09/11/2026
“There was a soldier in World War I named John McCrae, a Canadian doctor stationed in Belgium. After one of the most horrific battles of the war, he buried his best friend, and sitting in the back of an ambulance he looked out over the newly dug graves and saw red poppies blooming from the battlefield. That inspired his poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ - and because of it, the red poppy became a memorial symbol worn around the world to remember the fallen.
That made me think - what are other emblems that help us remember a significant sacrifice, from which sprouted life? And I thought of the sacrament.
We hear the sacrament prayers every single week, and there’s this phenomenon called semantic satiation - it’s when a word just becomes a sound and loses all its meaning. I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes when someone’s saying the sacrament prayer, I just can’t focus. So I was thinking - with these repetitions, how can we make them really meaningful? Basically, over time, meaningful repetition literally has the power to change our brains - to strengthen these neural pathways and to help us change our thoughts and behaviors. And isn’t that the purpose of why we take the sacrament every single week?
There’s a quote by Elder Steven J. Lund about the sacrament. He says: ‘To keep us connected to the central truth of mortality, the Lord proffers us a renewal of covenant almost every week. The sacrament prayers are not poems we recite nor anthems we rehearse. They are ordinances. They are words spoken to Heavenly Father by holders of keys over the very ministering of angels, bearers of the priesthood who implore the heavens that, then and there, the power of the Atonement may cleanse and purify and sanctify lives. Every week, miracles happen as young boys stand in the stead of the Savior and present us with the emblems of his Atonement, inviting us to be cleansed of our pain and sorrow and mistakes and sins.’
(continued in comments)
