“Sunday School Answers,” Ensign, Oct. 2012, 11

I have a tendency to look for grand answers to my challenges﻿—to ask the Lord to help me find that one thing that will fix everything. I’ve learned that such an approach can overcomplicate things.

As I was teaching the Gospel Doctrine class in my ward, I was determined to ask profound questions that would require contemplation and big, new, insightful answers. In other words, I wanted to avoid a recitation of the same old “Sunday School answers” that ward members seemed to offer each week.

As I pored over the New Testament in preparation, I was struck by the use of the word abide, which appears over and over. For example, John 15:10 says, “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love” (emphasis added).

In His great Intercessory Prayer, the Savior prays that His disciples “may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” and “I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (John 17:21, 23).

Much of what I searched for was how I could be one with the Lord, how I could abide in His love, and how, as a result, I could develop extra patience﻿—patience I so desperately needed to turn my experiences from ones that exhausted me to ones that invigorated and sanctified me.

Ironically, as I searched for both an understanding of the word abide and answers to the difficult challenges I faced on a daily basis, I was ultimately led back to the precise Sunday School answers I had been trying to avoid. I found the answers to my challenges by reading the scriptures, praying daily, serving my family and others, and attending the temple and my Sunday meetings. I learned that those simple things make the difference between enduring and enduring well and with patience.

The Sunday School answers really are the best answers.