith, Jun., thy husband, in his afflictions, with consoling words, in the spirit of meekness.
"I'm Trying to Be like Jesus" song by Janice Kapp Perry -- "Be gentle and loving in deed and in thought, for these are the things Jesus taught."
