Fearful Voyager – Sunday, March 19, 1944
If we were to allow ourselves to be unnerved by the daily impact of all we see and all we hear, and by all the untoward circumstances of our lives, we would soon be so completely upset in our feelings that long-time objectives and ultimate values would tend to be crowded from our planning and thinking.
If we should leave our thoughts and our lives unguarded and open to all of the real and potential disturbances of each passing day, it would be easy to become malcontents, misanthropes, neurotics—fearful, timid souls who live with an awareness of impending doom, with the constant companionship of imminent calamity.
If we should become tremblingly susceptible to all the troubles and tragedies that could or might happen, and fret about them as though they had already occurred, life would surely become a fearful ordeal. If every crosscurrent, if every flurry, if every breaker were permitted to capsize our ship, we would be daily drenched and drowning. There are some who are stopped by the ripples. There are some frail craft that shudder with every wave. But there are also those who have the vision of far places—the vision of ultimate goals and lasting values and fundamental objectives which make it worth weathering the storms, no matter how furious or frequent.
The ground swells, the quick squalls, and the deep and elemental disturbances are inevitable in life. They must not be permitted to upset us to the point where we lose our bearings, or cease navigating, or lose sight of our destination. The temporary setbacks, the sickening heartaches, the passing disappointments, the deep and bitter sorrows—some of which all men pass through—must not be permitted to confuse our course.
No man ever had freedom from trouble, or from the prospects of trouble, but many have lived above it and have grown more serene and peaceful and quiet within themselves while the noise and confusion and the storms and the passing flurries have ineffectively raged without, bent upon a wreckage that has not been accomplished. Both the fearful voyager who trembles at thought of rising waves, and the resolute mariner who heads into the, storm and waits it out, must early in the voyage learn this: That there is no glazed surface from shore to shore, from season to season, for anyone. When you’re on the ocean, the storms come. Of course life will upset us if we let it. It’s up to us not to let it.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, March 19, 1944, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1944.
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March 19, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,761