Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard G. Scott

Few institutions can derail a grand moral project faster than a living room. Richard G. Scott, a Latter-day Saint apostle known for disciplined, pastoral counsel, compresses a whole theology of conversion into an awkward, telling line: "The most difficult is the first family, to bring someone out of the world". The phrasing is slightly off-kilter, but the intent is blunt. He is warning that the hardest audience for serious religious change is not strangers, skeptics, or society at large; it is the people who knew you before you decided to be different.

In Scott's tradition, "the world" is shorthand for a web of habits, status, entertainment, and social incentives that compete with covenant life. The subtext is that faith is not merely private belief but a rearrangement of loyalties. That rearrangement threatens family equilibrium. When one person "comes out of the world", everyone else is forced to renegotiate roles: the fun sibling becomes the strict one, the easygoing spouse becomes the conscientious convert, the family script loses its predictability. Resistance often arrives dressed as concern: "Don't get extreme". "Remember where you came from". "Why are you judging us?"

The line also reveals an institutional realism. Religions grow (or shrink) along kinship lines, and leaders know that the first test of a conversion is whether it survives proximity, history, and emotional leverage. Scott isn't romanticizing conflict; he's naming the social cost. Leaving "the world" can sound triumphant in a sermon, but at home it can look like betrayal, and that is precisely why it is "most difficult."