I have a fascination with words, and with the ways in which people use them.  When I come across a well-turned phrase in a sacrament meeting talk or in my reading, I write it down, turn it over and over in my mind; and put it in my journal to retain it for future use.

Sometimes people’s minds or tongues stumble as they’re speaking, and out come creative words that I call “near misses.”  I collect these.  Some of them can be very funny.  Others give me pause for thought, and can be instructive.

Such was the case recently when the sacrament meeting speaker confused the words buffered and buffeted.  There is a one-letter difference in those two words, but that one letter reverses the meaning.  The speaker meant one thing, but said the other.

A buffer is a protection or a cushion used to protect someone or something from being buffeted, pummeled or battered.  For instance, old tires are often fastened to docks to act as a buffer between the boats and the pier so that waves or speed don’t throw a boat against the pier in a damaging way.  Another example of a buffer are the windbreaks of trees that are planted on the windward side of every farm house that you pass as you drive along the freeway through southern Idaho.  A third buffer which we hear a lot about is the ozone layer high in our atmosphere which protects us from the damaging effects of ultraviolet rays.

Another example of a buffer can be found in D&C 84:88.  The Lord says there that “I will go before your face.  I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.”

I love that verse.  It’s one of my very favorites of all scriptures.  It puts a picture in my mind that is extremely comforting.  The great buffeter is constantly looking for ways to pummel me, but because of the buffer that the Savior, the Spirit, and angels put around me, he can’t get to me.  The adversary can’t get to me unless I allow my buffer to become weakened.  That happens when I sin, when I don’t honor my covenants, when I fail to feed my spirit through study of the scriptures, and when I fail to pray.

President Heber J. Grant said that prayer “places around us a safeguard.”  (Conference Report, October 1944, pp. 6-13).  He told about his brother, Fred, who ran away from home when the abuses of Fred’s stepfather became intolerable.  Fred and Heber were both sons of Jedediah M. Grant, a counselor in the First Presidency to President Brigham Young.  President Grant said that, “I was told by Brother (Marriner) W. Merrill, at that time bishop of Richmond, Utah, that the night after my brother ran away, he, Brother Merrill, went to bed rebellious. He said: ‘I turned to my wife, Sister Merrill, and said, I feel that the Lord should have inspired me to take that boy away from the man who has reared him. He has abused and beaten him. His father is dead, and his mother has left the Church and now he has gone out into the world with no hope that he will ever come back again.’

“And that night, so Brother Merrill told me, he had a dream in which he saw my brother in all kinds of wicked company in many different states, and he saw that a light surrounded him. In the dream he said: ‘What does that light mean?’ And a voice answered: ‘That is the influence that a faithful, God-fearing and God-serving father can have over a son to keep him from going astray, and to eventually bring him back to the truth.’

“Years later when my brother did come back and joined the Church, as I related here last conference, he fulfilled Brother Merrill's dream, because Brother Merrill said that he saw him laboring all over the Church, bringing wayward boys to a knowledge of the truth, and he did labor from Canada to Mexico in that service.”  (Ibid).

We all need to be buffered to protect us from being buffeted.  Our prayers provide effective buffers not only for ourselves, but for those for whom we pray.  Let us never send our children out into the world each morning without placing around them the protective shield that family prayer offers.  When they stray, let us never cease praying for them so that light can protectively surround them even when their choices are not what they should be.  Let us daily fill our minds with the words of the prophets from scriptures and conference reports.  Let us keep and honor our covenants.

These things will go far toward keeping us buffered against being buffeted by the master buffeter.