“If Ye Have Love One to Another”
I conclude with the most important discipline of all, connecting and converging and conveying the many meanings of all our other disciplines. I speak of discipleship, our devotion to the Father and Son and the gospel they brought, for it is the gospel of Jesus Christ which gives all ultimate meaning to the nets and controls and boundaries that mark the dimensions of the court on which we improve ourselves.
Every year as school starts, I worry through the days and nights, praying you will be safe and happy and successful. We want you to have friends and to feel welcome and to feel loved. And we want you to understand that only you can provide those guarantees to each other. In a world which has some strife and stress and disappointment, we will never have too much friendship or too many arms extended to bear us up and lead us forward. When Christ came to his final days with his disciples, he summarized all that he had said to them in one great reminder, fearing perhaps that when their own disappointments came or when pressures would increase, they might not be able to recall every commandment on every scroll and every teaching from every discourse. He then said, as if there were but one way to remember it all,
A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciple, if ye have love one to another. [John 13:34–35]
The brotherly and sisterly expression of that love is the ultimate test of our loyalty to him. It is our highest form of discipline.
All of us have seen this special miracle work again and again, whether that be in our own lives, in the lives of our family, or in the lives of those with whom we’ve shared some experience. I remember vividly the dreadful circumstance into which a young lady had managed to fall several years ago. She was not a BYU student but was a Latter-day Saint, and yet her very life seemed to be disintegrating before our eyes. As a result of trying to play with the net down, trying to live without rules and without restraint, she was experiencing the moral and spiritual stupefaction of a broken marriage, illicit moral behavior, dark drug abuse, and finally physical violence. She was descending into a personal hell from which no one seemed to be able to retrieve her and from which she personally did not have the wish or the will to turn away.
Her mother and others who had great concern for her had been in contact with me. Her Church leaders had tried to help. All seemed to no avail. The weeks became months, and human life unraveled before our eyes.
Then something happened. A lifelong friend of this young woman contacted her and tried, with love, to open her eyes and touch her heart. When neither her eyes nor her heart seemed to be yielding, this friend, this sister in the family of God who understood Paul’s reminder that when one member suffers all suffer with it, grabbed the lapels of her friend’s heavy winter coat and shook it with all her might. She shook her with all the strength her 105 pounds could muster, and, sobbing, she said through her tears, “Look at yourself. Don’t you see what you are becoming? Look at yourself! I can’t stand it anymore. I love you, and you’re breaking my heart.” At that she let go of the lapels of the big heavy coat and with tears streaming from her eyes turned and ran away.
The young lady whose life was in such jeopardy later recalled for me her response to that encounter. She said, “I don’t know exactly what happened in that moment. Perhaps I am not likely ever to know. I had been talked to by many people, and little of it had meant anything to me. But if I live to be a hundred, I will never forget what I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears as this my childhood friend looked at me with utter anguish and screamed into my soul, “I love you, and you are breaking my heart.”
Today that girl is the beautiful, happy, safe, and productive young woman which she once had been and which surely God meant her to be. She has been remarkably successful in a graduate program at a very good university. She is fully active in the Church, and she is devoted to a life of responsibility and respectability—all because someone in her own way said at the right time and with the right intent that whatever disappointments there had been, these two were forever sisters and disciples of Christ. That stunning declaration not only changed a life, but it quite literally saved this one. We need such brothers and sisters nearby us.
We also need a Father in Heaven who stays by us in our times of necessity and fear. A great Christian writer once said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1967), chapter 6, p. 81). We may find in our lives that God’s love for us may also require a good firm grasp on our lapels.
“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). May God bless us with controlled and disciplined lives during this coming year while we learn and grow and love together. This is a wonderful time in your life and this is a wonderful place to be. Good luck, with the net up, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Am
