To many, particularly those outside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Boyd K. Packer, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, may be remembered as seeming stoic, firm and unyielding in his addresses and demeanor. Those are the types of words used to describe a defender, for that is what he was — a defender of righteousness, a defender of marriage and family, a defender of the faith and a defender of the doctrine.
To those afforded closer interactions and to those LDS Church members watching closely in conferences and meetings during his later years, President Packer will be remembered as kindhearted, sensitive, caring and loving. Those are the types of words used to describe a tender man, for that is what he was as well — tender in encouraging righteousness, tender in describing marriage and family, tender in promoting faith, and tender in detailing the doctrine.
Defender and tender — they’re not mutually exclusive terms and certainly appropriate to include when considering the legacy left by President Packer, who served 45 years as an LDS Church apostle and nearly 54 years total as a General Authority. He passed away Friday, July 3 at home at the age of 90.
Tender describes how President Packer might spend time after setting apart a newly called mission president and wife, recalling how many decades earlier he deployed homing pigeons from his hometown of Brigham City to collect election-night voting results from precincts scattered across rural northern Utah. Tender describes how President Packer might call a corporate executive, encouraging him to eliminate after-midnight email and Internet use for better-managed time and increased personal rest. And tender describes how President Packer might reach out to a longtime acquaintance, offering consolation when concerned his friend might be hurting or worried.
Consider the tenderness of his April 2004 General Conference talk, simply titled “Children.” He recalled a chilly Sunday evening in Cuzco, Peru, as a young boy dressed only in a long, ragged shirt entered mid-meeting, eyeing bread on the sacrament table. Shooed away by a woman, the boy returned later and responded to then-Elder Packer’s beckon by climbing on his lap before before slipping back into the night promptly at the end of the meeting’s closing prayer.
In the same address, he spoke a young beggar boy in Japan he saw while serving there post-World War II. He told of helping a first-grader hospitalized at a government Indian school open a Christmas package, containing some Navajo fry bread and mutton pieces from his reservation home. He recounted watching refugees and interacting with children with physical or mental limitations.
Said President Packer: “There is in the scriptures, there is in what we publish, there is in what we believe there is in what we teach, counsel, commandments even warnings that we are to protect, to love, to care for, and to ‘teach [children] to walk in the ways of truth.’ To betray them is utterly unthinkable.”
In concluding his final General Conference address, given in the April 2015 Saturday morning session, President Packer underscored in tender fashion all that was important to him — his marriage and family, the love and hope found in his children and grandchildren, his call to witness of Jesus Christ, and his testimony of the redemptive and empowering nature of the Savior’s Atonement.
“Sister Donna Smith Packer and I have been side by side in marriage for nearly 70 years. When it comes to my wife, the mother of our children, I am without words. The feeling is so deep and the gratitude so powerful that I am left almost without expression. The greatest reward we have received in this life, and the life to come, is our children and our grandchildren. Toward the end of our mortal days together, I am grateful for each moment I am with her side by side and for the promise the Lord has given that there will be no end.
“I bear witness that Jesus is the Christ and the Son of the living God. He stands at the head of the Church. Through his Atonement and the power of the priesthood, families which are begun in mortality can be together through the eternities. The Atonement, which can reclaim each one of us, bears no scars. That means that no matter what we have done or where we have been or how something happened, if we truly repent, he has promised that he would atone. And when he atoned, that settled that. There are so many of us who are thrashing around, as it were, with feelings of guilt, not knowing quite how to escape. You escape by accepting the Atonement of Christ, and all that was heartache can turn to beauty and love and eternity.
“I am so grateful for the blessings of the Lord Jesus Christ, for the power of procreation, for the power of redemption, for the Atonement — the Atonement which can wash clean every stain no matter how difficult or who long or how many times repeated. The Atonement can put you free again to move forward, cleanly and worthily, to pursue that path that you have chosen in life.
“I bear witness that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, that the Atonement is not a general thing that is for the whole Church. The Atonement is individual, and if you have something that is bothering you — sometimes so long ago you can hardly remember it — put the Atonement to work. It will clean it up, and you, as does he, will remember your sins no more.”