FAIR's Rising Generation

Archive for August 19th, 2009

I’m pretty excited about today’s Awesome Person, because for the first time, I’m actually highlighting a Mormon teen. An anti-Nazi Mormon teen.

While I was at the FAIR conference a couple weeks ago, I saw a book called Hübener vs Hitler, and was really interested by it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough American cash with me to buy it and they weren’t taking debit or Canadian money, so I bought the less expensive documentary on DVD, called Truth & Conviction. I am ordering the book from the FAIR bookstore soon, because the documentary was so interesting, I just have to know more about Helmuth Hübener!

As I said, Helmuth Hübener was a nazi resistance fighter during the Third Reich. Using a borrowed typewriter and armed with outside information from (then banned) BBC German-language broadcasts, he and two friends produced and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets. Over six months, he compiled more than 20 intelligently-written, informative leaflets, revealing the truth about Hitler’s regime.

Unfortunately, the Gestapo (“Geheime Staatpolizei” or “Secret State Police”) was informed of his activities when he tried to have a friend translate the leaflets into French. He was imprisoned for 9 months before being sentenced to death by guillotine.

I was moved by Helmuth’s motives; he felt it was his Christian obligation to defend the rights of others. He also recognized that while following the laws of the land is important, truth and righteousness do come before loyalty to any political leader. There were members of the Church who were members of the Nazi party, including Helmuth’s branch president. There was a strong pressure to appear as a “good German citizen”, and with religious prejudice abounding, members of the LDS community were definitely afraid for their safety. We can’t judge them, as we don’t know what it was like for them, or how much they were actually aware of (as all legally-available media was Nazi propaganda). What I do know is that Helmuth felt morally compelled to empower his fellow citizens with truthful information. His work was relatively short-lived, but has had a huge impact. He’s truly an inspiration to people all over the world, of any age, living in any time period.

Another interesting thing I found out is that there’s currently a major motion picture in production about the story. It’s called Truth and Treason. Something to watch out for!

I’ve been trying to find things to write about that would concern people my age more. Although I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to get the whole “Great and Abominable Church” thing straightened out, or recognizing the brilliance of a child (both previous posts of mine) I realize that I’m not relating very well to other fifteen year old, Mormon girls. I hope to slowly become better at this, and at the moment, the following is the best I can come up with.

Something I’ve been working on lately is making things more meaningful to me. You know, like the scriptures, prayer or the Young Women Theme. I listened more closely in church and I would occasionally ask a leader or another youth, but I found that only certain things worked for me. What might make prayer mean more to one person might just frustrate me. So I’m not guaranteeing that what I did is going to fix everything for you, but it might help you a bit.

Probably the most drastic of my improvements lately has been to better understand the sacrifice my Savior went through for me to partake of the atonement.

I always knew that I wasn’t getting it all, and even now I’m sure I’m nowhere near truly understanding the pain he went through. I knew that if I really understood the agony he suffered I’d be beyond tears and at that point the most the topic ever got out of me was a clenched fist and a thought running through my head chastising me for whatever sin I’d committed most recently.

I felt bad because although I knew that he bled from every pore and I knew that he must have loved us (me) a whole lot more than I’ll ever be capable of loving anybody, I just didn’t feel it. If you know what I mean. I knew that I should have been feeling more whenever I thought of His great sacrifice, but like I said before, my reactions were minimal.

So I did what I always do when I’m struggling with something, I knelt on my bed (I kneel on my bed, to be honest with you I’m still terrified that one day there’s going to be something under it) and prayed. I realized that what I wanted was to feel sorrow for His pain. It might be kind of weird, but the way I know how much I love somebody is by how much it hurts me to see them upset or in pain..

About a month later I went to the second and last Seminary Morningside of the year and I got my wish during the testimony portion of the meeting. A girl who I knew only through her friendship with my friends and the fact that she yells whenever she wins a game during seminary (her class is right above mine) got up to bear her testimony. She said that she had been having trouble understanding the magnitude of the atonement and that recently, she’d had a thought. Jesus was her brother, her brother. That is to say, that Him bleeding from every pore so that she may return to their Heavenly Father was not that far from the brother she had grown up with doing the same thing.

Now I don’t have any real brothers. But my sisters all got married when I was around 8-9 years old, so I’ve known all of my brother-in-laws for a while, one of them since I was six. As weird as it might be, I do consider them my brothers, especially the one who’s been pushing me into lakes and making fun of my hair on windy days since I was in Kindergarten.

So when she said that, I immediately pictured one of my brothers sitting in Christ’s stead in the Garden of Gethsemane and tears started streaming down my face. I was tempted to scream in fact, the thought hurt me so much. Somehow, and I’m not sure how, that was the moment I realized that Christ is my Heavenly Brother and that he walked seemingly alone into Gethsemane, willingly and in a mortal body, just as if one of my brothers would if they had to. That’s when it really hit me. From that moment on, I’ve known that my Savior loves me, that I love him and that the sacrifice He made for me and everybody else was beyond that which I could ever bear. I finally realized that it hurts me to hurt him and in addition, the other way around.