Speeches by Topic Topics | Baptism
I am honored by the opportunity to speak to you today. I love to come to the BYU campus. I stand before you as “true blue.” As it has already been said, my shade of blue was painted in Cache Valley at Utah State University. My husband’s blue has a reddish tint and our children’s blues are of various hues. Yet when we see the color blue—any blue—we cheer.
There is something very stimulating about a university campus. Where there is a learning atmosphere there is energy, and increasing your knowledge is progressive. You are advancing on the path of life.
Now you may be puzzled a
I am honored and humbled to be here to share these few moments with you. I am honored because it has been my privilege to be a faculty member at this very special place for 41 years. I am humbled because I feel that during those years I have been associated with some of the finest young people in the world. I hope that you can hear and feel my heart when I say that I genuinely care about your well-being and have earnestly asked for the Lord’s blessing to be with us this morning. I pray that we might communicate by and feel the affirmation of the Spirit of the Lord as we visit about some imp
I wish to speak about a unique and inspiring chapter in Church history. It took place in recent years among the beautiful people of Africa. Too often we have misconceptions about Africa and its people. Africa is referred to as the Dark Continent, and the media usually portrays Africans as primitive, starving, or at war with each other. One African official observed that the darkest thing about Africa is America’s ignorance of it (see James H. Robinson, in African American Quotations, ed. Richard Newman [Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1998], p. 18). When I was in Africa several years a
Many years ago I went on a mission to New Zealand, and the day I arrived I had the opportunity of meeting President Matthew Cowley for the first time. He was to be my mission president. During the next two years we became close friends, and during the latter part of my mission I had the honor of living in the mission home with the Cowleys and traveling with President Cowley throughout New Zealand.
He was an excellent teacher and a most interesting person. Some years later, while he was a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, I had the opportunity of bringing him here to BYU o
What Is It to Be “Born Again”?
One day, as I was traveling on a plane to New England, I entered into a conversation with a young stewardess sitting in the seat next to me. Most members of our Church know how to steer a conversation toward the gospel, and, before long, we were talking about religion. She told me that she had recently been converted from her former manner of living and was now “saved.” I congratulated her. Then she added that she was now a “born-again Christian.”
I asked her how she was born again, and she told me that she had accepted Jesus Christ as h
