Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas S. Monson

Monson’s sentence is built like a hand on the shoulder: calm, steady, and designed to hold when everything else wobbles. The opening stack of stresses - “confusion,” “conflicts of conscience,” “turmoil of daily living” - isn’t poetic flourish so much as pastoral triage. He names three different kinds of distress: the public fog of “the times,” the private moral grind of conscience, and the mundane exhaustion of ordinary life. That range matters. It tells listeners their anxiety isn’t a personal failure; it’s a condition of modernity, and it comes in multiple registers.

Then comes the pivot: “an abiding faith.” The key word is “abiding,” which shifts faith from a moment of certainty to a durable practice. In Latter-day Saint rhetoric (Monson served as president of the LDS Church), faith is less a mood than a commitment that survives weather. Calling it “an anchor” does two jobs at once. It concedes instability - you only need anchors when you’re at risk of drift - while offering an image of control without promising calm seas. The world stays chaotic; the self doesn’t have to.

Subtextually, the line also performs a subtle boundary-setting. In an era of moral pluralism and accelerating change, “anchor” implies there are fixed points worth mooring to: community, doctrine, habitual devotion. It’s reassurance, but it’s also instruction. Don’t chase clarity in the headlines or in the frantic self-improvement loop; stay tethered. That’s the intent: not to solve the turmoil, but to keep people from being swallowed by it.