Receptors of Truth

At the end of each semester, students are asked to evaluate their classes. There are many items concerning the teacher and the class on the survey that are simply answered with multiple choice categories. But at the end of the survey the students can leave comments. Last semester I received a very interesting comment. One of the students said, “She tells thirty year old stories.”

When I first read that I laughed so hard I cried. Evidently he thought that because my experiences were more than a few years old they weren’t relevant or couldn’t have any meaning for him. But the reason I was laughing so hard is that it was a Book of Mormon class and the experiences we were reading and discussing were over two-thousand years old. If he didn’t like my thirty year old stories, did he also dismiss the teachings of the two-thousand year old stories?

This experience has made me stop and think about how I discount things around me. Do I refuse to learn from someone else because they are old, or poor, or different, or annoying, or any other personal characteristic? When we live in Truth we accept what is before us at its face value and not on the merits of the person speaking or the situation. We evaluate the things around us based on their value, seeking for Truths that will enrich and encourage us and dismissing things that will harm or discourage us not because of who is saying it or when it was said but because of the Truth it contains. 

When we open our hearts to Truth, it is amazing to discover how much Truth the Lord sends us in any given day and in many surprising ways.