Jeffrey R. Holland

It is a miracle.

And I love too that you say, and you have the quote in the book right in the very beginning in your first chapter, Jeffrey Holland's quote, you say, believe in miracles.

I have seen so many of them come.

when every other indication would say that hope was lost.

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[gentle music] I loved President Jeffrey R. Holland.

As I wrote on my Instagram at the time of his passing, I don't have one of the cool stories of interacting with or meeting President Holland.

I always dreamed of interviewing him but never had the opportunity beyond a two-minute conversation at a media press junket for Meet the Mormons years ago.

Instead, my story is ordinary and no different than millions of others.

I loved him and his sweet wife, and that is what I'll tell my Jane someday when she asks me why her middle name is Holland.

I'll tell her about how both President and Sister Holland somehow managed to speak as if they were speaking just to you.

When she feels like she wants to give up, I'll remind her not to quit and to keep walking.

I didn't have any regrets about the way I had responded when he asked for my forgiveness.

One tragic story that President Jeffrey R. Holland shared involved a person from St. George, Utah, his hometown, who had been bullied as a youth and had made some decisions that made his later life difficult, including that he had stopped going to church.

After moving away from St. George, he had found the importance of the gospel in his life, come back to church, and started a family.

However, when he moved back to St. George, the people who had grown up with him seemed unable or unwilling to let the past go and give him a second chance.

No matter what sin we may have committed, we can always come back.

I believe it was Jeffrey R. Holland who said that none of us are the vilest of sinners.

We did not do what Alma did.

We don't know necessarily what he did, but there's a good chance that none of us have done that.

That really hit wrong.

He also had mentioned this statement that was, I think, originally Neil Maxwell, and then President Oaks repeated it, and then here Jeffrey Holland repeated it about how when they were building the temple in Nauvoo, just before the mobs expelled them and the mobs wanted them out, even as they were finishing construction, that they basically had to build the temple with, you know, a trowel in one hand and a musket in the other.

And he said, I'd like to hear a little more musket fire from BYU, meaning that this is an academic educational institution that is funded by the church and that they should be defending the principles of the gospel from a scholarly and academic and yes, faith-based perspective.

And yet, of course, all they heard was musket and they said, oh, he's encouraging violence.

And I don't need to take my religion into business because I have to compete in that arena or in sports.

I think Jeff Holland famously said, what is it? You don't you don't leave your values at the door or something.

Check your religion at the door.

That's right.

If you are wondering whether you or a loved one has wandered so far away that the love of God and His covenantal power cannot reach you, I say to you, you have not.

As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland so beautifully said, You have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love.

It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ's Atonement shines.

The Atonement of Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the greatest promise God made, that Jesus Christ would be our Savior and Redeemer.

That's crazy.

And it was, we are all enlisted by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland.

And he's talking about how we're all enlisted in this war against Satan and against the adversary.

And, you know, Satan knows he's going to lose, but he's trying to drag as many of us down with him as he can.

Wow.

Oh, that's nice.

I mean, Jeffrey R. Holland is the goat.

So that's this idea of just get, for those of you who will be on your mission, that sometimes you will have one foot out and one foot in.