Full Measure of Happiness

Living within your means, standing for truth, and finding joy in service

My dear brothers and sisters, it is a thrilling sight today to look into your faces. As I do so, I am reminded of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic words:

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams

With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!

Book of Beginnings, Story without End,

Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!1

Enjoy this great period of youth in your lives.

As I have contemplated what I would say, I have thought of the many challenges you face as young people today. The future is in your hands; the outcome is up to you. To aid you in the challenges that lie ahead, I offer the following advice that will help provide the happiness you seek: live within your means, stand firm for truth, and find joy in service.

LIVE WITHIN YOUR MEANS

I would like to mention the excessive debt that some of our people are piling up. This is a day of borrowing—a day when credit cards by the bushel are sent out in every mailing. According to recent statistics, the average American has ten credit cards. It’s so easy to buy on time, without reading the small print. A fairly low interest rate may apply for the first sixty days or so, but one generally doesn’t realize that after that period, the interest rate increases dramatically.

As an example of how much interest one pays at such a rate, if a person owed just $500 in credit card debt, had an interest rate of 18.5 percent, and paid a minimum payment of $10 per month, it would take seven years and ten months to pay the debt in full. In addition to paying the principal of $500, one would pay $430 in interest for the privilege of borrowing the $500.

Listen to the words of President J. Reuben Clark:

It is a rule of our financial and economic life in all the world that interest is to be paid on borrowed money. May I say something about interest? Interest never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation; it never visits or travels; it takes no pleasure; it is never laid off work nor discharged from employment; it never works on reduced hours; . . . Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders, and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.2

If you use a credit card, pay the remaining balance promptly. Don’t stretch your payments out. Most of you, at this time, don’t own a home—but someday you will. There are some items, such as an affordable home and a few other necessities, where going into reasonable debt is acceptable. We should avoid unwise borrowing for things we really do not absolutely need.

After I graduated from the university, I did a lot of work in advertising, and I know that advertising can sell a product. I’m appalled at the advertising I see for home equity loans. Simply put, they are second mortgages on homes. The advertising for such loans is designed to tempt us to borrow to have more. Nowhere in the advertising is there any mention that should you fail to make payments, for whatever reason, you could lose your home. During the 1930s and 1940s many people lost their homes and everything they had put into them because of such borrowing. My philosophy is that, as much as possible, we should pay as we go. Save for a rainy day. Avoid the philosophy that yesterday’s luxuries are today’s necessities. They aren’t necessities unless we make them such. Nearly extinct is the starter home. Most young people today begin with a large expensive lot and home—everything mother and dad worked a lifetime to achieve. Consequently, many enter into long-term debt on the basis of two salaries, only to find that changes do come, people get ill, women have children, sickness stalks some families, floods and other situations occur, and no longer can the two-salary mortgage payment be made. Then the family is in chaos.

I urge you to live within your means, whatever your means may be. We cannot continually spend more than we earn and remain solvent. I promise that you will be happier than you would be if you were constantly worrying about how to make the next payment on nonessential debt. President Gordon B. Hinckley said: “When I see people struggling with debt, as I see so very many—debt that holds them down and in many cases leads to repudiation of obligations and to bankruptcy—I think of these words directed to Martin Harris, found in D&C 19:35: ‘Pay the debt thou hast contracted. . . . Release thyself from bondage.’ Anyone who has been trapped by debt knows something of that oppressive bondage.”

My dear friends, I encourage you to live within your means.

STAND FIRM FOR TRUTH

We’re surrounded on every side by that which would drag us down. President Hinckley said: “We live in a world of so much filth. It is everywhere. It is on the streets. It is on television. It is in books and magazines . . . . It is like a great flood, ugly and dirty and mean, engulfing the world. We have got to stand above it . . . . The way to happiness lies in a return to strong family life and the observance of moral standards, the value of which has been proven through centuries of time.”3

One of the leading box office stars of today lamented: “The boundaries of permissiveness have been extended to the limit. The last film I did was filthy. I thought it was filthy when I read the script, and I still think it’s filthy; but the studio tried it out at a Friday night sneak preview and the audience screamed its approval.”

I find Alexander Pope’s classic “Essay on Man” most applicable:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien

As to be hated needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.4

Today we have a rebirth of ancient Sodom and Gomorrah. From seldom read pages in dusty Bibles they come forth as real cities in a real world, depicting a real malady—pernicious permissiveness.

We have the capacity and the responsibility to stand as a bulwark between all we hold dear and the fatal contamination of such sin. An understanding of who we are and what God expects us to become will prompt us to pray—as individuals and as families. Such a return reveals the constant truth, “Wickedness never was happiness.”5

May each of us seek the good life—even life everlasting, with mother, father, brothers, sisters, husband, wife, sons, and daughters, together forever. Remember the Savior’s words to the Nephites: “Ye must watch and pray always lest ye enter into temptation; for Satan desireth to have you.”6

Let us join in the fervent declaration of Joshua: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve. . .but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”7 Let us shun those things that will drag us down. Let our hearts be pure. Let our lives be clean. Stand firm for truth.

FIND JOY IN SERVICE

I’ve been thinking of the inquiring lawyer, who came to the Savior and asked the question: “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” You remember the Savior’s response. He said: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”8 If we can remember those two great commandments—love of God and love of neighbor—and act accordingly, our time here will have been well spent.

How do we demonstrate to our Heavenly Father that we love Him? When Sister Monson and I were university students, there was a popular song: “It’s easy to say I love you, easy to say I’ll be true; easy to say these foolish things, but prove it by the things you do.” We have a responsibility to prove to our Heavenly Father, by the things we do, that we love Him. It was Shakespeare who wrote, “They do not love who do not show their love.”

How can we know what our Heavenly Father would have us do? One way is by praying to know, by asking how we can be instruments in His hands.

Let me share an experience when inspiration came to me, providing a service opportunity. A longtime friend of mine, a robust athlete and all-star football player, was stricken with a malady that left him confined to a wheelchair. The doctors said he would never walk again. One day, as usual, in my morning prayers, I petitioned my Heavenly Father to know what He would have me do that day. Later that afternoon, as I was swimming in the pool at the old Deseret Gym, there came to my mind the thought, “Here you swim almost effortlessly, while your friend Stan languishes in his hospital bed, unable to move.” I felt the prompting: “Get to the hospital and give him a blessing.” Quickly, I left the pool, dressed, and hurried to Stan’s hospital room. His bed was empty. A nurse said he was in his wheelchair at the swimming pool, preparing for therapy. I hurried to the area, and there was Stan, totally despondent, all alone at the edge of the pool, ready to give up on life itself. I told him how I happened to be there. I said, “I didn’t just come, Stan. The Lord knew you needed a blessing. He knew that you needed such from one who knows you.” We returned to his hospital room where a blessing was provided. The Spirit of the Lord was there.

Day-by-day, Stan grew stronger. One day, about a year later, there was a knock at my office door, and in walked my friend who had been told he would never walk again. He handed his cane to his son, who was to be set apart for a mission, and walked over to my desk. What joy! What a moment of thanksgiving! Later he stood in the holy temple witnessing his daughter’s marriage. He stood without a cane. He expressed his gratitude for the inspiration that had come to me that day in the swimming pool at the Deseret Gym.

Opportunities to give of ourselves are limitless, but they are also perishable. There are hearts to gladden. There are kind words to say. There are gifts to be given. There are deeds to be done. There are souls to be saved. To all those who serve the Lord by serving their fellow man and to those who are the recipients of this selfless service, the Redeemer seems to be speaking to you when He declared: “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”9

May each of us qualify for such commendation as we find joy in His service.

Your future is bright, but it will also be challenging. You may ask, “Is there a safe way for me to tread through this world of uncertainty?” I answer you in the words of M. Louise Haskins, who wrote in her poem “The Gate of the Year”:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand

into the hand of God.

That shall be to you better than a light,

And safer than a known way.”

I bear witness to the truth of this advice and leave my blessing with you. May you realize a full measure of happiness and success in your life as you live within your means, stand firm for truth, and find joy in His service.

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Speech given by Thomas S. Monson

ENDNOTES

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “Morituri Salutamus.”

2. J. Reuben Clark, Jr. Conference Report. (April 1938), 103.

3. Gordon B. Hinckley. Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1998), 709.

4. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. (Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1968), 409.

5. Alma 41:10.

6. 3 Nephi 18:18.

7. Joshua 24:15.

8. Matthew 22:36–39.

9. Matthew 25:40.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

President Thomas S. Monson has served as a counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 10 November 1985. He was ordained an Apostle and called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on 4 October 1963.

He graduated cum laude from the University of Utah in 1948, earning a degree in business management. He later earned his MBA from BYU. Professionally, President Monson has had a distinguished career in publishing and printing. This article is adapted from President Monson’s devotional address to BYU students, faculty, and staff 20 January 2004.