The Bednar Conference

The Bednar Conference:

Allow me to begin by recounting the best story Elder Bednar told: 

Elder Bednar and our mission President, President Whitney are first cousins. And, while Elder Bednar was living in some major city in California as a boy he would get sent to the Whitney dairy farm in an attempt to keep him from being a pansy. 

He told of one time in particular while they were teenagers and the found 2 pairs of boxing gloves. One thing led to another and soon they were engaged in a battle of the centuries and President Whitney landed a vicious punch to the new that sent Elder Bednar flying straight through a window. 

If you've ever been sent through a window in a fight you know how nerve racking it is to wait for your parent (or in my case, a young men's leader) to come and realize what you've done and then yell at you. Apparently "Uncle Don" was someone that Elder Bednar did not want to face but when he came in from doing whatever dairy farmers do he saw the window and said "oh look, the windows broken. Time for a new window." He wasn't even mad. 

This story serves purposes:

1. To show us why President Whitney is so even tempered 

2. To show that our mission President can and has beaten an Apostle of the Lord in a fight.

Other than that though the conference was great. Instead of giving a talk he just kind of talked with us about a few particular objects. One was agency, in the church we play this goofy game called "guess whats in my head" to demomstrate he called on an Elder from the audience and asked him to recite the 4th article of faith. Now that the Elder was good and nervous and stumbled through the 4th article of faith his point was proven. By calling on the elder and forcing him to stand up and answer a seemingly random question he had acted upon him, turning him into an object and thus relieving him of his agency. We play "guess what's in my head" when we demand someone a question and expect them to give a specific answer. He invited us to stop doing this with the people we teach and start treating them as agents, not objects. When we let people use their agency to learn and to talk in class the Spirit (the only true teacher) can teach them but if we don't, we draw more attention to us and to our own knowledge it's a form of priestcraft. Most of us realized that we were guilty of priestcraft trying to get people to move away from their priestcrafty churches. If you fight fire with fire all you get is more fire. 

We had a special MLC with him afterward which was basically a 2 hour Q&A tacked on to thd 4 hour general Q&A we just had with him. He continued talking about agency and even though the rest of the world may disagree we need to follow the teaching patterns that the Spirit brings to us. 

During the MLC he had a big emphasis on ministering one by one he talked about when Christ came to the Americas he allowed each of the Nephites present in Bountiful to feel the nail prints in his hands and feet and the spear wound in his side. This would have taken some insane amount of time like 14-16 hours. And on the same day he blessed the children one by one. He told us that ministering one by one was the Saviors way and invited us to do that with the missionaries in our zones and also with those we work with.

All in All, it was a great conference.

Love y'all,

Elder Murdoch  

All I've got for pictures is a grainy photo of us and Elder Bednar, enjoy!

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