How I Became a Seeker | Steven C. Harper | 2021

Steven C. Harper explains how, by study and by faith, we can each become a spiritual seeker. “The plan is for us to seek our way from simplicity through complexity, by study and by faith, until we arrive at the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
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When I was ten years old, my best friend was a Methodist. He and I determined that we would know which of our churches was true based on whether Southern Methodist University or BYU won the Holiday Bowl game to be played on December 19, 1980.
It did not look good for the Restoration when BYU trailed by twenty points with four minutes left. Then the Cougars recovered an onside kick and scored. Then they blocked a punt and scored. Then, with no time left on the clock, quarterback Jim McMahon threw a Hail Mary pass that Clay Brown caught amid a thicket of defenders in the end zone.1
It was a miracle. Now I knew which church was true. It was that simple.
In football, as you may know, a Hail Mary is a hope-filled prayer that the trailing team offers in the form of a desperate pass into the end zone with no time remaining. I did not know while watching the game that a Hail Mary is also a Catholic prayer. That fact interrupted my ignorance sometime after the game when I learned about Clay Brown’s postgame comment: “It was a Hail Mary,” he said. “That’s all right, Jim and I are both Catholics.”2
Wait, what? Two Catholics connected to bring to pass the miracle? My childish conclusion was less simple than I had thought.
However, everything became simple and certain again early the following spring, when the BYU men’s basketball team trailed Notre Dame 49-50, facing elimination in the NCAA tournament with just a few seconds left. That is when Danny Ainge took the inbounds pass, dribbled the length of the floor, went between, around, and finally over future NBA players, and scored the winning basket with two seconds left.3
That is a true story. Well, it is actually more complex than that. It is a historical narrative.
Creating a Narrative
There is nothing false in the story, but it is overstated and oversimplified. The sports facts are objectively true, by which I mean that they are verifiable-regardless of one’s perspective or whether you cheer for the Cougars, the Mustangs, or the Fighting Irish.
So some ingredients of a historical narrative are selected objective facts. And then some more ingredients in my narrative are subjective facts-the ones that you can’t verify, such as the conver­sation with my Methodist friend. I could take you right to the spot where it occurred, but did it happen just the way I remember? I don’t know, and neither do you.
Another ingredient in my story is interpretation. By interpretation, I mean the way that I endowed facts with meaning beyond what you or I can prove or disprove. I took all those components and arranged them to serve my present purpose of priming you to think like a seeker.
Seeking the Right Narrative
Narratives abound in the information age. We are surrounded by, infused with, and, in one sense, even composed of stories like mine. Some narratives are simple. Some are sacred, even salvific. Some are sinister. Some are seductive. We must choose which narratives to make ours. How can we know what is true and trustworthy? The best way I know is to be a seeker precisely as the Lord prescribed in Doctrine and Covenants 88:118:
And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.
One way to read the first line of that verse is, “Since none of us have too much faith, we should be seekers.” The why of seeking is to grow our faith. The what of seeking is wisdom and learning. The how is diligently, “by study and also by faith.” And the where of seeking is “out of the best books.”
Becoming a seeker is hard intellectual and spiritual work. It is a long, slow, deliberate process. A seeker might google something as part of the process, but googling and seeking are not synonyms. And “just” praying about something is not seeking either. Oliver Cowdery tried that. The Lord told him, “I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost” (D&C 8:2; emphasis added)...