The following comments from Stephanie were delivered at a conference held at Zion Ponderosa Ranch near Orderville, UT on October 27th, 2024.

Stephanie Snuffer: Hi, everybody. Okay, let’s see… I really can’t see.

Unknown: Stephanie, could you move the Kleenex box? 

SS: Oh, I meant to do that first thing because Reed showed me what the image looks like on the camera. It’s funny. All you guys watching at home—Wah!!—it’s like a hugely glowing Kleenex box on the front. Okay, awesome. 

Okay, I don’t usually do this, but I do want to thank Mark and Carolyn and everybody else, I mean, who’s done all of this work. I can’t imagine. And never in a million and a half years would I volunteer for something like this. So, thank you. I do appreciate it. Okay, so I’m… 

[Audience applause] Yes. Please give them all another round of applause. Also, quick question, and Mark or Carolyn or anybody who knows: When am I…? When are we ending? What’s the deal here? [Inaudible response] There is no end time? Good Lord Almighty, you guys! Okay. Bring me… [Inaudible response] Two o’clock. Is my phone down there? Denver, bring me my phone. I need up my time. Okay.

Alright, so I’m gonna talk more practically speaking, right? So the tenth parable is this really wonderful story about, you know, some really great aspirational things. And if you’re married or if you have children or if you have parents or if you have friends, you know that all of these wonderful things in the Scriptures are great, except there’s no how; there’s no, like, there’s no HOW to do it. It’s just “seek for this, work towards this…” (Thank you so much) “…strive for this,” and I’m… We’re gonna leave you without any skills or any real knowledge or understanding on how to do it. So while I am so grateful for the talks that I heard… We got here yesterday, so I heard Jeff do the fellowship talk, and Leroy and Dan, and then Q this morning. I really want to give a huge shout-out and nod specifically to Leroy and Q for bringing in all of this other information that is so important to understand the “how we do things,” and what’s going on inside and in your mind and with your emotions, and how you’re sort of interpreting and seeing the world, because that’s the practical application of this stuff. 

So there are several domain… Okay, first of all, anything that life depends on has to be put through what is called destructive testing. I’m gonna say that again: Anything that life depends on has to be put through destructive testing. Okay? So all of your structural metals have to be destroyed to figure out their strength, their ability to keep planes together, right? Concrete has to be destroyed in its created form in order to determine its strength, because if these things fail, then lives are put in jeopardy. So I want you to keep in mind this idea of destructive testing: Anything life depends on has to be put through destructive testing. 

Alright, so we have… There are several domains of health in a relationship that will need attention, and everybody will go through different stages. Your… You’ll need to focus on certain things, and sometimes in your life… You know, if you’ve got kids, it’s about family. If you’re just a married couple, it’s about each other. So nobody’s experience is gonna look the same. Everybody’s experiences will look different at different times in life. You’ll have commonalities, obviously, but everybody will have different experiences. I have to tell Q, the… When… You told me that 15-year thing a long time ago, and I… Honestly, I’ve used it a lot, so I really appreciate it, because it is such an important message—and not to pick on Q and Rob—but it is such an important message for people to know that this is the hardest work you will ever do in your life is to be in a relationship with someone that you are, like, looking for eternity with, and this includes families, okay? So coincidentally to these domains that you’re gonna have to go through and these periods of your marriages and relationships that you’re gonna have to struggle through, God has offered us promised potentialities conditioned upon the lives we live and the way we behave in our relationships. We are given promises that are actually conditional. We have to rise to the occasion, so to speak. And the parable that Denver spoke of is one such offering. So the question then is, are we willing to be tested—destructively tested—to see what we can offer, what we’ve got. 

All of our relationships/all of our marriages have the attention of Heaven. They’re watching us. They’re checking to see how we’re doing, what effort are we putting in, where are we succeeding, where are we failing? They’re… Our poster… Our ancestors, those who have gone before us, our Heavenly Parents, they’re rooting for our success! And so, they’re watching. And they want to see what effort and energy and work we will put into these relationships to preserve them into eternity. And might I add that eternity is a long, long, long time. I can’t, I mean… And so, if your first 15 years were hell, that’s like a week, okay? There’s no… You get to do this for a really long time. And honestly, I think that’s a wonderful, wonderful message that I get to do this for a really long time. I have a long time to be on this path of progression in my relationship. It’s not meant to be easy. It is meant to be challenging. It is meant to be refining. It is meant to be edifying. It’s meant to be unsettling. It’s meant to be scary. It is meant to be glorious. 

And everybody struggles. All marriages, all relationships, all families have different seasons of difficulty. Some will have more than others. And so if you believe that you are the only person you know who struggles in your relationships with your children or your spouse or your parents, I am really sorry that you feel that way, because you need more people in your life who are willing to admit/who are willing to talk even a little bit about the struggles that they are going through. Because if you are surrounding yourself with people who are lying to you about their relationships, about how good they are all the time, you need a little bit of balance—because it’s not true, and I have absolutely no doubt about that at all; none. And we do a real disservice to ourselves and to each other when we are not willing to discreetly and appropriately share some of our struggles. And so if you think you’re protecting yourself or your family, you know… I think it’s important to be discreet. I think it’s important not to tell tales that aren’t yours to tell, but I think it is incredibly important that we are honest with… 

One of the things my children said as they got older and got married (and I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this), but a couple of them said the greatest disservice we ever gave/that we ever showed our kids (one of them in our relationship) is they never saw us fight, which means they never saw us make up—which does not mean we never fought; it just means we did it behind closed doors. So everybody’s gonna have a different experience. But I thought that was really interesting because, as adults going into their own relationships, the one thing they all said they wished we had done was be more open about our arguments and more open about our repairs. So you’re not protecting anybody by keeping this all hidden. Nobody is being protected by this.

Okay. It is easy and without challenge or sacrifice… Oh, IF it’s easy and without challenge or sacrifice, then we forfeit the right to be heirs of the promises that we are seeking. If it’s easy and if we’re not sacrificing (which Q just addressed beautifully), then we forfeit the right to become heirs. So in that thought, consider this scripture, or consider this lecture on faith, which has been brought up multiple times, starting way back in the Sawtooths: 

It is…vain for persons to fancy…themselves that they are heirs with those, or can be heirs with them, who have offered their all in sacrifice, and by this means obtained faith in God and favor with him so as to obtain eternal life, unless they in like manner offer unto him the same sacrifice, and [though] that offering obtain the knowledge that they are accepted of him. (LoF 6:8) 

I don’t see any reason why that scripture cannot be applied to the aspiration of an eternal marriage, one like unto our Heavenly Parents who, by the way, have done exactly what we are doing now. That is what the progression is about. It’s to start here (or wherever) and progress so that we, one day, can be like Them—and we have to do that down here in this mess, encumbered by a million different ungodly characteristics and traits, which include things like:

• Defensiveness, 





• Criticism of self and others,





• Stonewalling (which means you shut down and won’t engage in conversation to reconcile or to repair),





• Avoidance,





• Contempt,





• Projection, 

Projection—for those of you who don’t know what it is—is to defend our ego; it is to blame someone else for something that you don’t want to recognize in yourself. So for example, if my boss comes to me and says, “Hey, I need you to put together a program for this group that we’re gonna run, and I need it done by, you know, December 1,” and I think, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t…” you know, so then I’m mad at him for putting this on me because he shouldn’t have been so insensitive. He should have known how I don’t have time for that. He should have asked someone else. But what I’m really saying is, “I’m afraid.” “I don’t think I’m competent.” “I don’t know.” “I’m insecure about this whole thing.” So I take my insecurities and my fears