Richard L. Evans

"Music and the Spoken Word" Talks

Selected talks from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Broadcasts

To Begin -- and Get Going

Few people, whether their life be long or short, start and go in a predetermined direction, without any detours or delays. But young people are sometimes discouraged by the difficulty of making decisions, by the difficulty of knowing what they want to be, what they want to do; and by interruptions and uncertainties, and the fear of failure. Yet this ought not to be so.

On this subject we quote some significant sentences written more than sixty years since -- just in case the present generation should feel that such problems are peculiar to our particular time. "Few begin," says this source, "with anything like a clear view of what they want to do, and the fortune they seek may come in a very different form from that which they have kept in view." Those who are genuinely successful, the writer continues, "are those who are not paralyzed by failures.... While those who put all at risk on one venture, and, losing, weakly surrender, never accomplish anything worth living for.

Failures [we might add, problems or interruptions] enter into the natural expectations of everybody. . . ." Everything depends on how we take our failures."

We ought always to be earnestly "engaged in a

good cause," to have a good purpose and pursue it. "Nothing is more unworthy of a wise man," said Plato, "or ought to trouble him more, than to have allowed more time for trifling and useless things than they deserved."

The plain fact, restated for us all and especially for those younger in years, is that it is not given to any of us to see the end from the beginning, but we have to begin, we have to decide, we have to choose a good goal, and we have to get going. We have to accept the unavoidable interruptions, detours, delays; we have to be prayerful in decision, and patient and persistent in preparation.

"Few begin with anything like a clear view of what they want to do." But we have to choose a good objective and have the faith to prepare, to follow through -- to be faithful in the small things of which the larger ones are mostly made.

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Page Modified March 17, 2000