The following comments by Denver and Stephanie were delivered as part of a conference held in Geneva, New York on April 7, 2024.

Stephanie Snuffer: Okay, alright. 1-2-3, eyes on me! Works for second graders; sometimes works for fifth graders. Doesn’t work so good for adults.

Denver Snuffer: She’s a substitute teacher at Waterford. So, yeah, you’re gonna… 

SS: Alright. Okay. Are you gonna sit? What are you gonna do? We’re supposed to be up here together.

DS: I’m gonna make faces. 

SS: Okay, so we—I don’t know, about two weeks ago, maybe?—we started talking about maybe some topics that, if he finished, that we could bring up and just briefly address or put some ideas out there for you that you can start to consider in terms of, you know, yourselves/your relationships. If anybody has ever heard me speak in the last year or so, I have a particular penchant for interpersonal relationships and the benefit of getting your crap together, which basically means you have to know stuff. And I love how much knowledge we can gain by reading Scriptures, books, whatever it is we’re doing. And I don’t want to leave this part of learning off of the table. So Denver’s sort of really been a wonderful guinea pig for the last few years for me. We… He’s willing to… He’s taught me amazing things over the past 30 years that we’ve been married, and I’ve been, hopefully, lucky to offer up some stuff that maybe he hasn’t known in the past.

DS: It’s the electric shocks that bother me most. [laughter]

SS: Oh, stop it. Alright. (Kids, that doesn’t really happen.) Okay, we have… We came up with like nine or ten; we’re gonna maybe try and get through one or two—okay?—depending on how long it takes. The first idea we want to talk about is an idea… The idea of resilience. And every time I say, “resilience,” I want to sing Chumbawamba. Anybody? 

Edwin Wilde: “I get knocked down…” 

DS: “…but I get up again!”

SS: Right? Yeah. Okay. If you didn’t hear Edwin sing Chumbawamba, just ask him a little bit later. Resilience has a very specific definition: It is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. So inherent in that definition is, “Life is hard, and you are going to get knocked down.” And then you have to get up again. And what I did is I tried to find scriptural representation of resilience, so…because there’s nothing better than sort of marrying the two ideas, right?—some, you know, personal skills, some mental wellness, some self awareness—and then just see how that is represented scripturally. 

So, in James 1:2-4,  there’s this scripture that says, My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing (Epistle of Jacob 1:2 RE). So, we were driving to Niagara yesterday and reading through these things, and I said… Okay, so then we’re talking about the scripture, “Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” And I asked, “What do you think that means?” And you gave your input… 

DS: Feel free to repeat it.

SS: I don’t remember what it was because I was actually looking for the… 

DS: It was profound. 

SS: I was looking for the RIGHT answer. And he didn’t give me the right answer, so I had to wait ‘til he finished, and then I had to say, “But what about THIS?” And so, what struck me was it says… 

DS: [Chuckling] That’s true.

SS: …“let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” So this idea of the trying of your faith, this idea of a difficulty or a fall down, if you will, and tying it with patience and perfect work and entire and wanting nothing just really sort of actually blew my mind. Because I think that what this scripture is trying to say is that we have the ability to be complete, we have the ability to be whole, we have the opportunity to want nothing in the patience… 

DS: (I just want to see if this [mic] makes feedback.) 

SS: …of the trying of our faith. And so, if you tie this to resilience, the “getting knocked down” is a gift. It is the opportunity for you to do what the Lord wants you to do. Have faith. Pick yourself back up. Be resilient. And in that, you have the opportunity to be perfect, be whole.

DS: You know… Is this [the mic] working? 

SS: Up… Very… All the way up to your mouth. 

DS: Allll the way up… 

SS: All the way up to your mouth. 

DS: So like… 

SS: Come over here! 

DS: …like Jagger.

SS: Yeah, you’re gonna hate this. Get over here.

DS: I get to speak like Jagger. 

SS: Yeah.

DS: I’ve suggested that you read the account in Exodus and only look at what Moses said in the story of the deliverance from the pharaoh. Moses was told to go, do, and say some things. But it’s pretty clear that when he went and he did and he said, that the whole process intimidated him, and he wasn’t even confident about how well it would be vindicated—and Pharaoh wasn’t persuaded. So he went, and he told the pharaoh that the sign would be given, and that sign was given. And however much Cecil B. DeMille may have distorted our view of what that looked like, to the pharaoh, it didn’t look like enough to justify freeing the people. And Moses left there defeated and complaining and whining about it. If you think that adversity is something that only YOU get to experience… 

It’s universal. It’s everywhere. And it includes extraordinary frustration, difficulty, setbacks (that we know about) in the life of Moses, in the life of Jesus Christ, in the life of Joseph Smith. We just don’t have an adequate record to be able to fully assess all of the challenges, difficulties, and disappointments in the life of Melchizedek. I mean, why DID he need, by faith, to call rivers out of their course? What exactly was going on when that event took place? I mean, was he begging God and running for his life? It reads like “triumph,” but I don’t know of any life that gets lived without setback after setback and frustration after frustration. I referred to the first verse in the Book of Mormon (in the LDS version), Nephi telling you about himself—suffered all kinds of things throughout his life and, nevertheless, been “highly favored to the Lord”—is because he was resilient. 

SS: Um-hmm.

DS: (Here, I’ll take that.)

SS: Okie dokie. Job is another obvious representation of someone who was incredibly resilient: Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him (Job 5:10 RE). “Though he slay me…” This is Job talking about God: “Though he slay me, I will trust in Him.” That’s a pretty powerful recognition of where these bumps and knock-downs are coming from, right? Job knew what was happening to him, and yet, he views it as an opportunity to trust in God. 

It doesn’t take… You don’t have to read very much or listen to too many different things to realize that we’re not a particularly resilient population. We’re actually quite soft, and it’s getting worse by the HOUR, actually. It really is getting worse by the hour. And so, resilience is an important thing to understand, and it’s an important thing to cultivate. And there are actually things you can do to increase your resilience. Many of the things that are talked about in the context of mental health or mental wellness are SKILLS. This is not the kind of stuff that distills on you like the dew—umm, I don’t know—the dew, right? This is stuff you have to practice. Very often it doesn’t come naturally. Very often we feel confused/unmoored, so to speak. We don’t know where we’re going wrong. 

I won’t name any names, but I was talking to a lovely woman who told me that she listens to my podcast and realized that she was doing something that she thought was right until I said otherwise. (I wasn’t telling her she was doing it wrong.) But there are skills that can help in these kinds of concepts. And so, resilience is one of them. One of the things that you can do to increase your resilience is a gratitude practice. And a gratitude practice can be on paper, it can be in a journal, it can be with a buddy, it can be through text messages and group family chats, it can be some form of prayer, it can be said out loud, it can be said quietly. But a resilient person is grateful! They’re grateful for their shoes and their most comfortable pair of pants. And they’re grateful that the Airbnb had another set of pillows in the other bedroom because the ones in the bed that she was sleeping in were not sleepable (or something like that). And a gratitude practice is a wonderful way to increase your resilience. And it’s easy. It’s free. You don’t have to ask anyone or pay anyone for this, right? You can do this on your own.

DS: I’m telling you, you would have paid money to use those pillows in a high school pillow fight [laughter]. You could dislocate some important body parts with ‘em. So there’s reason to b