Dear youth of the noble birthright, you can witness and remember Jesus Christ regularly through the ordinance and covenant of the sacrament. Do your best to abide and walk with Him. Let the promises of Easter be real for you each day. Be faithful and prayerful, kind and helpful, clean and pure. Learn and grow. His Spirit will be with you. I promise. (Footnote 16)

I would like to share one experience that had a deep influence on my decision to serve a mission.

As I approached my twelfth birthday, my bishop met with me and taught me how to prepare to receive the Aaronic Priesthood and be ordained a deacon. At the end of our interview, he reached into his desk, took out some papers, and invited me to fill them out.

To my surprise, they were missionary recommendation papers. Even at that early age, Bishop Barreto understood his sacred responsibility to help the rising generation look to Jesus Christ with faith and prepare little by little to serve Him.

President Hinckley reminded us last April, "Whether you are among the posterity of the pioneers or whether you were baptized only yesterday, each is the beneficiary of their great undertaking." All of us enjoy the blessings of their efforts, and all of us have the responsibilities which go with that heritage.

It is not enough to study or reenact the accomplishments of our pioneers. We need to identify the great, eternal principles they applied to achieve all they achieved for our benefit and then apply those principles to the challenges of our day. In that way we honor their pioneering efforts, and we also reaffirm our heritage and strengthen its capacity to bless our own posterity and "those millions of our Heavenly Father's children who have yet to hear and accept the gospel of Jesus Christ." We are all pioneers in doing so.

Many of our challenges are different from those faced by former pioneers but perhaps just as dangerous and surely as significant to our own salvation and the salvation of those who follow us. For example, as for life-threatening obstacles, the wolves that prowled around pioneer settlements were no more dangerous to their children than the drug dealers or pornographers who threaten our children. Similarly, the early pioneers' physical hunger posed no greater threat to their well-being than the spiritual hunger experienced by many in our day. The children of earlier pioneers were required to do incredibly hard physical work to survive their environment. That was no greater challenge than many of our young people now face from the absence of hard work, which results in spiritually corrosive challenges to discipline, responsibility, and self-worth. Jesus taught, "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28).