"Live right now," Gerrit Gong, assistant to the president for planning and assessment at Brigham Young University, told students at Tuesday’s devotional. Gong emphasized the importance of both living – right now and living right – now. "While we learn from the past and plan for the future, we make decisions in the present. The nature of mortality is we live – right now. . . .Today’s choices shape tomorrow's decisions."
Gong's address will be rebroadcast April 8 at 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. on BYU Television and at 6 a.m. on KBYU TV.
As part of living right now, Gong directed students to focus on three aspects of life: choice, promptings and promises.Choices are an essential and inescapable part of life. "Choices," Gong said, "reveal, define, and refine us." Recognizing that we cannot avoid making choices, Gong encouraged students to learn about themselves from the choices they make, saying "Mortality is the ultimate 'choose your own adventure.' Each choice opens new opportunities to choose and closes others."
Promptings from the Holy Ghost can "help us live right now," he said. Though we will face many important decisions and choices in our lives, Gong reminded students that faith in God and "humbly seeking inspiration while fully obeying all the commandments," will help us determine the correct decision. Gong told students that promptings can come in the form of unanticipated opportunities to serve others or to prepare us for things to come, and sometimes in the very instant that we need them."Heavenly Father loves us more and knows us better than we do ourselves . . . we can make our best decisions knowing, on occasions and in circumstances He determines, His promptings will bless us and those around us by opening choices we would not otherwise have known," Gong promised students.By making correct choices and following the promptings of the Spirit, we can "unlock the Lord's promises in our lives," he said. The promise of the Atonement and forgiveness will help us in our efforts to live right now. "Human choices are inevitably incomplete, incorrect and often have unintended . . . consequences. Human choices require atonement," Gong said.He finished by suggesting five ways to "live right now." He prompted students to ponder their patriarchal blessing, to ask if there were things in their lives that needed fixing and fix them, to study the lives of the prophets, to review past promptings and their responses to them, and to count their blessings."May we raise our faces toward the promised day when we shall see His face and know that He is, as He encircles us in His eternal arms of mercy and safety," Gong said. "Our journey complete, we will then see no longer through a glass, darkly, but face to face, knowing as we are known, grateful for choices, promptings and promises that invite us, with a fullness of joy, to live right now."
Writer: Alexis Plowman
