The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Early in his medical career, Dr. Russell M. Nelson read in Doctrine and Covenants 130:20: “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated.”
Spending his days researching how to save patients with failing cardiovascular health, the young doctor reasoned that the “kingdom of the heart” would also be governed by laws.
“And my job as a researcher was to discover what some of those laws were that pertain to the beating of the human heart — the pumping action,” said President Nelson, now President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “And so, by learning the laws, we learned how we can turn a heartbeat off and have it start up again.”
The discovery that understanding eternal laws — and following them — will always lead to blessings has defined President Nelson’s career as a pioneering heart surgeon and his almost four decades in Church leadership, he said Saturday, June 24, during the 2023 Seminar for New Mission Leaders at the Provo Missionary Training Center.
Joined at the podium by his wife, Sister Wendy Nelson, President Nelson recounted a time while training others to perform surgical procedures that include stopping and then restarting the human heart, in which a professor asked: “What if it doesn’t work.”
President Nelson’s response was definitive: “I said, ‘It always works because we know the divine law that governs it.”
President Nelson told the mission leaders that there is another “divine law that works 100 percent of the time” and will not only bless missionaries but also every Latter-day Saint.
“It is simple,” he said. “You focus on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will know how to resolve every challenge you have had.
“And when you teach, you teach the doctrine of Christ. You want your missionaries to be disciples of Jesus Christ through all of eternity. Help them to start now.”
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
