The Power of Self-Mastery - James E. Faust

 The Power of Self-Mastery - James E. Faust

Stories from the life of Heber J. Grant about Self-Mastery.    This is so good.....

In its simplest terms, self-mastery is doing those things we should do and not doing those things we should not do.

Heber J. Grant was the first President of the Church I had the privilege of meeting. He was truly a great man. We admired him because part of his strength was his great determination for self-mastery. His father died when he was only nine days old, and his widowed mother struggled to raise him. He was conscientious in helping her and trying to take care of her.

“When he was older and wanted to join a baseball team, … the other [boys laughed] at him, … calling him a ‘sissy’ because he could not throw the ball between the bases. His teammates teased him so much that … he … made up his mind that he was going to play with the nine who would win the championship of the Territory of Utah. He purchased a baseball and practiced hour after hour, throwing at a neighbor’s old barn. Often his arm would ache so much he could hardly … sleep at night. He kept on practicing and … improving and advancing from one team to another until he finally [succeeded] in playing [on the team that] won the [territorial] championship!”

Another example of his self-mastery was his determination to become a good penman. His penmanship was so bad that when two of his friends looked at it, one said, “That writing looks like hen tracks.” “No,” said the other, “it looks as if lightning has struck an ink bottle.” This, of course, touched young Heber Grant’s pride. While he was still in his teens as a policy clerk in the office of H. R. Mann and Co., “he was offered three times his salary to go to San Francisco as a penman. He later became a teacher of penmanship and bookkeeping at the University of [Utah]. In fact, with a specimen he had written before he turned seventeen, he took first prize in a territorial fair against four professional penmen.”

Singing was another challenge for President Grant. As a small child, he could not carry a tune. When he was 10, a music instructor tried to teach him the simplest song and finally gave up in despair. At age 26, when he became an Apostle, he asked Professor Sims if he could teach him how to sing. After listening to him, Professor Sims replied, “Yes, you can learn to sing, but I would like to be forty miles away while you are doing it.” This only challenged him to try harder.

President Grant one time said, “I have practiced on the ‘Doxology’ between three and four hundred times, and there are only four lines, and I cannot sing it yet.” It is reported that on a trip to Arizona with Elder Rudger Clawson and Elder J. Golden Kimball, President Grant “asked them if he could sing one hundred songs on the way. They thought he was joking and said, ‘Fine, go right ahead.’ After the first forty, they assured him if he sang the other sixty they would both have a nervous breakdown. He sang the other sixty.”

By practicing all of his life, he made some improvement in singing but perhaps not as much as in baseball and penmanship, which he mastered. President Grant had a favorite quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson which he lived by: “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.”

As priesthood holders, we should not look for excuses when we lose our self-control. Even though our circumstances may be challenging, we can all strive for self-mastery. Great blessings of personal satisfaction come from doing so. Self-mastery is related to spirituality, which is the central quest of mortality. As President David O. McKay once said: “Spirituality is the consciousness of victory over self, and of communion with the Infinite. Spirituality impels one to conquer difficulties and acquire more and more strength. To feel one’s faculties unfolding and truth expanding the soul is one of life’s sublimest experiences.”