SALT LAKE CITY – Young members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered in the Conference Center in Salt Lake City and in satellite-connected congregations throughout the Western Hemisphere to hear Church President Gordon B. Hinckley encourage them to be grateful, smart, clean, true, humble and prayerful.
Speaking to Church members ages 14 to 25, President Hinckley emphasized that youth today live in an “age of great opportunity,” in a “season of an explosion of knowledge.” While there are great challenges for young people today, the 90-year-old Church leader pointed out that current challenges “are most easily handled [because] they largely involve individual behavioral decisions.” Once those decisions are made and followed, “the challenge is behind us.”
Acknowledging that young people stand on the threshold of their mature lives with worries about an uncertain future, President Hinckley offered six “B’s,” six guidelines for making behavioral decisions that will put their challenges behind them: Be grateful; Be smart; Be clean; Be true; Be humble; Be prayerful.
President Hinckley concluded his remarks by invoking blessings upon the youth of the Church, that God would “lead them gently by the hand in the direction they should follow.”
President Thomas S. Monson, second counselor in the First Presidency, conducted the special fireside meeting. Music was provided by a combined choir of youth and young adults from the Salt Lake Institute of Religion and from stakes in Bountiful, Utah. A capacity crowd of 21,000 filled the Conference Center and spilled over into overflow locations on Temple Square.
