PROVO — Lance Wickman led a platoon through jungles and rice paddies during the Vietnam War with a critical tool, a lensatic compass.
The compass was "worth, at most, a few dollars in the market place, but of immeasurable value to soldiers swallowed up in an alien wilderness," said Elder Wickman, now general counsel for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a member of its First Quorum of the Seventy as he delivered the Campus Education Week devotional address Tuesday at Brigham Young University's Marriott Center.
"No matter how hedged up the way, no matter how dangerous and foreboding the surroundings, the compass faithfully led to safety the soldier wise enough to follow its bearings," said Elder Wickman.
He suggested today's world can be a spiritual war zone, but one where guidance is available from Jesus Christ.
"Jesus Christ is, literally, 'the man in the white robe,' " Elder Wickman said, referring to Lehi's dream in the Book of Mormon. "He is the light, the beacon, the luminescent compass that enlightens every soul coming into the world."
But just as Elder Wickman, who earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, had to learn to use the lensatic compass at Ranger School, he said followers of Christ must learn how to follow their compass.
"This, of course, is familiar doctrine," Elder Wickman said. "The challenge is in the practicalities of knowing how to come unto Christ . . . in knowing how to follow him."
He called that knowledge the key to wisdom, a quality lacking today, and suggested LDS Church members can be lost when they become complacent.
"Are there some of us in our present go-along-get-along culture who have slouched into a casualness about spiritual things?" he asked.
The danger is that mists of darkness threaten to obscure the path, Elder Wickman said.
"Even would-be disciples in the very Church of Christ may at times experience periodic 'white out' conditions in the blizzards of Babylon and not see the 'word of the Lord' that is right in front of them."
He said the tools necessary for emerging from such danger are reverence for the Lord, faith and the willingness to follow the compass, to proceed "from grace to grace," as Jesus did.
"Proceeding from 'grace to grace' is the steady accretion of knowledge of God as it becomes reflected in our countenances and our behavior," Elder Wickman said. "The greatest treasure of all — the ultimate treasure — is to eventually come to a fulness of knowledge."
Television, magazines and the Internet are among media influences that may cause many to lose their way, he said.
"Even our very homes are no longer an automatic refuge from such things. It is as though these 'mists' aggressively chase us, like the ancient destroying angel, seeping in through cracks in the doors and the windows, over the transom and across the threshold. They are before us with the single touch of a remote control button or a computer keystroke."
Jesus Christ is the perfect guide out of "the dark and dreary waste because he has already covered that ground," Elder Wickman said.
"Always there is the word — the Word of Wisdom, our eternal reference point, the man in the white robe, our everlasting compass — illuminating, reassuring, beckoning us to those hidden treasures, 'even peace in this world and eternal life in the world to come.' "
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com