Sacred Things

By C. Gary Allred

The author lives in Alberta, Canada.

As I tried to multitask during general conference, I realized it wasn’t going as well as I thought it would.

A very pointed lesson was presented to me during the Sunday afternoon session of the April 2012 general conference. I sat in front of my computer screen and marveled at the reality of the speaker’s image and the bell-clear tone of his words. With my computer I would also be able to access the speaker’s words for sharing and later listening, or even print a hard copy as a study aid and future reference. It was truly amazing.

My eyes wandered across the toolbar at the bottom of my screen. I somehow decided that as long as I could hear the words being spoken, I could easily understand and absorb their meaning while also doing something else at the same time. After all, I was constantly hearing about the wonders of multitasking.

It didn’t take long to convince myself. Soon I had opened another tab and was messing with some mindless game whose image effectively covered up the pulpit and the speaker and most of the Tabernacle Choir. I could hear the speaker talking, though. General conference was still streaming live onto my flat-screen monitor.

Elder Paul B. Pieper of the Seventy was speaking about how we should hold some things sacred. I heard him say:

“Sacred means worthy of veneration and respect. By designating something as sacred, the Lord signals that it is of higher value and priority than other things.”¹

I told myself that I agreed with him. Then, as I made another move on my game, I heard Elder Pieper pass on another bit of counsel:

“But ‘there is an opposition in all things’ (2 Nephi 2:11). The opposite of sacred is profane or secular—that which is temporal or worldly. The worldly constantly competes with the sacred for our attention and priorities.”²

I nodded once more—he had my attention now. I listened to his words intently for a few minutes, though I couldn’t see his face behind my game. My multitasking probably wasn’t going as well as I thought it should be. Then I heard Elder Pieper say this:

“The sacred cannot be selectively surrendered. Those who choose to abandon even one sacred thing will have their minds darkened (see D&C 84:54), and unless they repent, the light they have shall be taken from them (see D&C 1:33).”³

Something was nudging the back of my mind. Then a strange thing happened. The edges of my on-screen game began to waver and break into scattered pixels. In just a second or two, everything—including the sound—was gone. My computer had crashed.

I shut off the whole system for a couple of minutes. Then I turned it back on and watched the machine reboot. Soon it was up and running. I signed back on to the Church’s website and saw that Elder Pieper had concluded his talk. Conference was again streaming in, clear and true. But I didn’t put my game back on.

My computer has certainly crashed on other occasions, but I kept thinking of the last words I heard from Elder Pieper that day. It seemed that my mind was “darkened” when I mixed the worldly with the spiritual, and then that which I still had was taken from me. I know the Lord often teaches us in more subtle ways or requires us to make a greater effort. And I suppose that the reason things happened the way they did could be open to debate, but I had learned a lesson, felt remorse, and repented.

A few days later I was able to listen to all of Elder Pieper’s talk and then print it out. What I had lost was restored and renewed, and so was my testimony that “sacred things are to be treated with more care, given greater deference, and regarded with deeper reverence”⁴—especially during general conference.