Gospel Story Finder

Hi! We’re Kynzley and Jayme. We did a service project to help a family in our ward. We raised a lamb and a pig and then sold them at our county fair.
Our friends’ dad was really sick. He went to see the doctor many times. Their family couldn’t go to church for a long time. We missed our friends in Primary. We wanted to help!
We decided to give the family the money we made when we sold our animals at the county fair. The money could help them pay medical bills.
We worked for nine months on our project. We prayed and fasted that we would pick good animals to raise. As we raised our lamb and pig, we spent a lot of time planning for the county fair. We made shirts, walked in parades, asked for donations, and helped organize the sale.
On the day of the fair, our animals were healthy and strong. We did a great job showing them at the livestock show. We were happy we could give the money we made to the family. We ended our project with a fast for them.
Working on this project helped us come closer to Heavenly Father. We learned to trust Him more. We did our best and let Him help us as we listened to the Holy Ghost. We struggled when our animals did not do what we wanted. But we remembered why we were raising them. We did our best to earn as much money as we could. We relied on the Lord and just worked hard.
We know that Heavenly Father cares about all of us and wants to help us. We are glad that we could help others too!
Illustration by Kiersten Eagan

When Bishop Ernest White of the Holywood Road Ward in Belfast, Northern Ireland, watched his two sons run a marathon, he expected his son David, who had been training for months, to finish the race much faster than his less-prepared son Peter. Bishop White was surprised when David stayed by Peter’s side all the way to the finish line.
“I’m holding you back. Go on without me,” Peter told his brother.
“I’m not going to leave you,” replied David.
This experience led Bishop White to think about the members of his ward. Many of them are elderly sisters, and it is difficult for them to travel to the nearest temple in Preston, England. Bishop White imagined each of these sisters saying, “Go on to the temple without me. I’m going to hold you back. Don’t wait for me.”
Despite the difficulties, Bishop White and other ward leaders didn’t want to leave these sisters behind. They decided to organize an annual ward trip to the temple, helping each ward member who desired to attend to enjoy the blessings of the temple.
Bishop White recognizes that while the trip is expensive and difficult to plan, “it brings a great togetherness.”
The annual trip involves everyone in the ward in different ways. Adults help schedule appointments and make travel arrangements. Youth help older members use technology to do family history research and prepare family name cards. The generous donations of some members help cover accommodation costs for all the traveling temple patrons.
“The message we have successfully given to our members—every single one—is if they have committed to follow the covenant path and move forward, none of them will be left behind,” Bishop White said. “They are needed, and they’re loved, and they’re not holding us back.”
For the first two annual trips, ward members flew to England. However, in 2024 some members couldn’t climb the stairs to the airplanes anymore, so the ward decided to drive instead. This required taking a ferry across the Irish Sea.
Over 30 members made the journey to attend the temple last August. For a week, they participated together in temple ordinances. These experiences reminded the members that they are each part of a loving ward family.
“When we walk through the doors of the temple together, it means so much to us,” Bishop White said. “When we see each other—all of us in the celestial room together—that’s like a little bit of heaven on earth.”
Although bringing the entire Holywood Road Ward across the Irish Sea to visit the temple isn’t easy, it is worth it for the members and their loved ones. “That’s what the Savior would have us do,” Bishop White said. “He wouldn’t have anybody be left behind. He wants all of us to move forward together, so that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Bringing the entire Holywood Road Ward across the Irish Sea to visit the temple isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

All over the world we have missionaries, young and old, who make great personal sacrifices to serve the Lord. This has always been the case in the history of the Church. In their desperate poverty, and in the midst of a time of terrible persecution, the early members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles were commanded to leave their wives and children at home and depart from Far West, Missouri, to missions in the British Isles and other far-flung parts of the world. As a result of this enormous personal sacrifice, the faith of these early leaders was surely strengthened, and a foundation was laid that allowed the Church to begin to prosper as converts from Europe then began joining Zion (see D&C 112).

It took six more years before I became pregnant again. I was so discouraged, thinking I would have another miscarriage that we didn’t buy a thing until I was six months along.
And my daughter was born.

I couldn’t decide whether to begin my talk with a joke or a definition of my talk subject, so I decided to compromise. Webster’s Dictionary defines a joke as follows …

What I didn’t mention during this address was that I knew this promise was true because I was in the midst of completing this very same assignment myself for the first time.
On December 1, 2016, I obtained a new set of scriptures and proceeded to begin the same assignment that I would later extend to young adults in January. When I finished the assignment six weeks later, I had looked up and marked more than 2,200 citations from the four books of scripture.1
For me, to be able to accomplish this assignment was just thrilling!
Something I found to be most insightful was that the Savior was telling us about Himself through these various periods of time—Old Testament, New Testament, the Restoration period, and our day. In all books of scripture, the story is the same and the Storyteller is the same.
I have devoted much of my 93 years to learning about the Savior, but rare are the occasions when I have been able to learn as much as I did over this six-week study period. In fact, I learned so much about Him from this study that I am planning to share much of it in other upcoming addresses that I am currently preparing.2
Upon beginning this assignment, I didn’t expect that this study would help me to receive a new testimony of the divinity of the work of Joseph Smith—but it did! The revelations recorded by Joseph Smith and the insights found in the Bible are amazingly consistent. It was so enlightening for me to see this in my study.
Joseph Smith wouldn’t have possibly had time to correlate and cross-reference with the Bible at the rapid rate at which he was translating the Book of Mormon—but it’s all here!
So not only do I now have a greater testimony of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, but I also have a reaffirmation of my absolute conviction that the system Joseph Smith had for translating the Book of Mormon was a gift from God.
I know how you feel. I thought the same thing of myself—that there’s no way I can have time to do all of this. I needed to remind myself that a comment like this is not a faith-promoted comment. A faith-promoted comment would be “I know I don’t have time for this, but I’m going to make time for it. And I’ll fulfill it with what time I have.”
Each of us who takes this challenge will finish in our own time frames. For me, much of the joy of this came from getting it all done in just six weeks. This intense study over a relatively short period of time allowed me to appreciate the complementary nature of the learnings to be found in the Old Testament, the Book of Mormon, the New Testament, and the Doctrine and Covenants.
To those of you who feel you don’t have time, if you will make a sacrifice, you will be well rewarded and very, very grateful for the change of perspective, increased knowledge, and improved depth of your conversion. I know this is true because I have seen the same rewards in my own life.

Many years ago, as a young and inexperienced branch president, I was asked by one of our branch members to participate in the blessing of his grievously ill wife. The man obviously wanted me to bless her with complete recovery from her illness. That indeed was my intention; both the husband and wife were much-needed pillars in our struggling branch.
The husband anointed his wife’s head with consecrated oil in the prescribed manner, and I proceeded to seal the anointing (see James 5:14). To my amazement, I found myself saying words I had not intended: the woman was “appointed unto death” (D&C 42:48). She would not recover from her illness but would slip away from us peacefully, cradled in the Savior’s loving arms.
The woman died the next day, and I presided at her funeral, a sadder but wiser man. I had learned a great lesson: when we administer to the sick, our maxim must be “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42).

“Did you notice the Jacksons are driving another new car?” Jim asked his wife. “That’s their second new car in less than three years. I don’t know how that man does it, but he sure knows how to make money. He makes me feel like a failure. We haven’t had a new car for eight years.”

“Yes, but you spend much more time in church service,” Jim’s wife says “You just don’t have time to concentrate on making money.”

Sometimes we feel we just don’t have time to write in our journals. I wonder. President Kimball stood before the World Conference on Records last August and said: “By now, in my own personal history, I have managed to fill seventy-eight large volumes, which are my personal journal. There have been times when I have been so tired at the end of a day that the effort could hardly be managed, but I am so grateful that I have not let slip away from me and my posterity those things which needed to be recorded.” (Ensign, Oct. 1980, p. 72.)

In July my husband and I went to Philmont, the Scout training center in New Mexico. Gathered there were 150 priesthood leaders and their families in that beautiful camp where the plain meets the soaring, pine-covered mountains.
Jeremy Judd was there with his family, and he celebrated his eighth birthday during that week. Because Jeremy wanted to be baptized on his eighth birthday, his father, Alma, made the arrangements. That Saturday afternoon I participated in one of the most spiritual baptismal experiences of my life.
Baptismal clothes were borrowed from a nearby ward. We drove to a stream located about fifteen minutes from camp where the water was deep enough to perform the ordinance. It was a secluded spot in the wilderness. A bank overlooked the stream as it flowed through a clearing of stately cottonwoods. We stood in the high grass and listened carefully as first the mother and then the father spoke to their son about the ordinance that was about to be performed. They reminded Jeremy of the importance of the covenant he was about to make. They indicated that the covenant he was making was a promise, or an agreement, to obey all the laws of the gospel. They told him he should consider baptism as the entrance into a new life—with the Savior as his example.
Then the father took his son by the hand and walked down the bank, over the pebbles, and into the water. There he immersed his young son in the water of the clear-flowing stream after the pattern given by the Lord. The boy’s sixteen-year-old sister stood by my side, and tears streamed down her cheeks as she whispered, “I am so happy for Jeremy.” I too was happy for Jeremy, and at that moment I remembered the joy I felt at my own baptism.
After Jeremy had changed his clothes, he stood in the clearing while his father and the other brethren laid their hands upon his head and confirmed him a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
With the sunlight on his wet hair and a radiance on his face, Jeremy felt a reverent calm, and he confided in me with wonder and excitement, “I was baptized in a river just like Jesus!”
When Jeremy’s father said amen to the words of his son’s confirmation prayer, I looked at that young boy and wondered if he was ready for the responsibility of the covenant he had just made. Would he follow the teachings of Jesus by living a new and renewed life? Did he understand his commitment to bear witness to the world of Jesus Christ?

Alison listened eagerly as the bishop announced that their ward would be having a Christmas open house this year. “We want it to be a special evening,” he said. “It will be a wonderful opportunity to invite friends and neighbors.”
Alison loved the Christmas holidays. She liked shopping for presents for her family and friends and singing Christmas carols. And she loved reading the story of Jesus’s birth and thinking of Him as a small baby.
The bishop’s next words caught her attention. “Because of the open house, we won’t be having our traditional ward Christmas party this year.”
Alison frowned. “No party?” she whispered to her mother. The ward Christmas party was one of her favorite parts of the season.
Mom put a finger to her lips.
“Some of our friends and neighbors do not understand that we are Christians,” the bishop continued. “We want them to know that we believe in Jesus Christ.”
Alison turned her attention back to the bishop.
“The open house will focus on Jesus Christ,” he said. “We’re asking families to bring nativity sets, and we will have a live reenactment of the Nativity scene.”
As the time drew near for the open house, Alison started getting excited. Mom and Dad invited an elderly neighbor to go to the open house. Alison invited Erica.
The night of the open house, Alison helped Mom wrap both of the family’s nativity sets in newspaper. Then Mom and Dad drove her to pick up Erica.
When they got to the church, Alison and Erica looked at nativity sets from Japan, Austria, the Philippines, and many other countries.
Then the girls went outside where the young men and young women were acting out the Nativity. There were live cows, sheep, and even a nanny goat. “Everything but a camel,” Alison said.
The bishop asked everyone to gather in the chapel. Alison and Erica sat with the Primary children. The children sang “Picture a Christmas” and “The Nativity Song,” and the ward choir performed parts of Messiah.
“That was really great,” Erica said on the ride home. “I wish my parents could have come.”
“Maybe next year,” Alison said, smiling. She thought about the open house and realized she hadn’t missed the Christmas party after all.

Addie’s older brother tells her that what she did was brave. The next day, Lane tells Addie that her parents changed their minds. They read the Book of Mormon, and the missionaries stop by their house. They feel the Spirit, and Lane and her family go to church.
William G., age 11, Georgia, USA

One day I was playing with two friends. One of them was not a member of the Church. He kept saying the Lord’s name in vain. It made me uncomfortable, but I was afraid to tell him to stop. I thought he might just laugh at me. But I kept having a bad feeling, and finally my friend and I told him we couldn’t play with him if he said that word. He promised that he would try not to say it around us.Tanner Peterson, age 11

Once when Chad was at the temple with one of our friends, Brother Gonzales, he again saw Brother Para at the temple waiting for a van to come get him. Brother Para had been waiting for a long time. Chad and Brother Gonzales decided to take Brother Para home themselves. Brother Gonzales had a big black truck. Just then, a carload of priests from our stake pulled up, and they helped put the heavy wheelchair in the back of the truck. Then they carried Brother Para into the truck, buckled him up, and held on to him so he would not fall over. I bet that day was awesome for Brother Para—how could he even imagine that he would be riding home from the temple in his dream truck!

After Primary a while ago our four-year-old grandson, Michael, reported to his parents, “When I pray, my heart feels like a roasted marshmallow.” Already Michael is recognizing the feelings associated with faith. How fortunate that he is willing and able to identify and talk about his feelings with his parents.

I am so grateful to you for printing the article “How Near to the Angels” (Mar. 1999). I was not sure what I wanted to do with my life, and I was juggling three different activities at once. This article taught me that all of them are equally important. But we can’t do all of them at the same time. Now I don’t feel so overwhelmed.
Heather BraunbergerWest Valley City, Utah

At Christmastime in 1996, I was serving a mission in southern Spain. My companion, Sister Noel,* was filled with enthusiasm and had a gift for loving everyone. Many times I saw the love of Christ reflected in her countenance.
Sister Noel and I were working with all our hearts in a little Andalusian town where the members loved us and seemed happy to have missionaries in their midst. It was a special time, and we could feel the spirit of Christmas in the streets and from the people of the ward. Sister Noel and I had both received little Christmas gifts from our families, friends, and home wards, so we had lots of goodies.
Almost everyone we knew seemed happy, except the Fernández family. The father was out of work and had no money to buy gifts for the children. When my companion learned about their situation, she felt we needed to help them in some way. Together we started talking about how we could help.
With the assistance of a member of the ward, we gathered together the goodies our families had sent. With the money we had received, we bought toys for the children.
The Fernández family was thrilled and astonished. But the little miracle did not end there. Thanks to this small act of service, my companion and I were also blessed with greater feelings of love for all the members.
Because of my companion, I learned that it is better to give than to receive. It gave me great joy to give something to a family who needed it more than I did. I’ll always be thankful for Sister Noel, who taught me that every day can be Christmas when we share the love of the Savior with others.

The second week, when the cast arrives, the work crew divides into two groups: the stage crew or the lighting crew. It’s their choice. “The responsibilities of each group will be explained, and the boys will learn to govern themselves,” says Sister Ganoe. “The influence of the Spirit plays a big part in that.”

Members of the stage crew do the special effects on or under the stage. They set off live fireballs and operate a 24-foot waterfall and water curtains. They also provide the flames when Abinadi is martyred and create the “destruction” scene with water cannons and smoke before the Savior visits the Americas.

Members of the light crew climb the ten 39- to 50-foot light towers to shine the spotlight on the actors as they move around the stage after dark.

Brother Ganoe invites the 26 crew members to make this decision a matter of prayer. They reflect on this decision while they are busy working.

At the end of two days, they decide where they want to serve. As they raise their hands to indicate their choice, they discover that they have chosen the exact number needed for each group: 12 will be on lights and 14 on the stage crew. They are now ready, spiritually and physically, to rehearse with the cast.

Another time, Tiffany had to take a long and very important social studies exam at school. She had studied hard but was still afraid that she wouldn’t do well, so she prayed that Heavenly Father would bless her to do her best. She got over 90 on the exam—an excellent score!

Imagine you’re having fun swimming in the ocean. The water seems fine, and you’re a strong enough swimmer to keep your head above water. Besides, you can see land nearby. But what if the level of the sea itself is sinking? No matter how hard you swim you have no choice but to go down with the level of the water you’re in—even if you’re sitting in a life raft. But if you’re standing on firm ground, you’ll stand tall no matter how low the water level goes.