Categories: All Articles, Bishop, Leadership, My Heart is Brim with Joy, Prophets
A Prophet Is Not Without Honor
Every person in this Church needs the opportunity to serve. Testimonies grow and faith increases when one learns to lose himself in the service of others. ‘Everyone needs a calling—even the bishop’s wife.
It is the bishop’s responsibility to determine through the Spirit what calling each person should have. It is his responsibility to issue that calling. Most people recognize the bishop’s authority and know from whence the inspiration came to extend the calling that will be changing their lives and requiring their time. Most people readily accept the calling and the challenge.
The challenge for the bishop comes when the Spirit directs him to issue the calling to his wife. The wife knows the bishop. She knew him before he became the bishop. She knows that he’s just an ordinary man with lots of failings.
It was my job as bishop to issue a call to my wife to be the mother-education teacher in Relief Society. After we had gotten the children to bed I sat my wife down in the living room. I was nervous about how she’d receive her new assignment. I put on my best bishoply face and air, and issued the call.
“What!?” she responded. “Are you sure? Have you prayed about this? If a real bishop had asked me to do this it would be different.”
To be sure, it was a humbling experience for us both.
Jesus went with His disciples to Galilee where He’d grown up, and where the people had known him as a child and as a youth. They were astonished when He began preaching, and asked one another where He could have learned such wisdom.
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.
“But Jesus said unto them, a prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” (Mark 6:3-4).
What would it be like to live with a real prophet? What if the boy you married grew up to become the prophet and president of the Church? That actually happens to some girls. Would you see him as the prophet or as a lesser mortal?
I was highly interested when Marjorie Pay Hinckley came close to answering those questions. She related that one day she was watching her husband walk across the room, and thought to herself (here comes the insight and wisdom), “What a cute, little old man!”
A prophet or a bishop or a stake president is just an ordinary man with an extraordinary responsibility and calling. He still has failings. He still makes mistakes.
Marjorie Hinckley related another time when this great man who was her husband spent his day crawling around under his son’s house fixing a plumbing problem. When the repairs had been made, Marjorie and Gordon returned to their own home where they found the beans scorched and burned that Marjorie had left cooking on the stove.
Gordon just shook his head, and went out to water the lawn. He turned on the faucet, and then followed the hose to see where the sprinkler was set. It led into the garage where the sprinkler was going round and round. He’d forgotten that he’d put the sprinkler there.
After getting the sprinkler properly set on the lawn he returned to the house where he sat down heavily and asked his wife, “What’s going to become of us?”
We need to be gentle with each other, and to make allowances for our humanity. This is especially so in our marriages, and with those who have been called to preside over us.