Everyone Here Said Yes

This week in seminary we started the book of Jeremiah, and the very first thing the Lord says to him has been sitting with me ever since.

Before Jeremiah had a body, before he was a baby, God already knew him, and I think that’s worth slowing down on, because it’s a pretty unusual thing to believe. A lot of the world assumes that each of us just starts, that you didn’t exist and then one day you were born and here you are. As Latter-day Saints we believe something really different, which is that our spirits, the actual person each of us is, existed long before this earth was made, and will keep on existing long after we leave it.

You can find pieces of that in the Bible if you go looking. Jeremiah is one. The book of Hebrews calls God “the Father of spirits,” and Ecclesiastes talks about the spirit going back to the God who gave it, which sounds a lot like it was with Him to begin with.

And then the Restoration says it plainly. When the Lord showed Abraham the spirits, He told him this:

So when I look at the person sitting next to me, I’m not looking at somebody who showed up thirty or forty or eighty years ago. I’m looking at someone who has existed, as themselves, for longer than any of us can measure, and who is going to keep existing forever. That changes how I want to treat them, and I think it’s where unity actually starts.

Abraham saw more than that. He saw all of those spirits gathered together, and he saw the plan laid out in front of them.

And when the Lord asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, He describes what that moment sounded like.

We also know it wasn’t a small decision, because there was a fight over it, and the fight was about agency.

We’re taught that everyone who comes to this earth chose to follow the Father’s plan and to accept a Savior, and I believe every person in this room was there for that. So here’s the thought I want us to hold onto. We have already been unified once. Every one of us, together, made the same right decision. I picture us saying it out loud, and Job says that when the foundations of the earth were laid, the sons of God shouted for joy.

Then we came down here, and a veil came down with us. We walked into this life without the cliff notes and without the cheat sheet, and we have to figure out the answers while we’re in the middle of taking the test. That was the deal, and we all agreed to it.

This past Monday at six in the morning I asked my seminary class to go around the room and name one piece of divine potential they could see in somebody else sitting there, something already in that person that’s going to shape their future.

When I walked out of that room I looked up, at the people on the road and the cashier and the kid sitting alone at lunch, and it hit me that every one of them was there too, and every one of them said yes.

So think about what we do. Somebody makes a bad choice, or a whole string of them, and we take one bad day of their test and use it to grade their entire character, and sometimes their whole eternal existence. We forget that the biggest question on the test, they already got right, and they got it right standing next to us. The driver who cut you off this morning, the neighbor with the sign in their yard you can’t stand, the family member who doesn’t call anymore, and even the person doing the things you’d never do, all of them stood up for the same agency you did. The person misusing it right now is using the very gift you both fought for, together, on the same side.

That doesn’t excuse what anyone has done, and some of us carry real wounds from other people’s choices, and remembering where someone came from doesn’t mean we owe them access to us. It means they’re the same kind of person we are, fighting the same battle with agency and learning control and learning to choose, just in a different arena with different weapons and different wounds. There’s a moment in the Pearl of Great Price where God weeps, and Enoch asks Him why, and this is His answer.

Their own blood. That’s about as plain a picture of a family that forgot it was a family as I can think of.

Under the veil we forget all of that pretty fast, and I want to tell you about a guy I know who shows how. He has never lost an argument, and it’s honestly not because he’s that smart. It’s mostly because the other person is never actually there. He has these arguments in the car, in the shower, and at two in the morning when he should be asleep. Somebody sends him a text that just says “fine,” with a period at the end, and by lunch he’s got the whole case built, and he plays his part and then very generously plays theirs too. He writes their lines for them, and he wins every single time, and he’s never once thought to just ask them what they meant, because why would he when he’s the one who wrote it. I know this guy pretty well. I see him in the mirror every morning.

And part of why we live in our heads like that is that most of us walk around with our heads down. Some of that’s the phone, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve never gotten a screen time report that made me want to throw my phone in a lake. Some of it is a lot heavier.

There’s somebody in this room right now who walked in looking completely fine, and underneath that is something they haven’t told anybody. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General put out an advisory on loneliness and isolation, and it found that about one in two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness in recent years, and that the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. President Uchtdorf named who’s behind it. Speaking of Satan, he said, “He aims to weaken God’s children by isolating us from each other.”

So here’s what I want to do. On the left are the things we do with our heads down, inside our own heads. On the right is what it looks like to lift your head, and every one of them comes from something the Savior actually did.

Simon is the first two rows. Jesus is eating at his house when a woman the whole town has an opinion about kneels at the Savior’s feet and washes them with her tears, and Simon doesn’t say a word out loud. He has the argument in his head.

I love that word answering, because Simon never said anything. Jesus answered the argument going on in his head, and then asked him whether he saw her, when Simon had been looking right at her. President Uchtdorf says that when our attention is on Christ, “we learn to see as He sees—looking on the heart rather than the outward appearance.”

The doorway row comes from a study run in 1970 and published in 1973. Researchers at Princeton asked seminary students, people training to be ministers, to walk across campus and give a short talk, some of them on the Good Samaritan. On the way, each one passed a man slumped in a doorway with his head down, coughing and groaning. Of the students who weren’t in a hurry, 63 percent stopped to help, and of the ones told they were running late, 10 percent did, and it made no real difference which talk they were carrying. Some of them literally stepped over him on the way to talk about the Good Samaritan. So you’ve got two people with their heads down, one hurting and one hurrying.

And in 3 Nephi 17, the Savior was the one with somewhere to be. He’d finished teaching, He told the people He had to go, and then He looked around one more time.

Every row on the left is something we do inside our own heads, and every row on the right starts the same way, by lifting your head and actually looking at the person in front of you.

When the Savior taught His disciples how to pray, I want you to listen to the pronouns.

There isn’t a single “I” or “me” or “my” in it. It’s our Father, give us, forgive us, lead us. Even when He was teaching us how to talk to God, He was pulling us together. Private prayer matters, and He taught that too, a few verses earlier, but I think a lot of us have drifted into living our faith as if it’s just me and God and nobody else in the room.

The sacrament we just took works the same way. President Uchtdorf pointed out that it’s the only ordinance we receive where we aren’t addressed by name, and the only names used are those of God the Father and Jesus Christ. And listen to how the priest speaks for all of us.

“We ask thee,” for “all those who partake of it.” The same bread and the same water for the person you agree with and the person you don’t.

When we’re baptized, it’s in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Those are three distinct beings, and when the Savior taught the Nephites how to baptize, He said this about them.

Three separate beings, and perfectly one. Then, just before Gethsemane, the Savior prayed for us to be one the same way.

I think that takes a lot of pressure off, because being one doesn’t mean we all have to turn into the same person. We existed as ourselves before we ever came here, and the Godhead shows us that you can be completely distinct and still be completely one in purpose and in love.

And then President Uchtdorf said the line I haven’t been able to get past.

I want to end on a beach. On the night the Savior was arrested, Peter followed Him to the high priest’s palace and stood in the courtyard trying to stay warm.

That night he denied Him three times, and John puts that fire of coals right in the middle of it. The Greek word John uses for that kind of charcoal fire shows up only twice in the whole New Testament. The first time is this one, the worst night of Peter’s life. The second time is after the Resurrection, when Peter and the others have gone back to fishing and been out all night and caught nothing.

The resurrected Lord of the universe is standing on the shore cooking breakfast, on the same kind of fire Peter denied Him beside, for His disciples, including the friend who had denied Him. And when they’ve eaten, He asks Peter the same question three times, and it’s hard to miss that Peter had denied Him three times, and He calls him by name every time.

He didn’t grade Peter on his worst night. He fed him first, and then He sent him to go feed everybody else.

That’s honestly where something I started came from. I call it the Thirteenth Cookie, and it’s about as simple as it gets. When you bake a dozen cookies, you keep twelve for the people you already love, and the thirteenth was never yours. It leaves the house for somebody you’ve never really met. There’s no speech and no pamphlet, just a plate, a name, and a reason to walk over.

The Thirteenth Cookie

Bake a dozen. Keep twelve.
Give the thirteenth to someone new.

1. 1

   Share a cookie

   Walk over and hand it to them. That’s the whole script.

2. 2

   Learn their name

   Ask it, say it back once, and keep it.

3. 3

   Remember what they love

   One thing. Bring it back next time. That’s the callback.

Obliterate Awkward Silence

And that third one is where the magic actually is. The next time you see them, you ask about the thing they told you, and that’s the moment they find out somebody listened. It turns out that’s exactly how the Lord treats us.

People are usually afraid this will be awkward, and I get it. But there’s research behind it too. When strangers were handed a small kindness, they felt better about it than the people giving it expected, and in one study of people who set out to talk to strangers for a week, most conversations happened with the very first person they approached. The kindness lands better than you think, and people say yes more than you think.

One honest thing first. Some distance is there for a good reason. No one is expected to keep enduring abuse, loving someone doesn’t mean handing them a key to your house, and Christ-centered unity never asks anyone to put themselves back in harm’s way. Even where there needs to be distance, you can stop writing their lines. And if your capacity is small right now, letting someone bring a cookie to you counts too.

So here’s my invitation. This week, choose someone safe, one person you’ve already answered for, somebody whose lines you’ve been writing. Bake the extra one, ask about allergies, or just walk over empty-handed, and learn their name and one thing they love, and then let them tell you who they are.

Every person in this room already said yes once, and they said it standing next to you. Somebody near you is waiting for someone to remember that with them.