A week before Christmas I was called by the bishopric to
give the address for our Christmas program put on by our ward Choir. Anyone who knows me understands that this is
a weakness I’ve carried all my life. I
don’t mind giving talks, it’s the preparing that’s the problem. After much time on my knees the spirit began
to come to my aid. One morning I told
LeLa that I had a very interesting dream.
I dreamt that I had given my talk to primary children with the aid of
two hand puppets. We both got a laugh out
of that and immediately shrugged it off.
The next morning the dream came again.
This time I said nothing but began to ponder; could this be
possible? In time, thoughts started to
form; things started to come together.
About two months previous to this, I was reading one of my favorite
books, Christ and the New Covenant, by Elder Jeffery R. Holland. I came to a section where he paraphrased the scripture
found in Mormon 9:12-13. For some reason
I kept going back to it until I soon had it memorized:
By Adam came the fall of man. And because of the fall of man came Jesus
Christ . . .; and because of Jesus Christ came the redemption of man. And because of the redemption of man, . . .
they are brought back into the presence of the Lord.
Two weeks prior in our temple prayer meeting, a member of
the temple presidency was giving their usual spiritual message and he told how
it would feel if we were to touch the hand of Jesus. He asked us all to take our hand and rub it
over the top with the other, which we all did.
He said this is exactly how it would feel. With these two more recent bits of knowledge
the spirit now had come to my aid. I had
not done any research to this point. I
hadn’t even opened up the scriptures.
There was no need. Everything I
needed was in my mind. Now all I had to
do was make the puppets which I did and then I practiced. I knew this was what the children of my ward
needed, because it was going to be simple enough for them to understand the
atonement of Jesus Christ.
After I had given my talk and the meeting was over I had
many people come up and said it was presented so good, differently than they
had ever heard. During the remaining
meetings I had comments. Even the next
Sunday I still had comments. I take no
credit. The sprit had come to my
aid. Many others of you have had this
same experience but this time it was my turn.
Gordan Hansen
Christmas 2004
