Repeat, and Repeat Again

September 30, 2019

Recently our Bishop challenged us to listen to the talks from April General Conference before October General Conference.

For a brief moment I thought “Hey, I'm already done!”

About six months ago I decided to clean up my act a bit. Spend less time listening to pointless podcasts, watching worthless shows, and the like. So I replaced some of my podcasts with General Conference. I replaced some Netflix favorites with reading the Ensign.

During that time I read the entire April General Conference on Gospel Library, and I listened to it via my favorite podcast app. (Yes of course they make General Conference available as a podcast!) And I found that I got different things out of it when I experienced it in different ways. Listening to a talk, you get the speaker's emotion and cadence, the emphases they put on various words. Reading the talk you get a slower, more timeless experience, where you can stop and ponder passages simply. You can spend time making notes and linking various passages to other scriptures. Both ways are good, and using one doesn't negate the other.

But back to the Bishop's challenge. I could have said “I've already read and listened to the entire thing!” Instead I said “Hey, we get to listen to it again!”

So our family is listening to a talk a night. We should be done with April conference by the middle of this week, a few days before October Conference.

And I've learned new things this time as well. There isn't a point where we are done learning the gospel. One of the things that I noticed during this latest pass through the conference:

First, the words of Christ can help us “increase [our] spiritual capacity to receive revelation” (Russell M. Nelson, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives,” Ensign or Liahona, May 2018, 96) quoted by Elder Takashi Wada Of the Seventy

Even if I've already read the New Testament cover to cover, even if I've read the Book of Mormon multiple times, even if I can quote a talk by heart, the words of Christ and His prophets can still open my mind and increase my capacity to receive personalized revelation.