Follow the King

By Elder Marion D. Hanks of the Seventy

(Adapted from a BYU devotional address delivered March 11, 1986.)

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another (John 13:34).

One morning at four o’clock my little grandson awakened me and said, “Grandpa, I throwed up.” I was pleased that he had come to me—not to his mother or father or grandmother, but to me.

I went with him to the bedroom where he and his brother had been sleeping. It was a mess. I gave two little boys a shower, then reclothed, and relocated them. They were both staggering around sleepily.

Afterward I lay in my bed, smiling. It had been an experience full of good cheer and appreciation.

Several days later, at the breakfast table, my grandson said, between mouthfuls of cereal, “Grandpa, I think you are the greatest man in the whole world.”

I said, “Well, certainly one of the best looking, but maybe not the greatest.” But he didn’t laugh. He said, “And the goodest.”

That little fellow was overgenerous to me, but he understood something very important, something the Savior taught: In serving and being served, we really do learn to love each other.

In Tennyson’s poem “Idylls of the King,” a young prince named Gareth says that he yearns to “follow Christ the King, /Live pure, speak true, right wrong.”

This is a goal within the reach of everyone who has a testimony of Heavenly Father and His Son Jesus Christ. One day each of us can live the kind of life that They live. I want that life for myself, and oh how I want it for you, for my children, and for their children, for therein lies happiness here and hereafter.

Illustrated by Robert T. Barrett