The Spirit of Home Teaching

I can remember looking down at the ball in my hands on one freezing winter day and seeing my bloody fingerprints on the ball. I’d been outside so long that the cold had cracked the skin on my fingertips, but my mind and my eye were on the orange rim. I can still remember it, including the chipped paint on the front edge of the rim where you’d lock your eye and know the ball would fall just past that spot into the dirt-stained net. I can still remember the mark on the driveway I’d dribble to and know I was at the top of the key. I’d spin and jump for that last second shot, with the score tied. And I’d do it again and again, sometimes for hours, feeling neither time nor the cold.

You may have learned endurance playing a trumpet, or throwing a football, or riding a bucking horse, or drawing a picture. But you learned what we all did. Effort only “now and then” didn’t take you far. The dreams that turned into reality stuck with you nearly all the time. You worked at them, either in fact or in your thoughts, every day and almost every hour.

Henry B. Eyring, “Because of Your Steadiness,” Ensign, May 1988, 39
I love home teaching. I know that when done in the right spirit with persistence, lives change. I found this talk from Henry B. Eyring that captures the spirit of home teaching. He continues:

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Lord has said to you and to me, “Watch over the church always, and be with and strengthen them” (D&C 20:53). God loves us, and he intends for us to become like him. He doesn’t ask us now to worry about all his children in all the world, as he does. Instead, he begins with a call to watch over just a few families, just a few people. But he knows that to visit thirty minutes every month with the same lesson for every family would never produce the progress he wants for us.