Spiritual Promptings

I don’t intend to share many personal experiences on this blog.  However, I share the following in the hopes that the lesson learned will be helpful to you.

My current job in the temple is working with those who come to receive their own ordinances.  It is an assignment I enjoy very much.  A couple of months ago, a new missionary came through with his father to receive his own endowment.  As I visited with his father, I learned that this young man had lost his mother when he was a young teenager and had been raised since that time by his single father.  I’m sure it had not been easy for this young man.

As we were concluding, the spirit prompted me to share a scripture with this young man.  Regrettably, I ignored the prompting.  I missed an opportunity to bless this young man’s life in a way that the Lord wanted him blessed and that I believe would have helped him on his mission.  I didn’t do it, because doing so would have been against the “rules” and the training we receive.  I have deeply regretted it since that day.  However, I am confident that the Lord will find another way to get the message to this young man.

Pondering on this experience has taught me something valuable.  The promptings we receive from the Spirit are almost always for something we are not planning to do.  If we were going to do something anyway, the Spirit would have no need to prompt us.  Most of the promptings will be to do something we are not considering or may even be something we don’t want to do.  Perhaps this is why it is easy to ignore or argue with the promptings we receive.  They require us to alter our plans or what we are doing.  Understanding this, however, may also help us to recognize these promptings especially when they are subtle. 

We had a good discussion in our teacher’s quorum about how the Spirit operates in our lives.  I believe this is something we all must learn and experience for ourselves.  It probably varies somewhat from individual to individual.  It is a little difficult to describe adequately to another person.  Elder Packer once described it as trying to explain what salt tastes like.  You know it, but how do you explain it to someone else who maybe had never tasted salt.  His talk “The Candle of the Lord” (Ensign Jan 1983 or search on church website) is one of the best I have read on how the Spirit works in our lives.