VISITING TEACHING
MESSAGE for April
Love, Watch Over, and Strengthen
Prayerfully study this
material and, as appropriate, discuss it with the sisters you visit. Use the
questions to help you strengthen your sisters and to make Relief Society an
active part of your own life.
Like the Savior, visiting teachers minister one by one (see 3 Nephi 11:15). We know we are successful in our ministering
as visiting teachers when our sisters can say: (1) my visiting teacher
helps me grow spiritually; (2) I know my visiting teacher cares deeply
about me and my family; and (3) if I have problems, I know my visiting
teacher will take action without waiting to be asked.1
How can we as visiting teachers love, watch over, and strengthen a
sister? Following are nine suggestions found in chapter 7 of Daughters
in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society to help visiting
teachers minister to their sisters:
• Pray daily for her and her family.
• Seek inspiration to know her and her
family.
• Visit her regularly to learn how she is
doing and to comfort and strengthen her.
• Stay in frequent contact through visits,
phone calls, letters, e-mail, text messages, and simple acts of kindness.
• Greet her at Church meetings.
• Help her when she has an emergency,
illness, or other urgent need.
• Teach her the gospel from the scriptures
and the Visiting Teaching Messages.
• Inspire her by setting a good example.
• Report to a Relief Society leader about
their service and the sister’s spiritual and temporal well-being.
From
the Scriptures
From
Our History
“Visiting teaching has become a vehicle for Latter-day Saint women
worldwide to love, nurture, and serve—to ‘act according to those sympathies
which God has planted in [our] bosoms,’ as Joseph Smith taught.”2
A sister who had recently been widowed said of her visiting
teachers: “They listened. They comforted me. They wept with me. And they hugged
me. … [They] helped me out of the deep despair and depression of those first
few months of loneliness.”3
Help with temporal tasks is also a form of ministering. At the
October 1856 general conference, President Brigham Young announced that
handcart pioneers were stranded in deep snow 270–370 miles (435–595 km) away.
He called for the Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City to rescue them and to
“attend strictly to those things which we call temporal.”4
Lucy Meserve Smith recorded that the women took off their warm
underskirts and stockings right there in the tabernacle and piled them into
wagons to send to the freezing pioneers. Then they gathered bedding and
clothing for those who would eventually come with few belongings. When the handcart
companies arrived, a building in the town was “loaded with provisions for
them.”5
What
Can I Do?
1. How can I know what my sisters need?
2. How will my sisters know that I care deeply
about them?
Notes
1. See Julie B. Beck, “What I Hope
My Granddaughters (and Grandsons) Will Understand about Relief Society,” Liahona and Ensign, Nov.
2011, 113.
2. Daughters in My Kingdom: The
History and Work of Relief Society (2011), 112.
3. Daughters in My Kingdom, 119–20.
4. Brigham Young, “Remarks,” Deseret
News, Oct. 15, 1856, 252.
5. See Daughters in My Kingdom, 36–37.
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