Advice On Cars & Building The Kingdom

Advice On Cars & Building The Kingdom

This testimony was shared Sunday, March 9, 2014 during Family Morning Worship at the Bountiful., Missouri Branch by Patriarch Fred Williams.

In the 1980s, the price of gasoline was going up very rapidly.  Rations on how much gas you could buy at a time were put into place.  Betty and I decided we needed to buy a fuel-efficient car.  Now I didn’t want to buy a small compact car with an automatic transmission; it would have to be a stick-shift.  Betty protested that she couldn’t drive a stick, but I told her that I would teach her.  We bought a 1982 Ford Escort with a manual transmission.  We loaded up the kids into the backseat – Christy, Brian and Jeff – and set out to teach Betty how to drive a stick.

Betty struggled trying to drive.  Sometimes she would kill the engine, other times the car would really jerk forward.  Somtimes she would peel the tires.  One time at a stoplight, on a slight incline, the light went from red to green and back to red while Betty was still struggling to get across – but she was learning.  Strange thing was (funny to me, but not Betty), we kept getting advice from the backseat. 

The three kids were very vocal giving advice on how she needed to drive.  Now I knew that none of those kids had ever driven a stick-shift, and I couldn’t even think of a time when they had riddenin a car with a stick-shift.  Yet, they were full of quips to tell Betty how to do it.  Betty learned how to drive a stick shift and the car served us well, but this experience had me thinking: Isn’t Zion that way?  There isn’t a man living on earth today who has built or lived in Zion, yet people are willing to sit in the backseat and tell the prophet what he needs to do to bring it to pass.

When the community at Bountiful was being built, and our family was given the opportunity to move out there, we were faced with this question: Were we going to sit in the backseat and tell President Larsen how to do it, or were we going to get in the front seat and try?

Yes, as a Church, we are going to make mistakes.  We will kill the engine.  The car will jerk forward and we will peel the tires, but the time will come when we will look back and say, “That wasn’t as hard as we thought!”

We have been listening to each other for too long.  Now is the time for us to turn and listen to Him.