My slow walk through general conference continues. See part one to get a bit of information about personal general conference filter and part two for an analysis of one of the early talks in General Conference. This post analyzes Elder Karl D. Hirst’s “God’s Favourite”. In the previous two talks there were aspects of each I liked and aspects that I worried could be used in ways I would find difficult. In this talk there was absolutely nothing I didn’t like. It not only fit right into the core of my theology, it was expansive in ways that I found motivating and inspired. This is a talk on God’s endless, unconditional love.

I’m just going to quote the talk extensively and then provide a bit of summary at the end.

• On what it’s like to be a parent: ” Our love for each of our children is pure and fulfilling and complete. We could not love any one of them any more than another—with each child’s birth came the most beautiful expansion of our love.”
• “The sense of blemishes in the relationship between parent and child is diminished with a focus on love.”
• On God’s love: “Our Saviour’s love is the ‘highest, noblest, strongest kind of love,’ and He provides until we are “filled.” Divine love never runs dry, and we are each a cherished favourite. God’s love is where, as circles on a Venn diagram, we all overlap.”
• How God’s love amplifies our own: “When we love one another in this way, as completely and fully as we can, heaven gets involved too.”
• God loves includes our brokenness: “We can confidently disregard brokenness in any way disqualifying us from heavenly love—every time we sing the hymn that reminds us that our beloved and flawless Saviour chose to be ‘bruised, broken, [and] torn for us,’ every time we take broken bread. Surely Jesus removes all shame from the broken.”
• No matter what we think we’ve done, we are never, ever beyond God’s love: “However misshapen we might feel we are, His arms are not shortened. No. They are always long enough to ‘[reach our] reaching’ and embrace each one of us.”
• We feel God’s love through our covenants to love others: “I have also enjoyed the comfort that comes to my soul when I wrap myself more tightly in my baptismal covenant and find someone who is mourning a loss or grieving a disappointment and I try to help them hold and process their feelings.”
• What happens if we don’t feel God’s love, “But being loved is definitely not the same as feeling loved,”. He recognizes that feeling God’s love may not always be possible but suggests: “Can you take a step back from whatever is in front of you and maybe another step and another, until you see a wider landscape, wider and wider still if necessary, until you are literally “thinking celestial” because you are looking at the stars and remembering worlds without number and through them their Creator?”
• The promise of God’s love is that it can reach us where we’re at, no matter how far we’ve descended: “Somewhere you feel so lonely that you must truly be all alone but you aren’t quite, a place to which perhaps only He has travelled but actually has already prepared to meet you there when you arrive? If you are waiting for Him to come, might He already be there and within reach?”
• My most favorite quote in this whole talk. “Splash it (God’s love) everywhere you go. One of the miracles of the divine economy is that when we try to share Jesus’s love, we find ourselves being filled up in a variation of the principle that “whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

I nearly quoted the entire talk so just read it. It’s good quote after good quote. God loves us. God will meet us where we’re at. We won’t always feel it. We need to find ways to connect with it – nature, poetry, music, serving and loving others. If we feel love we should splash that feeling to everyone around us, loving others more fills us with more love. It is generative. Just because we don’t always feel loved doesn’t mean we aren’t loved.

God’s love is at the heart of my theology. This talk is all about God’s love. I love this talk, absolutely.