I asked the men in our elders quorum to close their eyes (and not fall asleep).
Then I gave them President Emily Belle Freeman’s simple exercise: think through the decades and recall your best days. Now recall your worst. The space between the two, I believe, is where the gospel often takes hold in our lives.
Our anchor text was Luke 22 β Peter’s triple denial and the devastating moment when “the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.”
I pulled up Carl Bloch’s famous painting of the scene and zoomed in progressively, closer and closer to Christ’s face, until (I believe) it became clear that Bloch had painted something deliberately ambiguous (see slides below).
August 2026 EQ lesson by John Dye
What exactly is in that expression?
Disappointment?
Sorrow?
Or something closer to commissioning β a look that says, I still know who you are going to become?
The class offered layered answers. One participant framed Peter’s failure as a collapse under unprecedented fear β a man who had always been able to turn to Christ for answers suddenly watching that source be taken away.
Another drew on his professional experience as a school psychologist, citing Elder Lawrence Corbridge’s talk “Stand Forever” to reframe the denial not as weakness but as wrongness β a miscalculation about self-interest, the kind every person makes when the gap between belief and truth has not yet closed. “Peter wasn’t evil,” he said. “He was just wrong.”
One class member reflected on his own tendency to stay silent rather than risk being asked questions he can’t answer β a quieter, subtler species of denial.
Another spoke about failure as a teacher, noting that Peter, having lived through the worst test of his life, would never fail it again.
Yet another shared how his late wife’s dialysis years earlier had reshaped his daily habits and, perhaps, his entire purpose β a worst day whose meaning he is still discerning.
I kept thinking back to Pres. Freeman’s crucial insight: perhaps Christ’s gaze at Peter “was not a look of failure, but instead a look of enabling strength meant to carry Peter through the worst moments ahead.”
An Elder shared an anecdote from Elder Christofferson, who once called the monument marking Peter’s denial his least favorite place in the Holy Land. “Who would build a monument,” he asked, “to someone’s biggest mistake?”
I closed with what I believe most deeply: no person should be defined by their worst day. Our worst days can help shape us into the people we need (and the Lord needs us) to become.
Because of Christ, our best days are ahead β even when the road between here and there demands we fall to our knees.
dyejo
Guest Author
