There is a picture on my computer screen that I cannot stop looking at. It is neither portrait nor photograph. It is a word cloud: a square of crowded letters in which large words crouch beside small ones and certain names blaze across the center like lamps at midnight. My friend and colleague Ed Hegeman built it.1 He gathered the full text of every talk given at the April 2026 General Conference, poured all 40,970 words into a generator, and let the program do what programs do. Count. Arithmetic was hired to count and ended by confessing.
The words the General Authorities and General Officers chose are not surprising to the faithful heart, but they are arresting on paper. JESUS appears 375 times. CHRIST, 371. Together those two names were spoken from the pulpit by living apostles, prophets, and general officers 746 times across two days. LOVE comes next at 162, then GOD, LORD, SAVIOR, LIFE, FATHER, COME, KNOW, ONE, NAME. A child could read the cloud and know what the Church most wants her to remember.
Cynics sometimes say that Latter-day Saints talk about the Lord less than other Christians. Cynics do not count; they assume. But counting, as it turns out, is a kind of confession. A piece of software with no theology at all, given no instructions about what was holy, took one hundred and ninety minutes of recorded worship and returned a single verdict: this Church has a Redeemer and cannot stop saying His name.
Word clouds were invented for marketing. They exist to show a company what it “talks about” so the brand can be adjusted. What happened in Ed’s generator on the afternoon of April 5 was something else entirely. The software adjusted nothing. It simply bore witness. A machine built for marketing had blundered into testimony. It behaved, without meaning to, like a small apparatus of the Holy Ghost, who is also in the habit of testifying of Jesus Christ from unlikely quarters. Balaam’s donkey did not set out to prophesy. A word cloud does not set out to preach. The Spirit, though, will use whatever instrument lies near Him, and on this occasion He used a Python script.
The modern assumption is that truth draws nearest when we strip away warmth, doctrine, and repetition; that we reach the real by becoming cooler, more mechanical. Ed’s data show the reverse. Strip away the music and the cameras and the benedictions, and every raw letter that remains still carries warmth, pressed into the very frequency of the word. The coldest tool in the house has turned itself into a psalm.
Many Saints wondered what kind of prophet President Oaks would be. What would he emphasize?
April 2026 was not an ordinary conference. It was President Dallin H. Oaks’s first general conference as the eighteenth President of the Church, following the passing of our beloved President Russell M. Nelson in September of last year.2 Many Saints wondered, in the quiet months after the Solemn Assembly, what kind of prophet President Oaks would be. What would he emphasize? What would he ask us to put down? What old note would he sound, and what new one? A prophet is never more original than when he remembers what cannot be changed.
The word cloud answers before the new prophet has finished clearing his throat. Ed’s count does not show a Church reshaping itself around a fresh personality. It shows a Church gathered under the same Name it has borne since 1830 and since A.D. 33, the Living Christ at the center of every session. NAME occurs 89 times. SAVIOR, 132. REMEMBER, 70. At the transfer of the keys from one prophet to the next, nothing of the substance has shifted. President Oaks, speaking on Easter Sunday with the word “peacemaker” on his lips, taught that “Jesus Christ is the way to peace in this world and eternal life in the world to come.”3 The new prophet has altered no coordinates. He has only sharpened the beam of the same lamp his predecessors carried.
There is a reason NAME made the top twenty. Every sacrament prayer asks us to take upon us the name of the Son. A family in Kansas kneeling around a card table on Sunday evening speaks the same words as an elderly couple in Tonga and a seminary student in Santiago: that we do always remember Him, and keep His commandments, that we may always have His Spirit to be with us. Multiply that one sentence by millions of households each week. Add the daily prayers. Add the temple ordinances. Add the missionary lessons. You begin to see why our sustained leaders cannot help repeating what the whole Church is already murmuring. The cloud is not a summary. It is an echo.
Pressing. Trusting. Receiving. Following. Ministering. These are not the verbs of spectators.
Particular talks confirm what the aggregate data already knows. Elder David A. Bednar called the patient walk of the covenant Saints “the joyous quest of a lifetime, a pressing forward with faith in Jesus Christ in a gradual process of trusting in and receiving help from our Savior to become more like Him.”4 Sister Kristin M. Yee invited every disciple who longs for meaning: “If you want to feel grounded, get a sense of divine belonging, and make a real difference in the world, follow the Savior and minister in His name.”5 Notice the verbs. Pressing. Trusting. Receiving. Following. Ministering. These are not the verbs of spectators. They are the verbs of people who have been told to move toward Somebody. The restored Church is never content with an adjective when it can give a man a verb.
That Somebody is named openly, not in passing. The conference fell on Easter weekend, and the words EASTER (39), RESURRECTION (30), and TOMB (25) sit near the heart of the cloud like stones rolled away. The Brethren were not merely observing a liturgical date. They were teaching doctrine. A dead Lord cannot command anything. A living Lord commands everything. Every verb on the word list depends on the empty tomb, because every one of them is addressed to Someone who can still be heard.
TEMPLE shows up 31 times. COVENANT and COVENANTS together, 82. The April 2026 apostles did not treat the House of the Lord as a decorative badge of seriousness. They returned to it because nothing else in mortality teaches the disciple how to remember a Savior with the same patience. Repetition is never tedious to love; it is only the pulse by which love stays alive. The generator’s count has caught a doctrine that statistics rarely reach: the Saints who covenant the most have the most to remember, and the Saints who remember the most have the most that has been done for them.
This is why Ed’s project matters for anyone reading. At the close of conference, President Oaks made a promise that is easy to skim and dangerous to ignore:
As the messages from this conference are published, we invite all to study and ponder them prayerfully and to act in faith on the principles they explain. The Lord has promised, “Unto him that receiveth I will give more.” As we treasure up and act upon the teachings of this conference, the Lord will continue to teach and inspire us with personal revelation and guidance.6
That is not speechcraft. It is an oath. The prophet is telling us that the same Lord whose name was said 746 times from the pulpit will speak 746 more times into our own hearts, if we will open the messages and do what they say. Study. Ponder. Act. Three short verbs with no fine print.
There is a common Latter-day Saint habit of watching conference, enjoying it, quoting two or three lines in Relief Society, and returning to the same routine a month later. Ed’s data is an invitation to repent of that habit. We have a curious talent for turning revelation into a souvenir. If the General Authorities, gathered for the first time under a new prophet in an hour of real global anxiety, chose to fill their mouths with one Name more than any other, then a Saint who never reads those words again has declined the gift.
Choose one talk this week and act on one thing inside it.
Open the Liahona. Open the Gospel Library app. Open the printed page, if that is how you read. Choose one talk this week and act on one thing inside it. If JESUS was the most-said word in April 2026, let it be the most-said word in your kitchen in April too. The cloud is only an icon. It points to a Face. The Face looks back.
On my desk the picture has not changed. The letters have not moved. Every color is where it was. A child reading it will still see the same large Word in the middle.
The cloud has quietly become a mirror. Whatever else a Latter-day Saint does this month, one question follows him out of General Conference and into Monday morning: if someone counted the words of my week, what would be large? A man’s creed is rarely what he says he believes, but what he cannot stop saying. The Church has given its answer. A new prophet, who seems incapable of speaking a sentence without reaching for his Master’s hand, has given his. A generator in a friend’s home office has given its own.
The Lord is waiting for ours.
