Terryl and Fiona Givens

Quotes by authors Terryl and Fiona Givens

“No man woman can remain in this church on borrowed light. However, in 1945, a Church magazine urged upon its readers the exact opposite, that ‘When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done.’ Many are familiar with that expression; fewer are aware that when President George Albert Smith learned of it, he immediately and indignantly repudiated the statement. ‘Even to imply that members of the Church are not to do their own thinking,’ he wrote, ‘is grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens

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“The most terrifying specter that haunts the modern psyche is not death or disease or nuclear annihilation. It is loneliness.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life

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“Berdyaev wrote that ‘one must help others and do good works, not for saving one’s own soul, but for love, for the union of men, for the bringing of their souls together in the kingdom of God. Love for men is a value in itself, the quality of goodness is imminent in it.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“Some members of the Church believe that wayward children unconditionally receive the blessings of salvation because of and through the faithfulness of parents. However, ‘The tentacles of Divine Providence’ described by Elder Orson F. Whitney may be considered a type of spiritual power, a heavenly pull or tug that entices a wandering child to return to the fold eventually. Such an influence cannot override the moral agency of a child but nonetheless can invite and beckon. Ultimately, a child must exercise his or her moral agency and respond in faith, report with full purpose of heart, and act in accordance with the teachings of Christ.’ A pull, a tug, an enticement, invite, beckon. In there words, we hear an echo of the original promise, ‘I will draw all men unto me.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“God and Christ are omniscient, and yet the promise is: ‘He who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more.’ Our Lord is like the mother of Wendell Berry’s poem, whose forgiveness is ‘so complete that I wonder sometimes if it did not precede my wrong.’ He purposely forgives our sins, to extirpate our shame. The act is sublime.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“Section 10 of the Doctrine and Covenants contains a rather remarkable reassurance. The date is April 1829, a year before the Church was restored. In this revelation, the Lord refers consistently to his Church as something that already exists. The Restoration, he says, will not ‘destroy that which my people have already received.’ ‘Therefore,’ he continues, ‘whosoever belongeth to my church [in 1829] need not fear, for such shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.’ Those who belong to his church, he tells us, will receive more light. In his words, ‘a part of my gospel’ will be theirs. But this will not, he repeats reassuringly, ‘destroy my church, but I say this to build up my church.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“The vocabulary of sin and guilt and damnation has too often overwhelmed the restored gospel’s message of absolute love and powerfully grounded hopefulness. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, summarizing the almost universal misapprehension of overanxious Saints among us, we must learn to ‘distinguish more clearly between divine discontent and the devil’s dissonance, between dissatisfaction with self and disdain for self. We need the first and must shun the second. When conscience calls to us from the next ridge,’ he wrote, her purpose is to beckon not to scold.

“Rather than continuing to frame our lives in terms of deficiency and inadequacy, we would benefit from the perspective of Irenaeus, who emphasized the forward-looking process in which we should be engaged: becoming ‘perfected after the image and likeness of God.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“The story is told of a church official who returned from installing a new stake presidency. ‘Dad, do you Brethren feel confident when you call a man as the stake president that he is the Lord’s man?’ the official’s son asked upon his father’s return home. ‘No, not always,’ he replied. ‘But once we call him, he becomes the Lord’s man.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens

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“What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps

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“In an 1831 revelation, the Lord told Joseph Smith that most of the world was under sin, ‘except those which I have reserved unto myself, holy men that ye know not of.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens

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