Gospel Story Finder

When two-year-old Clayton overheard the family sharing feelings about his grandmother serving in Swaziland, Africa, his little heart was touched. Often he would fold his arms, bow his head, and say, “Gam-ma on mission. Jesus. Amen.” When she returned, he did not recognize her until she said, “This is your missionary grandma.” Instantly he broke into a smile, ran, and threw his arms around her. Each grandchild now wants to be a missionary.

My favorite recipe is Grandma Great’s applesauce oatmeal cookies. Grandma Great died and is now with Heavenly Father and Jesus. Mommy and I make these cookies to remember her.
Lydia B., age 5, Texas, USA

My wife and I, together with baby Kay, were all fine and good the evening we bid granny good night and entered our room to sleep. After some conversation and night prayers, we slept.
Around 3:50am on Sunday, 16 July 2023, my wife started complaining of acute abdominal pains. I went to the nearby 24-hour pharmacy to get her medication. After taking the medication and receiving a priesthood blessing, she was fine, and we went back to sleep.
About 5:45 am, the pain began again and this time it was so severe and intense, we could not take care of it at home. As a health worker, I knew I had to quickly send her to the hospital.
I asked myself “Why now”? I had prepared for a talk at one of the branches in the district where I serve as district president, and I didn’t want to fail them. The branch president there was newly called, and I didn’t want him to lose trust in me, but I needed to be there for my wife. My family is very important to me. I was going to call the branch president and tell him that I would not be able to speak, but I felt strongly I should not call him. So, I obeyed the promptings and decided there was still time.
At the hospital, all physical and laboratory investigations done on my wife were within normal ranges. She was given some pain medication and antibiotics.
As we got to the emergency unit, there was a little child who was suffering from severe anemia. Nurses on duty were prepared to transfuse the child with one pint of blood. The blood was ready but due to the low level of blood in the child’s system, the veins had collapsed, and the nurses were unable to secure the intravenous line.
This hospital is the same facility that I work at. I was asked to set the intravenous line for this little child. On the second attempt I got the vein and the transfusion started immediately.
When I went to my wife’s bed to see how she was doing, I had a great surprise! She was fine and I got to bring her home to be with our little boy, Kay.
As we were going home, I thought about what had happened. I was able to save the life of this little baby. What would have happened if my wife had not experienced the sudden onset of abdominal pains? I know that this handsome little child would have died. It made me feel very grateful for my training and abilities to help others.
Often things happen to us where the Lord wants us to use that opportunity to save a life or help rescue someone. We are his hands here on earth.
Let us have the attitude of gratitude in all things. Let us give thanks to our Father in Heaven and to His Son, Jesus Christ, for all that happens to us. It can be a blessing in disguise. Even if the blessings don’t come today or tomorrow, I testify that they will definitely come.

Thank you for the article “No Laughing Matter” (June 1994). I have had a very similar incident happen to me at school when a girl from my gym class saw me reading the Book of Mormon before school. She told a number of her friends and they all bowed to me in class and taunted me. It made me ashamed until, just like the girl in the story, I realized that it didn’t really matter as long as I was doing what was right. Thanks for the reassurance.
Debbie WilliamsSalem, Oregon

It isn’t your typical activity at the Byrd Springs Ward cultural hall. Two hundred young men and women from all over the Huntsville Alabama Stake have gathered here on a Saturday afternoon, but they’re not attending a dance or a youth conference, not playing sports or putting on road shows. They’re tying quilts, more than two dozen of them. The quilts will be donated to a center for children whose parents are in jail or otherwise absent. The massive quilting bee is Tyler Williams’ Eagle Scout project.
Tyler got his idea of holding a massive quilting bee by talking with the stake Young Women presidency. “They came to me, actually,” he explains. “Of course, my mother is in the presidency, and she knew I was looking for a project!” But he quickly realized that providing the quilts could do what he hoped to do—he could organize a lot of people (including some non-LDS friends he had helped with their projects), he could help the community, and he could let some lonely children know they were loved.
He learned quickly that other things were required, too. “You can’t just crash it through,” he says. “You’ve got to have a plan. You have to be organized. You have to delegate; you’ve got to have it mapped out mentally and be assertive, so people know what to do.” With donated yarn and fabric, fliers and announcements throughout the stake, and half a dozen borrowed quilting frames, the project, from start to finish, was completed in about one month. “And that,” he says, “was rushing it.” His advice to others: “Get it done before you’re about to turn 18.”

2. Professional scholars, who as a matter of course reject the whole idea of inspired writings, have been as reluctant as the clergy to recognize resemblances between the myths and legends of various parts of the world as being anything but the purest coincidence. The reason for this is departmental pride. For example, a Celtic or Semitic scholar may very well know more about Greek than I do; but if Greek is my one and only field, I may still turn up my nose with a great show of scientific skepticism and technical superiority, and categorically refuse to consider even the possibility of a relationship between documents that I can read and documents that I cannot read.
A dazzling demonstration of this type of precious myopia was the century-long refusal of Egyptologists to acknowledge any connection whatever between Israel and Egypt (they used it as an argument against Joseph Smith) though links and ties confronted them at every turn. When Erman finally showed beyond a doubt that an important piece of Egyptian wisdom literature also turned up in the body of Hebrew wisdom literature, he was almost ashamed of his discovery and never followed it up.

That’s how things are now. But for a long time, the family didn’t go to church very often. The children attended only when they visited Brother Stailey’s mother in another town. They enjoyed those visits and started reading the Book of Mormon on their own. They read almost the whole book over a two-year period and started asking their dad to take them back to church. When the family went through some difficult times, Brother Stailey realized that they needed the gospel in their lives. They started attending meetings again, and they’re glad they did.
“I enjoy going to church,” Allysa explains. “Everyone is nice to us. Even on our first day back, they helped us find our way around and were friendly.”
“The members of the Church really care about you,” Teylor adds.
The Staileys were already good people before they went back to church. But now they are much happier good people. “A lot of wonderful things have happened to us,” Brother Stailey reports. “We pay our tithing faithfully, and blessings have come from that. A couple of months ago, I was ordained an elder and I got to ordain Jeddy a priest that same day.”
There were many things that helped the family become active, but Brother Stailey has no doubt about the most important one. “You can’t believe the strength that comes from these kids. They are the reason for my change of heart. They and my mother are the reason this family turned around.”

The Red Cross of Bogotá, Colombia, honored the Church in November 2007 for organizing a record blood drive in which 879 volunteers donated 605 units of blood, nearly three times the number of units most blood drives in Bogotá produce. The donations were timely in that the time of year the drive took place has the fewest donations but sees the greatest need for donated blood.

I think of Elder Neal A. Maxwell and some of the challenges he faced during his teenage years. His parents were very poor. It was embarrassing to him that early on, they did not have indoor bathroom facilities like so many of his friends. His 4-H project was raising pigs, and that didn’t gain him a lot of popularity at high school either. He suffered from severe acne that challenged his confidence and self-esteem. He wondered if he would ever be socially acceptable to others.
He was intensely interested in athletics—particularly basketball—and was good enough to be able to play on the team as a freshman. But in later years, he was cut from the team and the sport he loved. Consequently, as he described it, “I turned to the world of words.” That became an immense blessing for him in his political, university, and educational executive assignments, and to all of us he now serves as one of the Lord’s prophets, seers, and revelators.

Shyness and nervousness have always made my life difficult. High school and college were trying because I was too afraid to answer questions verbally. Job interviews were equally hard, and it was difficult for me to secure employment.
After I joined the Church, sometimes I did not go to Church meetings for fear of being asked to offer a prayer. I felt bad having a testimony and not sharing it with my brothers and sisters, but I was too nervous to speak up. One Sunday I was asked to offer a spiritual thought the next week. As I walked home after church that Sunday, I thought seriously of never returning.
But that afternoon, I decided to have a nap. Before I dozed off, my six-year-old son, David, walked into the bedroom holding a copy of the Pearl of Great Price. He had opened the book to Moses, chapter 6, and he asked me to read it to him. I reluctantly told him I was tired and quickly closed the book. He pleaded, “Please, Mommy, just read here!” He again opened to Moses, chapter 6, his little fingers pointing to verse 31. I started to read:
“And when Enoch had heard these words, he bowed himself to the earth, before the Lord, and spake before the Lord, saying: Why is it that I have found favor in thy sight, and am but a lad, and all the people hate me; for I am slow of speech; wherefore am I thy servant?
“And the Lord said unto Enoch: Go forth and do as I have commanded thee, and no man shall pierce thee. Open thy mouth, and it shall be filled, and I will give thee utterance, for all flesh is in my hands, and I will do as seemeth me good” (Moses 6:31–32).
Even before David asked me to explain these scriptures, I had a new feeling within me. In the best and simplest way I could, I spoke to him in Kiswahili, our native tongue, and explained that the Lord promised to help Enoch; the Lord said He would make Enoch’s weakness his strength (see Ether 12:27). David smiled at me and told me to continue resting.
I did not go to sleep but spent the time pondering the realization that I am a special child of God. He had a purpose in sending me to earth.
The next Sunday I was nervous, but I gave the spiritual thought. I was later called as a Relief Society teacher, and with the help of the other sisters and my loving Heavenly Father, I was able to teach the lessons. Currently I am the first counselor in the Relief Society presidency of the Parklands Branch, Nairobi Kenya District.
It is amazing how the scriptures can bring light into our lives, both spiritually and temporally. I have continued to find joy and peace through reading the scriptures.

(80) Young Robert D. Hales gains a testimony as he learns about Deity from his parents, teachers, the scriptures, and the Holy Ghost.

Our beloved prophet not only calls us to be better missionaries, to lengthen our stride, he shows us how. In 1975 my wife and I were with President and Sister Kimball in Bogota, Colombia. As we were in the airport for his departure, an airlines representative met with us. Upon being introduced to this fine young man, the prophet extended his hand with these words, “Young man, I hope the next time I shake your hand you’re a member of this church.” Without any hesitation, and with his eyes fixed firmly on those of the prophet, the man replied, “Sir, so do I!” The President turned to the mission president and obtained a commitment from him to teach the man the gospel. Words President Kimball had spoken to missionaries in Bogota had been exemplified in deed: “Give full energy and thought to the Lord’s work—your lives will be rich because of it.” That day I saw how the prophet’s full thought was centered on living the spirit of the calling, as well as carrying out the physical duties that are his.

I became interested in photography because both of my parents like to take photos, and I took many pictures as I was growing up. After I had been scuba diving for a year, I got a digital underwater camera and took a picture of every fish I saw in the ocean. My skills increased with every dive trip I went on, and I also continued to take topside photos and capture the vivid colors of nature.

When I met with the missionaries, it was hard for them to tell me how God loves me and that He is my Father in Heaven. I did come to understand that because of the plan of salvation, I will meet my father once more. Because of my faith in the plan of salvation and the Atonement of Jesus Christ, I was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints in 2013.

I also served on Christmas Day, alongside my stake president and his wife, teaching missionaries (Elder Logan and Elder Holt), and a family of two brothers from the stake who had not yet opened their presents.
Elder Logan said, “We had the opportunity to serve at a fish bar doing deliveries. We first heard about it from our Church leader, President Jason Spragg. It was so great to have the opportunity to be a part of such an amazing act of kindness and charity. We greatly respect the owners/workers of Victoria Fish Bar. We thoroughly enjoyed the chance to help spread some Christmas cheer and goodwill. We had the opportunity to deliver boxes of fish and chips to some local care homes in Cardiff for the workers who sacrifice so much time and care for our elderly community. It was a lovely experience and I encourage anyone to seek out those opportunities in their area.”
This was a day to feel united, as many volunteers turned up; so many we had to queue up to volunteer. It was such a humbling experience, one that will stay with me throughout my life. I have learned the importance of service and sacrifice through being a service missionary.

Our dad is a police officer. A couple of years ago when we lived in Australia, Dad was working at a big convention. Important people from all over the world were coming. There were lots of protesters, and Dad’s job was to protect the people attending the convention. It lasted five days, and it was on the television news all the time because the protesters were angry and causing problems.
Dad worked long hours and was hardly ever home during that time. We watched television as much as possible to find out what was going on. One morning, Mum turned on the TV, and Dad was on the news! The protesters were getting out of control, and the police officers were having a difficult time protecting the people at the meeting. Mum turned off the TV, and we knelt down and said a prayer. We asked Heavenly Father to protect our dad.
When Dad got home that night, he was very tired. We told him we had prayed for him that morning that he would be protected. Dad smiled. He told us that he had been on the front line facing the protesters when the sergeant told him to leave the line and go cover a different area. After he left, several police officers were injured and had to be taken to the hospital. The sergeant had made him leave the front line shortly after we had finished our prayer.
We are children of God. We can pray to Heavenly Father anytime, anywhere. We know that He hears and answers our prayers.Jessica and Jaime Zurzolo, ages 11 and 6, Weippe, Idaho

“One day in my early teens a remarkable boy gave me a copy of English poems with pages torn, worn, and soiled, but it changed my life. One verse was marked: ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’

“So wrote English poet Robert Browning decades before I read it that day and I took it personally, appropriate to my self-discovery, of hopeful idealism and firming philosophy.

“Worn leather volumes containing William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Geoffrey Chaucer were passed into my hands by this boy who understood the grasp-and-reach theory. The public library provided me with ugly, stiff, practical new bindings of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘Friendship.’

“I loved all these books unabashedly.

“This boy and I couldn’t understand everything we read, but it was so exhilarating trying to understand that it was like coming in with the tide. Stretching our minds in the reading and then struggling to say it back in our own words to each other kept our relationship going one swift summer and was the basis for a lifelong friendship.”

Once a year Joseph went back to the Hill Cumorah, and Moroni taught him more each time. Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, later wrote that Joseph occasionally told the family some of the things he had learned. He would describe the people who once lived on the American continent—their clothes, means of travel, cities and buildings, methods of warfare, and religious worship, as if he had lived among them.
During this time Joseph married Emma Hale and continued to tell others about the revelations he received. Still, few people believed him, and many continued to persecute him and his family.
In 1827, Joseph received the plates and began translating them. In 1830 the Book of Mormon was printed and the Church was officially organized. Within a few months, missionaries were taking the Book of Mormon to other parts of the United States and to Canada. Many people were touched by the wonderful Spirit that accompanies the book.

Sitting in front of the group of people waiting to speak, Steve let his thoughts slide backward 12 years to a frosty winter evening when two small boys dragged snow shovels behind them, each clutching dollar bills in red right hands.
The house on the corner had a light on.
“There’s one,” Steve had said hopefully.
“Okay,” his brother Paul had answered, “you go ahead.”
Wearily he had trudged up the front walk and rung the bell. Two severe-looking brown eyes had stared down at him as he had forced his voice to ask, “Would you like your walk shoveled, ma’am?”
His voice had cracked and broken over the cold air that surrounded him as he realized that the old lady was Sarah Dunn. Sarah Dunn seemed ancient, and scary, and he thought of the rumor that she had once shot at someone for running across her lawn. Steve remembered being too scared to turn and run, and he could still feel the tingle that ran down his back as she had looked him in the face and asked, “Do you think my walk needs it?”
“Oh …”
He had begun to step backward when she said, “Why don’t you go ahead?”
The air seemed black and freezing as he turned to start shoveling. Looking up, he realized Paul had gone home or to find another house to shovel. He shivered, both from the cold and from his close contact with old Sarah. He wasn’t really sure what she had done to make some people afraid of her, but he was in no mood to find out. He decided he wouldn’t ask for any money for the shoveling; he would just do it and be glad to get home where it was warm and safe.
It took him longer than usual; he didn’t want to miss a spot. Once he looked up and saw her glancing out the window at him; he quickly bent over his work. Just before he pushed the shovel toward the porch for the last time, she opened her front door.
“Is it all right?” his voice faltered.
She leaned out from the porch, her eyes following the line of newly exposed pavement.
“Here,” she said, handing him three dollars and a Hershey bar, which he took gently from her.
“That’s too much,” he started to say, but she cut him off. “Next time it snows,” she said, “you come back.”
It snowed the next day. Steve watched the flakes fall and prayed for the sun to come out. Miss Dunn’s brown eyes haunted him throughout the afternoon as he and Paul played Ping-Pong. After losing three games because he kept watching flakes hit the windows outside, he left with the snow shovel.
It was the same that night—three dollars and a Hershey bar and she told him to come back. Opening the chocolate with red-cold hands, Steve realized he wasn’t quite so scared this time. Handing him the chocolate, she’d almost smiled.
It snowed a lot that winter, and Steve did lots of shoveling for many neighbors, but mostly for Miss Dunn. One night in February she asked him to come in when he had finished. His mouth almost said no before his brain could give the possibility any long thoughts. But his feet stepped right ahead until he was sitting in Miss Dunn’s front room and she was handing him a steaming cup of chocolate.
“It’s been getting harder for me to do my yard work,” she began, and before he left that night he had a summer job. He was hired to work Saturdays, but he usually found himself coming at least twice a week. He mowed the lawn while she pulled weeds and raked. She seemed strong for as old as she must be, he thought, feeling something like admiration as she leaned to pull a weed the size of a funny-stemmed carrot. She got as thirsty as he did, too, and she always seemed to have an ice-cold bottle of ginger ale waiting for both of them after the work was finished.
One day, when she finished her glass of ginger ale ahead of him, she looked at him suddenly. “Would you like to hear me play the piano?” she asked. He nodded, surprised, as she sat down and glided her hands across the keys. A smooth, many-noted melody drifted into his ears, and he began to relax, and she leaned her head back and started singing. It wasn’t a song he had ever heard, but she seemed to like it so much he couldn’t help listening. When she finished playing, he felt like he ought to clap his hands. Instead, he just looked at her.
“I used to sing for people,” she said. “I have pictures in my album. Would you like to see them?” She picked up a huge black book and patted a place beside her on the couch. He sat awkwardly next to her, expecting to be bored. Yet her voice added color to the tiredly fading newspaper clippings that clung desperately to the album’s pages. He found himself absorbed, reading along with her and looking when her finger pointed to pictures of herself in choral groups. He found it was late afternoon before he left her house.
After that, they talked regularly as they drank ginger ale and ate the oatmeal cookies she made. He brought his yearbook to show her, and she dug out pictures of herself when young. By noticing the year on one of the newspaper clippings she showed him, he figured that she was past 80. Yet she still pulled weeds.
His friends didn’t understand why he didn’t look for other work or why he stayed after the yard work was finished. He didn’t tell them much about his reasons; somehow his time with Miss Dunn wasn’t something he felt like sharing with everybody else.
For seven years he worked in Sarah Dunn’s yard, mowing in the summer and shoveling in the winter. Then, the summer he turned 19, he received a mission call. He wasn’t sure Miss Dunn knew what a mission was or how long it would last. Sometimes it was hard for him to tell himself he would really be gone two years. He knew he had to let her know so that she could find someone else to take care of her yard.
They were looking at a book together when he told her. She looked up into his eyes, and a look passed between them. “Two years,” she said softly, and the look said, “Maybe I won’t be here when you come home. Maybe this will be the last time.”
Steve looked down and pointed to something in the book she was holding. “Look at that,” he said, and his voice broke.
She wrote to him while he was gone, about how high her tomato plants were getting, and how last winter had seemed colder than all the others, and she asked was it cold where he was. He wrote back, glad when he was handed each new letter from her.
She was there when he came home. She walked a little slower, and he had to talk a little louder so she could hear, but she was definitely glad to see him. They sat on her front porch, and she looked at the pictures he had taken on his mission, holding each one out into the light and then close to her eyes so that she could see it.
“Beautiful,” she said quietly, studying one closely, “beautiful.”
It was hard for him to believe it when she died. He had thought it might happen while he was gone, and now that he was home, she had seemed safe somehow. Her niece telephoned him at home.
“Aunt Sarah had definite ideas about her funeral,” she said, “and she wanted you to be the main speaker.”
So here he sat, now, in front of the people who waited for his words. Getting up, he felt his knees shake, just the way they had that day when he asked, “Would you like me to shovel your walk, ma’am?” and he wondered if he could make his voice come out. He rested his hands on the podium edge. “How many of you,” he asked in a surprisingly clear voice, “how many of you really knew Sarah Dunn? I started to know her when she told me that she sang for people.”
His words came easily after that. He visualized the garden and Miss Dunn bent in half with her hands wrapped around a stubborn bit of morning glory weed. He saw in his mind the rounded shapes of her velvet living room furniture the color of rhubarb, and he saw himself seated on the edge of one of Miss Dunn’s chairs. (He never did quite trust himself while holding the gold-edged water goblet filled with ginger ale.) He could almost taste the ginger ale in the back of his throat as he talked.
“Do you know what Sarah Dunn gave me?” he asked the people in front of him. “She gave me my mission. I don’t mean she gave me the money to go, though a lot of what I saved came from working for her, but what she gave me was more important. She showed me how to love someone whose life was completely different from mine. She showed me that all people have some things in common. After a while, when we looked at the pictures in her album together, it seemed like we were seeing the same things—at least we could both appreciate what we saw.” Steve stopped, feeling a tear on his cheek. Would more people notice if he wiped it away, or if he left it? He left it, feeling the raw wetness descend his face.
“And on my mission, it was the same. Some people who answered the door gave me looks that made me feel like turning back, and then I would remember that 12-year-old boy standing in the snow on a bitter winter night. I would remember how the look on Sarah Dunn’s face scared me then, and think of how warm her ancient smile became that summer as we drank our ginger ale and tried not to think how many weeds we had pulled. I would think of Sarah Dunn, and I would begin to talk to the man whose frown seemed glued to his forehead, to the woman who looked as if she really wished she could be someplace else.” He stopped to breathe. His face felt really wet by now.
“I’m not saying it worked every time. I’m not saying the whole world suddenly became interested in me. But through Sarah Dunn, I suddenly became interested in the world. It wasn’t easy for me to like her. There was more than half a century between us, and at first I felt every one of those 60 years. Yet at the end of last summer, we might have been born on the same day. For showing me that loving your neighbor is really the most natural thing there is, I would like to thank Sarah Dunn now. Thank you, Sarah. What we shared will always be a part of me.”
He could talk no longer. He felt a hand on his shoulder and knew it belonged to his mother. It was funny, though. The hand felt exactly the same as Sarah Dunn’s had, the night she had said to him, “You know, I used to sing for people.”

Old Mr. Winkel lived in a little house with four stray dogs that just happened to come live with him. They all behaved quite well, except Emmet. Emmet loved to go and return when he pleased. He was called a troublemaker by everyone in the neighborhood.
But one night when everyone was asleep, Emmet heard a prowler and finally had a chance to redeem himself. The beautiful double-page colored illustrations offer much to see and enjoy.