The Covenantal Journey of Disciple-Scholarship 

A few years back, I was having dinner with the  family of my graduate student Kala‘i Ellis. His father, Mark, is involved with the Polynesian Voyaging Society and now the Polynesian Cultural Center. In his work, Mark—along with many others—employs historically accurate navigational approaches to sail double-hulled canoes thousands of miles across the Pacific without using western instrumentation. They use celestial navigation and knowledge of oceanography and natural history to cross ancient routes traveled by their ancestors.

Mark, in a moment of clarity that captured my imagination, summarized the work of navigation when he said, “On the deck of the canoe, the navigator daily makes thousands of observations to make hundreds of choices to answer two questions at sunrise and sunset: ‘Where are we?’ and ‘What is our heading?’”

Those same two questions should animate each of us spiritually. We should daily ask, “As a disciple and a scholar, what are the observations and choices I am making that tell me ‘Where am I?’ and ‘What is my heading?’”

Polynesian Voyaging

I have deep admiration for the skill of ancient and modern Polynesian voyagers. Centuries before Europeans crossed the relatively mild Atlantic, Polynesians discovered hundreds of scattered islands in the Pacific and then developed a complex network of commerce stretching from Samoa to Hawaii, Tahiti to Rapa Nui, and Rarotonga to New Zealand. I have begun to grasp that anciently there were two distinctive types of Polynesian voyaging: voyages of discovery and voyages of settlement.¹ Voyages of discovery were propelled by curiosity and subtle signs in the environment that led explorers to new lands. Voyages of settlement, on the other hand, used landmarks to guide their travels, including celestial guides, major marine currents, and other landmarks determined by prior voyages of discovery. In these two types of voyages—discovery and settlement—we find models for the path each of us must follow as a disciple-scholar.

Voyages of Discovery

Before there were established trading routes connecting distant islands, some voyagers left the safety of the lagoon, sailing against currents and the prevailing wind, curious to know what existed out in the deep waters of the Pacific. On voyages of discovery, these light and fast canoes were occupied by small crews who were highly sensitive to evidence and who were filled with optimism and curiosity.² They surely were like the young Mormon: “quick to observe.”³

For example, consider the discovery of Aotearoa, the Māori name of New Zealand. The initial discovery was likely initiated by voyagers who first saw plant material floating up on a southern current. Additional evidence came from millions of birds migrating south in the spring—surely a sign of nesting grounds somewhere. Voyagers followed these signs, but there are also beautiful stories of humpback whales joining the journey, leading the canoe to a place from which the travelers could see the long white cloud from which Aotearoa got its name. There are other stories of mariners dozens of miles off the coast hearing the ring of the bellbird’s song from the dense New Zealand forest. It was only after following all these lines of evidence that the voyage of discovery ended as travelers reached that distant shore.⁴

Those voyagers of discovery were seeking unknown lands. What about us while we are at BYU? Our task is to discover how we use the refining experiences, the resources, and the community of BYU “to stay on the covenant path,”⁵ to “let God prevail”⁶ in our lives, to “[build] bridges of understanding”⁷ that will help reduce conflict and division in our communities, to live lives of gratitude,⁸ to become peacemakers,⁹ to repent, to seek forgiveness, to forgive others, and, ultimately, to build a life guided by celestial ideals.¹⁰ That is a far more daunting goal than the secular challenge of using the university to become a scholar or find a profession.

Our challenge is to observe the spiritual signs—our metaphorical bird migrations and celestial landmarks—that confirm we are on the path God intends for us. Being covenantal creates a unique type of acceptance and wonder along the voyage of discovery, inviting us to discover who God intends us to become. Being covenantal suggests that we are bound to God and to each other in a process of growth and transformation, each discovering our own way to use our talents and life experiences to build the kingdom.

So, what are the observations that we need to be making on our own voyage of discovery? Let me suggest three:

• First, observe how the Spirit is drawing you toward particular people or problems.
• Second, observe how to develop your unique suite of spiritual strengths so you can be a better disciple.
• Third, observe how the hand of God blesses and guides you, and give thanks for those blessings.

See Where You Are Being Led

The covenantal approach to scholarship asks us to focus on others. Being a disciple of Christ is manifest by our “love one to another.”¹¹ We are invited to see our academic or scholarly work as a reflection of our willingness to serve God and neighbor. Just as Polynesians on voyages of discovery confidently set out with reassurances coming from the smallest signs of distant land, in our voyage as a disciple-scholar, the earliest evidence of our personal life mission will be those people or problems that the Spirit draws us toward. Well before choosing a profession, we will feel the Spirit showing us individuals, communities, problems, or issues that need our help. This might be around topics of the family, healing, civility in society, sustainability, poverty alleviation, educational access, or myriad other areas. For each of us, our arena of service should be personal and purposeful.

Observe Your Gifts

Along the journey, the voyager of discovery is looking for reinforcing evidence—the flight paths of migrating birds or whales. For us, as disciple-scholars, that evidence is the reassurance of the Spirit that we have gifts to share. Once we are drawn toward an issue, we will see how to refine and develop our unique strengths—our personal spiritual gifts. We know of the gifts described in scripture: wisdom, knowledge, healing, prophecy, tongues, and many others.¹² But there are additional gifts that I see in you. These gifts include the gift of meekly supporting a poorly performing peer; the gift of knowing how to support and refine “brilliant stars”¹³ in music, academics, or athletics; the gift of forming effective study groups; the gift of taking time to love and listen; the gift of celebrating another’s success when we haven’t succeeded; the gift of making peace; the gift of quietly pondering; and many more.¹⁴

In my University 101 class, I watched as twenty-two students texted one peer who was absent from class, letting him know he was missed. I saw a disciple-athlete demonstrate his refined physical gifts in a historic win and, later that week, share a profound personal testimony of the Savior with a group of BYU fans. I watched an advisor introduce a shy student to a faculty member, facilitating an inspiring learning experience. These examples—and hundreds of others—show how you are refining and developing gifts essential for your journey as a disciple-scholar.

I firmly believe that, for most of us, the discipline we choose is far less important than how we demonstrate our discipleship. For me, as a teen in western Washington, I felt drawn to the natural world and to ways we might live more sustainably within it. Being a middle child in a military family that moved frequently, I often felt displaced and disconnected, shy and somewhat awkward. That is, I was a teenager. It was in the mountains, climbing waterfalls, and exploring ocean shores that my testimony germinated and grew—I felt emplaced and connected, awed by God’s creation. Given a choice, I knew I would find a way to professionally or personally make a difference that was related to the natural world.

This revelation constrained my options, but professionally, I could have pursued writing, teaching, social or natural sciences, or many other things. My curiosity led me to courses in the humanities, psychology, physics, and biology—all promising. Ultimately, my unique combination of aptitude in thinking systematically, my middling language skills, and some quantitative abilities pointed me toward where I could be of service. Some strengths needed to be developed and expanded and many weaknesses overcome—including the high school D minus I got in public speaking.

A second critical orienting experience came with a mission call to Auckland, New Zealand, where I learned to speak Samoan. That service imprinted in me a deep desire to spend my life learning from and serving the people of Polynesia. With stops and starts, exploration and reorientation, I ultimately discovered an academic home in ecology and a particular desire to work in the South Pacific.

Choose to Acknowledge God

For astute voyagers, the initial and sustaining signs—the clouds on the horizon, the sounds of distant birdsong—will begin to coalesce and expand each day when we are on the correct path of discovery. Along our voyage of discipleship, the most important observations to sustain and reassure us come from recognizing God’s guiding hand in our lives. In a revelation to Joseph Smith we learn, “And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things.”¹⁵ We need to be observant of how God leads us and who is being led to us. Absent deliberate, structured, intentional efforts to acknowledge God, it is easy to slip into scholar-only mode and forget about the sacred purpose of our scholarly work.

In the middle of my career, I had to reorient my daily approach to scholarship so that it was more connected to my discipleship. A few years after I had been hired at BYU, I was involved in several research projects. It was a busy time of life with the demands of teaching, research, and a young family. I could rush to leave Provo, drive to a research site, collect data, and return home without ever reflecting on anything other than the immediate deadlines that come with academics. I was not feeling spiritually nourished, despite working on scientifically important questions in beautiful deserts, lofty mountains, and the Pacific Islands. I had plenty of scholarly success and the federal grants and published papers that come with dedicated scholarship. But I knew that I needed to be more purposeful in noticing God’s hand in my work and in the places where I studied. For me, this meant spending some dedicated time at the beginning or end of the field day sitting reflectively and focusing on the beauties of nature. I took up photography. My first photos were poor—overexposed, washed out, and poorly composed—but I thank God for what I began to see.

My experience confirms something that Elder Jeffrey R. Holland quoted in the April 2024 general conference: “Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”¹⁶ Gratitude emerges when we recognize the source of joy in our lives and couple that with the wonder of how God’s hand guides and blesses us. Here are a few signs of God’s love of the world and of me that I have seen in the past few years:

• I have flown my drone and observed a squadron of manta rays swimming along reef margins in Hawaii as if they were birds flying.
• I have marveled at the colors and behavior of hoiho—yellow-eyed penguins—an extremely rare and vulnerable species that nest in the coastal grasses in southern New Zealand.
• In Utah’s subalpine regions, I have zoomed in on tiny flowers that bear a resemblance to giant elephants.
• While researching Hawaii’s coral reefs, I have been surrounded by dolphins and turtles who quizzically surround us from time to time.
• In one year, I have been awed by the same population of humpback whales in their winter home of Hawaii and their summer range in Alaska’s Excursion Inlet.
• I have seen sunrises and sunsets that calm me and nourish my soul.
• I have celebrated students being tutored by young Samoan children; they have even found time to dance together in the rain.

If you spend much attentive time in nature with eyes to see, you will experience wonder. But a remarkable thing happened when I was deliberate in acknowledging God’s hand in my life. I began seeing heavenly insights and appreciating the complexity of the Creation through a beautifully designed experiment. I also began seeing my students differently—seeing how you reflect and manifest God’s goodness.

These observations also reinforce where we can be of service. Elder Neal A. Maxwell once said:

Brothers and sisters, this mortal experience through which we are passing is one in which beauties abound; subtleties and delicacies are all about us, waiting to be noticed. Wonders are everywhere to be seen. It is, however, the observing meek, who will contemplate the lilies of the field, will ponder the galaxies and see God moving in His majesty and power. It is also the meek who will notice, and then lift up, those whose hands hang down.¹⁷

When we observe as a disciple and choose to follow signs as a disciple, the Spirit will confirm to us that we are in the right place and have the right heading along our individual covenant path.

Reorient

The value of making so many daily observations is the ability to change our heading when we are off course. I am reminded of an experience we had earlier this summer while conducting research off the coast of Oahu. We were using an autonomous underwater vehicle to survey coral reefs. It may be the closest analog to traditional voyaging’s dead-reckoning skills that we have, because when our robot is underwater, it does not have access to GPS, Wi-Fi, or any other geolocating capabilities. Instead, the robot takes thousands of readings per second to sense its own movement and location relative to the ocean floor and to where it started.

With faith in our engineering and in our daily prayers, we launched the robot in an unfamiliar area. It dove, and our crew waited. When it hadn’t surfaced on schedule, we put our acoustic communication underwater to see where the robot was.

Our student said, “It is thirty meters (one hundred feet) down and parked. Is that normal?”

In case you are wondering, no, that is not how we planned it. When we reviewed the footage from our onboard cameras, we pieced together what had happened. As the robot was following the terrain three meters (ten feet) above the ocean floor, an outcropping formed by a long-ago lava flow loomed in front of the vehicle. It sensed the obstacle, but the robot was moving too fast to navigate over the rock and clipped the top. With that glancing blow, the sensor that helped the robot know its distance above the seafloor temporarily went offline; the robot lost the ability to sense its location, so it dove, nosed up against a rock, and parked. Fortunately our brilliant engineering colleagues had programmed in a fail-safe—literally a way to safely fail. After a full minute of trying to push through the rock, the robot backed up and surfaced, and we recovered it.

Our covenantal commitments, coupled with the promises of our Savior, can reassure us that as we journey into the unknown, we can sense when we are off track, when we face looming obstacles, or how we can fail safely. Failure, reorienting repentance, and setting out again are part of the perfecting process. If we don’t sense a need for course correction, it likely means we aren’t voyaging at the edges of ability, experience, or current knowledge. Self-discovery, spiritual discovery, and scholarly discovery are part of an eternal plan, and we have access to the Atonement of Jesus Christ, in which Christ takes upon Himself our pains, afflictions, infirmities, transgressions, and even death.¹⁸ There is joy and excitement that comes in living a discovery-oriented life, reassured by the promises of our covenants.

In my own home, I have four young adults—including twin daughters who will be first-year students this fall. Our entire family wishes that we had personal, detailed maps for the territory through which we will travel in the coming years or perhaps a high-precision spiritual GPS telling us exactly where we are moment to moment and where we should head. Instead, we get the excitement of using signs to daily discern where we are and where we are heading—trying to orient ourselves using evidence coming from God. We sail toward the horizon with faith, a little bit of anxiety, and a lot of excitement.

Voyages of Settlement

Beyond voyages of discovery, there is a second, more familiar type of journey. Voyages of settlement were undertaken following voyages of discovery. Crews were put together with everything necessary to sustain a community. The canoes were provisioned with the agricultural, medicinal, and ornamental plants necessary for flourishing in a new land. The crews consisted of loved ones with a shared vision that would form the distant community.

These voyages, rather than moving fast and seeking for the smallest sign of unknown land, navigated using established landmarks—notably the celestial landmarks in the rising and setting sun, moon, and stars.¹⁹ When Captain James Cook visited Tahiti in 1769, he met a navigator named Tupu‘ia who shared that he knew the transit of more than 150 stars, with celestial landmarks that could lead him to more than one hundred islands.²⁰ Voyages of settlement are focused on long-term community creation.

Now, consider that as we each have come to this community at BYU, part of our mandate is to settle into and become the school in Zion foretold by prophets and guided by celestial ideals. In 1975, President Spencer W. Kimball charged BYU to embrace core ideals. He promised that as we navigated by those ideals, BYU would achieve its destiny. He quoted Carl Schurz: “Like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose [your ideals] as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.”²¹

BYU’s Celestial Landmarks

What ideals, or celestial landmarks, do we have here at BYU? During my first week as a freshman, then BYU president Jeffrey R. Holland spoke at the first devotional that I ever attended here in the Marriott Center. In that address²² and in a talk a year later,²³ he shared the ideals that guide this university and ways we might become a “school in Zion.”²⁴ President C. Shane Reese reframed many of these ideals in his inaugural response,²⁵ with three ideals being critical to an understanding of how we build a community of disciple-scholars:

• First, our “double heritage,”²⁶ in which we must be committed to excellence in both scholarship and discipleship.
• Second, our commitment to build “a covenant community.”²⁷ Recently our BYU president said, “It is our collective work at BYU to help one another along this journey of discipleship.”²⁸
• Finally, our guidance by the ideal that our scholarship will be inspired by our higher mission of blessing “our Heavenly Father’s children directly” and being anchored to “prophetic priorities.”²⁹
• I see a remarkable consistency of vision from President Kimball through President Holland, President Kevin J Worthen, and now President Reese. This orientation to mission in our work is the full manifestation of discipleship, where the work in our labs, offices, classrooms, and studios reflects our love of God and love of neighbor. To keep this orientation, our scholarship must include an integration of culture, languages, history, the humanities, and the social and natural sciences. Only then will we understand our neighbors sufficiently to love them completely.

As a historical aside about celestial navigation, when modern Polynesian voyagers were searching for celestial landmarks to navigate from Tahiti to Hawaii in the late 1970s, they found that the most useful sign leading them to Hawaii was the Southern Cross. When it sat exactly six degrees above the southern horizon, they knew they had reached the latitude of the Hawaiian Islands.³⁰ While we have institutional constellations that help us navigate toward our collective goal of “becoming BYU,”³¹ none of those are meaningful independent of the celestial landmark of the cross and the empty tomb.

How can we possibly use these guides to shape our scholarly work? Let me share an example. One Sunday morning I was sitting in the open-air courtyard of a chapel in the village of Saipipi in Samoa. I was there as part of a humanitarian trip that was a collaboration between medical professionals and BYU faculty and students. My role was as a program administrator. That morning I was somewhat troubled. You see, I had all the powerful positive emotions that come with serving. I was feeling blessed by my friendships with villagers and students and by the many things I had learned from them. However, my scholarly skills were only modestly connected to our work there, and I knew I had more to offer through my training as an ecologist. I prayed for God to show me a way that I might be of better service.

That afternoon as we got back to our hotel, I had emails from two of my inspired colleagues. They had been on a visit to our sister campus in Laie, Hawaii, and both had been impressed by a young man who had guided them. Stau Segi was Samoan, and, as we found out later, he was prayerfully seeking to know his life path, having recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marine biology. He and I scheduled a call and found shared passions and interests. Miraculously, he was born and raised in the village less than half a kilometer south of where I sat praying to know how to be of better service.

Stau joined my research lab, and he developed a dissertation that directly addressed many critical environmental concerns in the South Pacific. He has become a remarkable scientist who is guided by spiritual principles of stewardship and who has key insights into conservation needs in the South Pacific. Four months ago, Dr. Segi defended his dissertation. He is equipped with skills that will bless his native Samoa and the broader world. In his time here at BYU, he was a mentor to many undergraduate students. He trained others using his computational and field biology skills and also shared his life experiences of growing up in a small village in Samoa and the times when God had intervened in his life to make his PhD possible.

Stau currently serves on an international committee representing small Pacific Island states in establishing best practices for marine protected areas. This work is possible only because of God’s grace, an answer to prayer, an institution where scholarship is inspired by our mission of lifting others, and the celestial ideal of building a covenant community that thrives because of the diverse experiences of each of us serving together in a common cause.

On Meekness

For us to become a school in Zion, we must develop the disposition of the voyagers that worked to settle and build a community. That disposition includes the meekness to value—while sorting—all the world’s knowledge. President Holland charged this university both to organize and prioritize our expertise and to fuse gospel insights and perspectives into every discipline. There must be, he said, a “real merging”³² of disciplines and discipleship. On our voyage to fully become BYU, the “Christ-centered, prophetically directed university of prophecy,”³³ we must be meek enough to be teachable while discerning, internalizing, and sharing eternal truths.

During my final semester at BYU as an undergraduate, I was employed as a teaching assistant in a biology course. I read the student papers in the first assignment without much enthusiasm. They were technically sound and syntactically proficient but lacked animation. Then I got to a paper that started with a beautiful poem. With that verse and the writing that followed, this student captured essential truths that were missing from all the other essays and taught eternal principles of stewardship and the divinity of creation. The student’s science paper was alive with metaphor and ethereal language. The writing transcended the expectations of a student’s scientific paper, reflecting gifts primarily developed in the humanities.

As I went into class and handed back the essays, I slowly whittled down the pile until there was only that paper and a lovely young woman with deep brown eyes sitting on the front row wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots. I handed her the paper, smiled, and said, “Wow, you have beautiful . . . writing. We should talk.”

We did talk, and after I had graded my final essay that semester, I asked her out on our first date. We married a year after that, and in May of this year we celebrated our thirtieth anniversary. She has the beautiful disposition of a disciple-scholar and easily navigates between her own poetry, research, support of student scientific writing, and divine truths.

Having a disposition attuned to the redemptive power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ can help us reconcile differences between disciplines and among ourselves. If we are to navigate by the ideals of mission-inspired scholarship and covenantal belonging, we will need to be meek enough to see the divine aspects of all disciplines and integrate our religious, general, and disciplinary education.

Voyages of Return

A description of voyages of discovery and voyages of settlement is incomplete without highlighting the voyages of return. Just as the voyagers of discovery found their travels meaningful only if they could return and share their findings, and just as the voyagers of settlement could only be sustained by continued trade with their origin communities, we too need to return. The imperative to know where we are and what our heading is increases when we contemplate our return to God. President Russell M. Nelson has continually reinforced the idea that the covenant path ultimately leads us back to God—a blessed voyage of return.³⁴

A few months ago, I was doing something that I love to do more than just about anything—being with family cheering on our Cougar basketball team. I was sitting right there—section 7, row 22, seat 3. We were locked in a close game against a top-five team when I experienced what I thought was the worst heartburn and nausea ever. Soon after, I was going through the emergency room doors at Utah Valley Regional Hospital. Our men’s basketball team losing an intensely close game literally broke my heart. Sometime that evening, the inner lining of a coronary artery had dissected and blocked the flow of blood to the right side of my heart, causing a massive heart attack. I now have four stents keeping that artery open.

The important part of this story is what happened when I woke up in the intensive care unit—after coming frighteningly close to the ultimate return—and started reflecting on how I stood in my relationship with God and neighbor. My first observation was gratitude for God’s sustaining hand—particularly the gifts of the disciple-physicians and disciple-nurses who cared for me and who dedicate their lives to the messy work of supporting us on the worst days of our lives. I was overwhelmed at the thought of being separated from my wife and four children at this most consequential time of our lives and grateful that my life had been prolonged. Soon after that, my mind was drawn to my dear colleagues and, even more pressing, to my students. There weren’t many thoughts directed toward the grant applications or manuscripts left unwritten. It confirmed the truth of what Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught when he said:

Though I have spoken of the disciple-scholar, in the end all the hyphenated words come off. We are finally disciples—men and women of Christ.³⁵

Our scholarly, academic work will ultimately be judged by how it supported our journey of return to God. Did it help us be more worshipful? Did it, as the hymn says, give us

More faith in [our] Savior,
More sense of his care,
More joy in his service,
More purpose in prayer.³⁶

There is a beautiful Samoan proverb, “Ua pala le ma’a, ae lē pala le tala,” that can be interpreted as “the rocks will erode but the story remains.” The story of our journeys of discovery and settlement, written daily with our disciple observations and choices, is all that will remain on our journey of return. It is my prayer that as we look back on our life journey, we will see how our discipleship shaped every choice. I am grateful for the reprieve I have been given and hope that we can all journey together, surrounded by wonder and the evidence of God’s hand in our journeys. May we find ways to love and serve each other. There are signs all around us letting us know where we are and guiding us back to our own celestial home. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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