Speaking on the value of faith at this time of the world's history, Relief Society General President Julie B. Beck began her remarks by sharing an experience her mother, Geraldine Hamblin Bangerter, had while serving as the first Relief Society president in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the late 1950s.
As the wife of a mission president, Sister Bangerter lived in a foreign country with no understanding of the language and even less familiarity with the city streets. With homemade maps in hand and her non-English speaking counselor by her side, she endeavored to hold the first Relief Society meeting in Brazil. The meeting consisted of nine sisters, a five-minute talk explaining visiting teaching and Sister Bangerter's short testimony in Portuguese.
"Out of that small group and others like that has grown a wonderful, vibrant, faith-filled body of women in the country of Brazil," said Sister Beck. "They are talented, educated, intelligent, fabulous leaders and they would never be what they are without the gospel of Jesus Christ and their faith.
"Sometimes we complicate the gospel to such an extent," she said, "that we forget what we're really about."
Sister Beck said the gospel is simply about "knowing that we have a Father in Heaven, it's about knowing we have a Savior and making covenants with Him. It's about knowing we have a restored gospel on the earth and that we are led by a prophet and it's about testifying to one another about those truths."
Sister Beck read various scriptures, including 2 Nephi 28, which describe the world today and the trials that are to come and then said, "That's the world I get to live in and navigate in. How wonderful, because with that challenge comes our opportunity because we have the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. We have truth and we know how to act and how to get answers. We aren't lost and left alone."
Like those sisters in Brazil, Sister Beck said, the women of the Church today can make the Relief Society organization "something wonderful where we can support and help each other to grow in our faith and help ourselves navigate in this world."
Sister Beck also said the scriptures testify to her that "the women of the Church, the women of the world, have half the Plan (of Salvation). We have the female half to take care of and if we don't do our part, no one else is going to do it for us. We can't delegate it, we can't pass it off to anyone, it's ours. We can refuse it, we can deny it, but it's still our part and we're accountable for it. There will come a day when we will remember what we promised before we were born. We will remember that we fought in a great conflict for the privilege to have half of this responsibility ... The half of the Plan that creates life, that nurtures life, that causes growth, that influences everything else was given to us."
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