BYU had quite a scare last fall when Penn State tried to recruit away football coach Kalani Sitake. The university’s president joked Tuesday that he felt a similar jolt when Sitake charmingly scarfed Pop-Tarts on national television after a bowl victory last month.
“I’m honestly a little worried that Pop-Tarts might try and come to hire Coach Sitake away from us,” Shane Reese told laughing students during the opening campus devotional of the winter semester.
What really mattered to Reese was the way Sitake displayed courageous urgency about BYU’s true mission in front of a national television audience of 8.7 million people.
“These guys are great spiritual men,” Sitake told ESPN’s sideline reporter about his players. “They have a testimony and belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ. We get to celebrate Christ’s birth around this time. I’m really thankful I get to be around faithful men.”
Reese also said the prophetic urgency displayed by President Dallin H. Oaks and President Jeffrey R. Holland while they led BYU from 1971-89 and afterward is a model for the campus community.
Reese called them “two mighty prophets, seers and revelators who have shaped, influenced and inspired this campus for the past 50 years ... If there were ever two patron saints of BYU, they would surely be President Holland and President Oaks.”
“Their influence on this campus during this second century is immeasurable and ongoing,” he added. “It will endure forever.”
Reese noted that both men also were BYU students. He said President Oaks was 1 of 1: He graduated from BYU High School and BYU, became its president and now is the chairman of BYU’s board of trustees as the new president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Reese said President Oaks once told him that BYU students today need to have models of civil dialogue and disagreement. He said there are too few examples of this in the public square and that it is incumbent upon BYU and the church’s other campuses to model it in classrooms and university life.
President Holland died on Dec. 27. He had served as the church commissioner of education over BYU and as chair of the executive committee of the board.
“They entered this school to learn, they went forth to serve and they never once stopped serving,” Reese said.
He shared lessons from each man about urgency. He said President Oaks is known for his immense capacity to work with urgency. President Holland awoke from a coma two years ago with a call to more urgently pray, testify of Christ and focus the church on the Savior.
Reese has championed the concept “Becoming BYU” during his presidency, which is in its third year. He used a quote from President Oaks to tell students that the BYU experience is designed to help them become what they can.
“In contrast to the institutions of the world,” President Oaks said in 2000, “which teach us to know something, the gospel of Jesus Christ challenges us to become something.”
Reese asked students not to miss that opportunity but to make the most of it.
“I pray that you will make the very most of your time at Brigham Young University,” he said. “Become something. Become a disciple.”
He invited students to ask themselves two questions:
- What is God revealing to you personally that asks for more urgency from you?
- What have prophets, seers and revelators taught with urgency that invites you to act with an equal urgency?
Reese told the students that he and his wife, Wendy, believe in them. “President Holland believes in you. President Oaks, the living prophet of the living God, believes in you. Jesus Christ himself bled and died because he believes in you. So, please, believe in yourself. Believe in him who is mighty to save. Believe in and work for those good things to come.”
Reese delivered his message at the Marriott Center to 8,387, who received BYU 150 pins as part of the school’s ongoing sesquicentennial celebration.
Wendy Reese also spoke. She encouraged students to follow their heavenly GPS, a three-step set of directions rooted in trusting God’s plan, prayer and following the covenant path.
She reiterated Latter-day Saint doctrine that each person chose mortality as a time to prepare to grow and then live again with heavenly parents by following Jesus Christ’s example, relying on his atonement and making sacred covenants with God.
“That’s a pretty clear road map,” she said, “and we are blessed to have so many restored truths and modern revelations to guide us along the covenant path.”
She acknowledged that students face a decade of decisions from how to prepare to serve a mission to majors to marrying.
She counseled them to avoid decision paralysis by learning three ways to better follow heavenly direction — trust in the plan, pray and follow the covenant path.
She said they should seek to know what God wants for them.
“As you build a deeper relationship with God through sincere prayer,” she said, “I know you will be able to better understand the language of the Spirit to help guide you through the choices ahead.”
Wendy Reese asked the students to move forward with faith and courage.
“Trust in God with all your heart this semester,” she said. “I promise that it will make a difference. I promise that he will help direct your paths as you exercise good judgment and move forward with faith. The destination that God has in store for you is far greater than anything you can imagine.”
The Reeses talks can be viewed now on BYUtv.
The next BYU devotional, on Jan. 20, will be given by Elder Matthew S. Holland, a General Authority Seventy.
