As a father, I think one of the most important responsibilities that I have is to teach my teenage children to recognize truths and doctrine that can be found in the scriptures that connect to them personally in their lives and in their circumstances.

And that’s been a really important learning lesson for me to be aware of the Spirit and to connect to them to be aware of their needs but, more importantly, help them to discover a love of the scriptures and understand that the doctrine can relate to their lives.

I am a Primary teacher.

I’ve got a large class. We have some with some special needs and luckily, we had some great training from our Primary President, and she taught us how not every child learns the same way and some people are very tactical and need to hold something or do something.

Some people really need to learn visually and things like that. So, we as the three brethren in the class really try to pray about it and think about how we can get from where our children climbing over each other or out the window to something they could really learn about the Savior and learn about things that would help them to be involved and engaged in the classroom and we just had a great experience with these children to be able to really have some engaging lessons.

I was recently given the assignment to speak about a very dark period in my life, which was a period of grief. And how I approached this assignment to speak was to focus on the Savior’s example.

I reflected back on the many periods of sorrow that the Savior went through and how He dealt with them.

I realized that through focusing on Him and how He dealt with these personal circumstances, everything that I went through was really for my betterment.

And I realized that it was all a part of a loving Father in Heaven who loves us and does so perfectly, regardless of what it is that we go through.

In my teaching, I ended up asking for more examples.

I saw connections when we would talk about a doctrine and then I would ask Young Women to see connections. And one example was a Young Women who I just asked, for example, where do you see the Savior in the sacrament?

And we had just talked about the sacrament and she just, lightbulbs went off when she talked about (gasp), when we look at the sacrament table, we are looking at His body. And she just had this moment where even though she was seventeen years old, she had never connected the Savior there, and just because of that, for me personally preparing that way, I began to see Him more and it just naturally flowed out of me.

Back when I was on a mission, I learned how to always be ready to listen to the spiritual promptings of the Spirit. As I strived to listen to the voice of the Spirit, it helped me understand my investigators and helped to teach them according to the Spirit.

We have two older daughters that participate a lot in our study of Come, Follow Me, but our third daughter was kind of shy and wasn't sharing much. I saw during the week that she was making drawings of what we were discussing. And I thought it would be a wonderful way to help her feel like she could contribute. So I invited her to share with us those drawings, and every week she'd have new drawings of all the things we were, we were discussing. And then she started sharing her testimony together with those drawings and writing them down. And it was a wonderful way to help her feel like she was valued and that she can contribute in the things we were discussing, and definitely helped us all to develop our testimonies.

As a bishop, I work a lot with youth and I believe the best way to help them is, by focusing on Jesus Christ. And I do that by using the Personal Development Program that is designed for all the youth. I have one young man who was not attending seminary and I thought that, helping him to understand the need to become like Jesus would definitely help him. So we organized an activity on the Personal Development. And after that activity, he comes to attend seminary regularly. So I understand that if we want the youth to grow spiritually and temporally, we can help them to focus on becoming like Jesus.