This General Conference Odyssey post is on the Saturday morning session of October 1981.

Last week, we heard some drastic changes to our Sunday schedule. Now, everyone is trying to figure out how to work that into a ward situation. All lessons in Priesthood/Relief Society will now be taught from General Conference addresses. And if you’ll recall, a few years ago, teachers found teaching a lesson from the General Conference talks more difficult than any other lesson. So, how will we teach these lessons effectively and in keeping with the spirit?

With emphasis now being placed on Home-Teaching, we need to figure out how to discuss relevant gospel points through modern revelation with our families. Discussing them in a classroom setting may help us bring these thoughts home, or vice versa, from our homes to the classroom.

(And now we can guess why Home and Visiting Teaching names were changed because now the church will be emphasizing a different kind of Home Teaching.)

Reading a series of conference talks and summarizing them each week has been an interesting exercise for me. I’ve learned that it’s important to get to the main focus of the talk quickly in order for thoughts to germinate and for real discovery to take place. I have also noticed that in some sessions of conference, all of the talks of that session can sometimes jell together with an overall theme. This doesn’t always happen, but it serves as a reminder that there are multiple talks given on one doctrine and all can be consulted, explored, and used to explain the main point.

For example, this session, from 1981, talks about Faith, the Savior, The Plan of Happiness, listening to those who testify of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, and gaining our own testimony of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.

The messages from these talks seem to jell together, but looking farther, there are many talks given over the years on the same topics. In a way, each of these talks, taught separately would feel incomplete. But when joined together with other voices, experiences, scriptures, and testimonies their overall message becomes powerful, thought-provoking, and memorable.

The point I want to make is that our job is not to fill the time in a classroom setting. Our job, as parents, teachers, and examples is to teach truth in as powerful a way as we know how, using the words of the Brethren, as well as the truth found in our scriptures. It isn’t necessarily the very words they speak, it is the feeling in which they invoke in each of us. And sharing our discoveries with our families has become imperative.

Our ability to magnify these messages to our families and to our fellow Saints will be measured on how much we rely on the Holy Ghost when we allow him to speak through us. Not the words of the conference address, but the spirit in which these eternal truths are expressed.

And please remember to bear testimony whatever, and wherever, you teach.

I testify that my faith in Jesus Christ is real on the basis of what I have read in the scriptures. The Plan of Happiness is my course where “God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. … Which things also we speak not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual” (1 Cor. 2:9-13, quoted in Howard W. Hunter’s talk).