General authority speaks on personal growth
Elder Gregory A. Schwitzer, a member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave five ways which students can improve their lives through self-discipline during a valley-wide fireside at the Spectrum on Sunday.
Schwitzer said students can better themselves through integrity, which included civility and honesty to all men as well as fidelity. He said having integrity requires more than just giving the facts – it requires also giving the correct impression of the facts.
He said the next way was to make sure to always have a clean and organized living environment.
“This is a tremendous blessing in terms of helping you develop self-discipline,” he said. “Make orderliness a part of your life. To do this may require you to get rid of some excesses in life and learn to retain the essential.”
Schwitzer gave an allegory of a young man who had become stuck in the swamp. It was not until the young man had taken off his backpack full of cares that he was able to wade out of the swamp.
Schwitzer said the third way was to practice self-denial of all things that do not contribute to progression.
“Entertainment really makes a very small contribution to your success if life,” he said. “This will require you to think clearly and consciously about your priorities.”
He said many families are destroyed by pursuits of entertainments such as pornography or the excessive pursuit of sports or addictive media.
“By creating a mental environment in which you own your thoughts, or even better, that Christ owns you, you gain self-discipline,” he said.
Schwitzer said the fourth way was to “identify and attach yourself to a higher cause in life than yourself.”
“Every destination of greatness has a higher cause as its motivating force,” he said.
He said without a higher cause, there is no motivating force to become like Jesus Christ. It requires not only identifying as a member of the LDS Church, but internalizing its principles until it defines oneself.
The last way Schwitzer told students to better their lives was to be obedient to a righteous cause. He said it is a process of consistently following the commandments and making and keeping covenants with God.
“This is why God gives us commandments,” he said. “They are the schoolmasters of exaltation, and obedience to them helps us develop that in the individual. Obedience is an endurance skill – it is not a one-time affair. Obedience is much more than making a commitment and talking about it.”
Jade Johnson, a student at USU who attended the event, said she enjoyed Schwitzer’s emphasis on the importance of building character.
“It’s so important to be honest and self-disciplined in this time of our lives, and he really brought that back to my attention.” Johnson said.
Schwitzer said there are many differences between modern education and ancient education.
“In the early days, the role and purpose of higher education often was rooted deeply in religion,” he said.
He said modern institutions provide students with an amazing amount of information, both factual and nonfactual, which can be a blessing but may also become harmful.
“Something has been lost in our education system, and that being the broader purpose of obtaining an education,” Schwitzer said. “There is so much emphasis placed today on the acquisition of factual knowledge, which, when you find it out, really turns out to be knowledge about opinions. Today, the pursuit of information has separated us from the development of character.
Schwitzer said many blessings come from diligently paying tithing, which is one-tenth of church members’ annual income. He said even as young newlyweds in college, he and his wife paid their tithing.
“If I were to say to you that if you’ll pay your tithing, you’ll be healthy, you’ll develop new skills and you’ll have a wonderful marital relationship, you would say, ‘Bring it on! I’ll pay my tithing for that,'” he said. “But the fact is, is that sometimes the way that the blessing comes, comes in a way that we have a hard time recognizing it until later, but it’s a blessing nonetheless.”
–sara.mcquivey@gmail.com