COMMUNICATION

Communicating is one of the most important things we do. We are in this world together, and what a lonesome place it would be if we were really alone. Can you imagine anything worse than Robinson Crusoe without Friday? That would be about the saddest thing we could have. It emphasizes to me the importance of working together.

Communication of information involves both a sender and a receiver. The gospel flows from the Creator of the world who sees the end from the beginning. It flows to all who are able to receive it. Too many of those who are blind and deaf to this flow of information foolishly deny the existence of the Creator.

Written in the many languages of the world are all sorts of messages that completely escape us because we don't speak those particular languages. We haven't yet found the appropriate Rosetta stone.

Soon after my family first arrived in Pima, Arizona, our horses got loose one night and broke into Bishop Philemon Merrill's alfalfa fields next door. Those horses felt awfully good the next morning when I was given the chore of getting them out. Just as I was about to coax the last horse through the gate, the whole herd broke and ran back into the fields, and I had to start all over again. When they broke for the second time, all my patience was gone, and I began explaining the situation to them in very descriptive terms. It was a performance I'm still ashamed of. I was finally able to get them out, but I had been overheard by Charles Ferron, who had the farm on the other side of Bishop Merrill's place.

Three years later I went to work for Brother Ferron for several summers, which helped our family finances considerably. On one occasion he asked me, "Henry, do you know the first time I ever saw you?" I said, "No, I don't know." He said, "Do you remember when you were getting horses out of Bishop Merrill's?" I acknowledged uneasily that I did. He said, "I'll tell you what I said—I said, `It would have been all right if Brother Eyring had just drowned that boy when he was born.'" I think by then I had redeemed myself with Brother Ferron, but it was an uphill struggle. What I needed was a better way to communicate with those confounded horses.

Anyway, communications are essential to our functioning in the world and to our relationship with its Creator. The Creator of the universe has implanted a message in every created thing. Geology, astronomy, physics—all science is really nothing more than an effort to read those messages.

The universe is so large that the best reflecting telescopes enable us to see stars by light that started journeying toward us 12 billion years ago. The subsequent history of these stars is completely unknown. They may have long since ceased to exist. Do you think the Lord ever goes out there? If he does, when you pray to him out there what happens? Nobody on earth knows how to send a message faster than the velocity of light. And so, if you prayed today and the Lord was on the far side of his ranch, clear out there at the farthest star, it would take 12 billion years for your prayer to get there and another 12 billion years for an answer to get back. By that time, it would be out of date.

I don't really know the solution to this hypothetical problem, but that doesn't keep me from telling you what I believe. I think either the Lord has an organization that takes care of things or else he has a way of communicating (which I suspect is true) very much faster than anything we know about. In fact, there seems no reasonable alternative to the conclusion that the Creator has methods of immediate communication unknown and perhaps unknowable to man.

Somehow, the universe is coordinated and regulated by influences that transcend the laws of physics now known. I don't think that just because people on this planet don't know how to send messages any faster is any proof to me that God doesn't know how to do it. So I'm going to pray just the same, no matter whether he's all the way at the other side of the ranch or just part way. He's running this thing. I know that because of how magnificently it runs.