Julie B. Beck, Relief Society general president, spoke on a number of topics to nearly 10,000 women and priesthood leaders in southeast Idaho in February 2011. The following is some of what she taught about following the Spirit.
“What I hope you listen to very acutely are the promptings and the whisperings of the Spirit for your own lives. … Those are the promptings that you listen to and write down and take home with you and act upon. Other things will disappear over time, but what you carry home in your heart will be very important and hopefully change you in some way.”
“We can only fulfill our [responsibilities] and do the things the Lord needs us to do as we qualify for, seek, receive, and act upon the promptings of the Spirit. If we have the Spirit, we are OK. If we don’t have the Spirit, we are nobody; we don’t have the help of our Heavenly Father in doing His work. [Having the Spirit] is what we are seeking.”
“No woman ever has enough time, enough energy, and enough strength to do all the good things that are in her mind to do, so we have to have the help of the Holy Ghost to take care of the most essential, and then the necessary, and fill in the nice-to-do things around that.”
“I believe that all these meetings are like the Lord’s work. As soon as we think we have a formula for how they happen then we have just closed the Holy Ghost out of the process. I anticipate answering or asking questions, but I always come prepared to do it another way if the Spirit wants me to, being willing to listen to the thoughts that the Lord gives to me—and oftentimes those come pouring in at the beginning of the meeting.”
