— A Blessing, Not a Beggar —

Wonderful things have happened to me when I have stopped praying for blessings, and started praying that I might be a blessing.

Spencer W. Kimball

Historical Context

The line you have just read appears in his 1972 book Faith Precedes the Miracle. He wrote it from inside his own life. He had spent decades on his knees asking the Lord for things — for healing, for relief, for guidance for the Church, for his own children — and in the middle of all that asking he had noticed something. The deepest answers had almost never come in the form he had requested. They had come in the form of being changed himself. Not the world rearranged around him. Him, rearranged for the sake of the world.
He named it as a turning point. The day he stopped praying give me and started praying use me, the prayers began to be answered in ways he had never imagined.
It is one of the most quietly revolutionary sentences in Latter-day Saint literature. It does not say that praying for blessings is wrong. President Kimball prayed for blessings his whole life — for the sick, for the missionaries, for his wife Camilla, for Native American children whom he loved deeply. What he is saying is that there is a posture of prayer that is more than asking. There is a posture in which the one praying offers himself as the answer to someone else’s prayer. And that posture, he discovered, is where the wonderful things happen.

A Story to Sit With

In 1957, two years after he was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Spencer W. Kimball developed throat cancer. The surgery took most of one vocal cord and part of the other. The surgeon told him he might never speak in public again. For a man whose entire ministry depended on his voice, this was something close to the end of the world.
He went home to recover. He prayed. The natural prayer of any man in that situation would have been Lord, restore my voice. Lord, give me back what I had.
What he prayed instead was something more like Lord, take what is left of this voice and use it however you can.
What was left was a whisper. A rough, low, scratchy sound that he had to push out from somewhere behind his collarbones. He stood at the pulpit in October General Conference six months after surgery and spoke. The Saints leaned forward to hear him. They did not lean back for twenty-eight more years.
That whispered voice ordained apostles. It dedicated temples in places no Latter-day Saint temple had ever stood. It spoke the words that introduced the 1978 revelation to the world. It blessed grandchildren. It prayed over dying friends. It said the words I love you to Camilla Kimball almost every day of their marriage.
He had asked, not to be healed back to what he was, but to be used in what he had become. The answer to that prayer turned out to be twenty-eight years long.

Scripture Cross-Links

Matthew 5:16 — “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
Acts 20:35 — “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
1 Peter 4:10 — “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
Mosiah 2:17 — “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.”
D&C 81:5 — “Wherefore, be faithful; stand in the office which I have appointed unto you; succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees.”
D&C 58:27 — “Men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness.”

Thematic Reflection

There is a moment in every honest life of prayer when the words change. It happens quietly. No one announces it. One day you are kneeling beside your bed listing the things you need — healing, money, peace, an answer, a way forward — and a different prayer rises up inside you and asks to be said instead. Lord, make me a blessing today. Not later. Today. To whomever you put in front of me.
The first prayer is not bad. It is the prayer of a child, and our Father in Heaven welcomes the prayers of His children. But the second prayer is the prayer of someone who has grown up a little. It is the prayer of a person who has realized that the world is full of other children, each of them asking, and that perhaps the most direct way for an answer to reach any one of them is through you.
President Kimball is not telling us to stop bringing our needs to God. He is telling us that there is a second, deeper room in the house of prayer, and the door is unlocked, and the wonderful things happen in there.

Richard’s Personal Reflection

For most of my career, when a patient was in trouble I prayed for the patient. Lord, please help this man. Lord, please ease this woman’s pain. Lord, please give the family peace. These were good prayers. I do not regret a single one of them.
But at some point — I cannot tell you exactly when, it crept up on me — the prayer began to change. It began to sound more like Lord, make me the kind of physician they need this morning. Make me steady when I would rather be in a hurry. Make me kind when I am tired. Make me wise enough to know which test matters and which one is just noise. Make me a small instrument of your care today, in this exam room, with this person who is afraid.
I cannot prove this scientifically. But I can tell you that the days I prayed the second prayer were the days I noticed things I would otherwise have missed. The hand that needed to be held. The question that had not been asked. The fear behind the chief complaint that the patient had not yet found words for. It was as though the prayer itself reshaped my eyes.
Grandma has known this her whole life. I have never once heard her ask the Lord for something for herself in prayer without immediately asking what she might do for someone else. It is the rhythm of her soul. She inherited it from her grandfather, who was Spencer W. Kimball’s counselor and knew this gospel from the inside out.
This is the secret. Make me a blessing today. It is the shortest prayer I know. It is also the one most often answered.

Grandfather’s Counsel

I want you to try this for one week. Just one.
Each morning, before your feet touch the floor, before the day takes hold of you, say these six words: Lord, make me a blessing today. That is all. You do not need a long list. You do not need to know who you will encounter or what they will need. You only need to make yourself available.
And then watch. Watch the day. Watch who shows up in front of you. Watch the small openings — the cashier who looks tired, the friend whose text seems a little off, the neighbor on the porch, the child who needs an extra minute. Walk through those openings.
You will be amazed at what one week of that prayer can do, both to your days and to your soul.
You are loved. You are also needed. There are people whose lives will be lighter because you decided this morning to be a small answer to a prayer they have not yet finished praying. Be that answer. The wonderful things will follow.