The Worst That Could Happen – Sunday, September 28, 1952
Perhaps few if any of us escape our days of depression and the feeling of being down and discouraged. Fear and gnawing worry and depression of spirit are among the most common and most uncomfortable of ailments, sometimes induced by serious personal problems, sometimes by causes partly imagined, and sometimes by the whole outlook of events.
To you who are so beset, to you who fear the future—indeed to all of us—a line from Walt Whitman suggests itself: “The future is no more uncertain than the present.”1 For our present purpose, suppose we presume that the worst we fear were actually going to happen.
Suppose that civilization as we know it, were surely doomed. Suppose that all men and all moral and material values were going to be wiped away. Suppose that all these fearful suppositions were true! Even if they were, what could we possibly lose by building for the future? And what could we gain by giving up in dark despondency?
Now mind you, it is not to be conceded that the uncertainties we fear will certainly befall us. But suppose they would. Suppose a year from now, a decade from now, a generation from now, all would be over.
Suppose all this were true. Yet wouldn’t we be better off by living as if life were going on? Even if the worst were true, what could we gain by living as if there weren’t going to be a future? And what could we lose by living as if there were?
Life without faith in the future would be all but meaningless. There has always been a future—and there are Providential purposes that prevail, despite the foolishness of men and the forces they set in motion.
Anyone who has any regard for his own future and for the future of his family will fight against the false feeling that there isn’t going to be a future worth living for or worth working for. On every front we must fight fear and dark despondency.
We must fight them with an earnest and working faith—the kind of faith that is the mover of mountains. *
*Revised
1Walt Whitman, Song of the Broad-Ax
“The Spoken Word,” heard over Radio Station K S L and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System, from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, September 28, 1952, 11:00 to 11:30 a.m., Eastern Time. Copyright, 1952
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September 28, 1952
Broadcast Number 1,206