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I have chosen to speak today about a very pedestrian principle: patience. I hope that I do not empty the Marriott Center by that selection. Perhaps the topic was selfishly selected because of my clear and continuing need to develop further this very important attribute. But my interest in patience is not solely personal, for the necessity of having this intriguing attribute is cited several times in the scriptures, including once by King Benjamin who, when clustering the attributes of sainthood, named patience as a charter member of that cluster (Mosiah 3:19; see also Alma 7:23).

Agency existed in those premortal worlds from which we come. And yet, we know that in some essential way agency became operative with new stakes and new conditions in the Garden of Eden. The Genesis narrative makes clear that human creation is not finished—we do not exist in any complete or perfect way—until the first human creation has been differentiated, organized, into two human entities.

Often, when speaking to student leaders in higher education, I have used the analogy that—in a university—the faculty, staff, and administration are like the natives, and the students are like the tourists. In many ways, a recurring devotional speaker is more like one of the natives.

“A great and marvelous work is about to come forth unto the children of men . . . Behold, the field is white already to harvest; therefore, whoso desireth to reap, let him thrust in his sickle with his might, and reap while the day lasts, that he may treasure up for his soul everlasting salvation in the kingdom of God.” (Doctrine and Covenants 6:1, 3; 11:1, 3; 12:1, 3; 14:1, 3)

The Maxwell Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Steven L. Peck as a full-time faculty fellow, with his two-year term slated to begin in September 2025. Dr. Peck is a professor of biology in Brigham Young University’s College of Life Sciences and the author of the Living Faith title Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist, published with the Maxwell Institute in 2015.

Elder Maxwell seldom spoke autobiographically because he did not like to draw attention to himself, but members of his family encouraged him to share some personal experiences and lessons he learned from them.

Elder Maxwell was in the Presidency of the First Quorum of the Seventy when he delivered this devotional address at Brigham Young University on October 26, 1976.

When modeling and teaching of the Sabbath, my goodly parents, Latter-day Saints from birth, were encouraging rather than heavy-handed. This was prudent, given their children’s temperaments. Despite wise and faithful parents, a vague reluctance sometimes came upon my young self when the declining Saturday afternoon sun made long shadows. Thoughts of the morrow–a more regulated day–encroached. Transposing my imagination from an antebellum Missouri village to the twentieth-century suburbs of Salt Lake City, I retained enough Tom Sawyer in my blood to find the prospect of preachings and formal Sunday attire to be constricting.

First, my brothers and sisters, my gratitude to the prophet and his counselors for this call. To them, to Elder Richards and the members of the First Quorum of the Seventy, I pledge that my little footnote on the page of the quorum’s history will read clearly that I wore out my life in helping to spread Jesus’ gospel and helping to regulate His church.

The Doctrine and Covenants makes the provocative wager that spiritual vision is a mode of seeing that lights up the whole body so that we feel, sense, and know not just through the eyes. This realization illuminates passages like those that promise readers if their eye is single to God’s glory, then their whole body will be filled with light.