Gospel Story Finder

“Brother Ng,” the man’s voice began. Being addressed as “brother” by a gwailouh (foreigner) caught Ng Kat Hing’s attention. A group of clean-cut Americans wearing dark suits had wandered into the furniture store where he was employed, and their unusual appearance fascinated the 25-year-old Hong Kong native. But he was even more intrigued by being called “brother.”
When Ng Kat Hing questioned them about the title, one of the Americans, who wore a name tag identifying him as President Heaton, asked, “Do you believe there is one Father in Heaven?”
When he nodded, the man continued, “Then we are brothers, and I will call you that.”
Forty-three years later, Brother Ng still recalls his response. “I was touched, and in that moment, a little bit of the restored gospel was manifest to me. I wondered about it all that day and through the night. Four days later when the man called back to confirm the furniture order, I knew I wanted to know more.”

A true story from Bermuda.
Colin tied two long pieces of wood together to make his kite. Then he looped string tightly around the outside of the kite to make it strong. Now it was time to add the colorful paper.
Uncle Ladd pointed to his own kite. “Am I doing this right?”
“Yeah. Now pull the strings tight,” Colin said.
“And choose some cloth for the tail,” said Alec, Colin’s younger brother. He pointed to the strips of cloth on the table. “That helps it fly.”
Colin and his family were making kites for Good Friday. Good Friday was a big holiday in Bermuda. It was the Friday before Easter. Everyone celebrated by going to the beach to fly their kites. Uncle Ladd was visiting Colin’s family. He had never made a kite before.
“Why do you fly kites on Good Friday?” Uncle Ladd asked. He chose red and blue paper for his kite.
“The kites flying in the air remind us that Jesus Christ was resurrected,” Colin said. “He went to be with Heavenly Father again. So we will all be resurrected someday.”
Alec nodded. “Everyone in Bermuda flies kites to celebrate.”
“What’s your favorite part?” Uncle Ladd asked.
Colin chose some colored paper. “I like that it brings us closer to God. And we get to spend time with family and friends.”
“I like that so many people celebrate together,” Alec said.
On Good Friday, Colin and his family went to the beach. They took their kites, fish cakes, and hot cross buns.
There were already lots of people at the beach. Colorful kites filled the sky. The wind blew everyone’s hair around, and the bright blue sky matched the color of the ocean. It was a perfect day for kite flying!
They sat on the beach to eat. The fish cakes were warm, and the hot cross buns were soft. Colin and Alec waved at friends walking by.
Then they walked with Uncle Ladd down the beach. Colin held his kite tightly. He had to run and try a few times before the wind picked up the kite and held it in the air. He watched his colorful kite dance in the breeze.
“I’m glad Jesus lives again,” Alec said.
Colin stared up at his kite and smiled. “Me too.”

I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, attending a zone conference, and Reggie, a young black university student, came to the conference. He had on a new pair of Levi’s that still had the four pieces of thread where the price tag had been. He wasn’t doing very well financially. He had bought them for the zone conference and had on a white shirt and tie that I think the missionaries loaned him. In a discussion he said to me, “I was taught two or three discussions. After the discussions they invited me to church. When I got to church Satan met me outside the door and he said, ‘You can’t go in there. That is a white man’s church.’ Satan tried to play the ‘colors’ game on me.”

That was interesting to me because Reggie said he went inside because he knew that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that the Book of Mormon was true, and that he had found more love and caring than he had known before. He said he felt like a poor beggar who had stumbled upon a field of diamonds and wanted to share with everyone he met.

In 1863 Charles Dickens, the English novelist, went on board the passenger ship Amazon, which was bound for New York. His purpose was to report on the Latter-day Saint converts who were emigrating to build up the Church in the American West. There had been thousands of converts who had already emigrated, and much had been written, particularly in the British media, about them and their beliefs. Most of what was written was unfavorable.
“I went on board their ship,” wrote Dickens, “to bear testimony against them if they deserved it, as I fully believed they would; to my great astonishment they did not deserve it.”
After observing and mingling with the converts, Dickens was impressed with them and described these English converts, most of whom were laborers, as being “in their degree, the pick and flower of England.”

As a young man having just finished my first year of college and needing to earn money for a desired mission, I spent the summer working at the new Jackson Lake Lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Many college-age youths came to work in that pristine, beautiful area.
One such person was Jill, a young woman from San Francisco, California. Feeling that a young woman from a big city might be a little bit naive about her new environment, I and a few friends felt it our obligation to teach her about the ways of the real West. We decided to take her on a “snipe hunt.” For those of you who may not be familiar with a snipe hunt, it is a practical joke, as there is no such thing as a snipe, at least not in the western United States. The tools necessary for a snipe hunt are a stick and a cloth bag. The “hunter” is told to go through the brush, beating the bushes with a stick while calling the snipe in a high-pitched, ridiculous voice. The nonexistent snipes are thus to be driven into the cloth bag.
We gave Jill her cloth bag and a stick and an area to hunt across the hill. The plan was to return to our starting point in about 15 minutes, at which time we would supposedly count our snipes.
When she did not return at the appointed time, we gloated and took delight in the seriousness with which she took her hunt. After about 30 minutes, we felt it was time to rescue her, explain the joke, have a good laugh, and all go to dinner. However, it became apparent that she had taken her snipe hunt more seriously than we had expected—she was not to be found in her assigned area. After searching rather extensively and still finding no evidence of her, we began moving into the woods, calling for her at the top of our voices, but to no avail.
Hoping she might have gone back to her dormitory, we returned and asked some young women to search for her there, but this also was to no avail. It was now turning dark, and our concern heightened. We enlisted all the young men we could from the boys’ dormitory, and with flashlights continued the search deep into the woods. Well into the darkness of night—frightened, concerned, and hoarse from calling—we decided it was now time to report our ridiculous deed to the park rangers. While we were standing in front of the dorms, trying to determine which brave soul would have the privilege of reporting her disappearance, Jill suddenly appeared—not from her dormitory, but rather from that of a friend, with whom she had enjoyed dinner (which we incidentally missed) and a comfortable evening with her friends. Her first words to us as she approached said it all: “How do you fellows like hunting snipe hunters?” Well, so much for big city naïveté, and so much for the ways of the real West. The joke was on us, and I have never had a desire for any more snipe hunting.

In 1935, a returning missionary, Elder Gordon B. Hinckley, was asked to visit with the First Presidency because of his special work in the British Isles. His fifteen-minute appointment soon stretched to nearly an hour and a half. Impressed, the First Presidency requested him to help with missionary work, and he has scarcely left the Church Administration Building since then. Only now he sits, humbly, in the center chair in the First Presidency Council Room to which he came humbly sixty years ago!

As a teenager, Gerrit loved to go backpacking and hiking with the other young men in his ward. Wally Salbacka, a lifelong friend, remembers one camping trip in particular. “I was there with Gerrit and his brother, Brian, and a friend who wasn’t a member of our Church. For some reason, we started singing hymns. Gerrit sang melody, Brian sang tenor, and I sang bass. I think we sang 10 or 20 hymns, just for the joy of singing. It was a good experience. Our nonmember friend was impressed.”

It may be that some of us are still like these early Saints—we know no more concerning the destiny of the Lord’s church and kingdom than a babe upon its mother’s lap. We don’t comprehend it. I certainly do not, but I am beginning to get the picture. I started to expand my vision when I was a young missionary serving in Italian-speaking Switzerland and in northern Italy. The food in Italy was wonderful, but the work was difficult, and rejection was common. Certainly larger numbers of people were joining the Church in Italy at the time in comparison to some other European countries, but it was not uncommon for missionaries to labor months upon months without witnessing the marvelous miracle of conversion. I was very pessimistic about the Church’s future in Italy. I knew, of course, of the phenomenal success of the Church in Mexico and in Central and South America, but I was deeply concerned about Europe. At the time the Eastern Bloc—the former Soviet Union and other eastern European countries—was closed to active missionary efforts.

In my lifetime I never imagined that China, Africa, and Greece would ever have congregations of Saints worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ. Yet, ironically, we still believed that the Second Coming was imminent. We simply did not comprehend the Lord’s timetable in this matter or the scope of His intended work during the time preceding the Second Coming.

Sometimes, in rather dramatic fashion, things change. The revelation on priesthood in 1978 and the demise of the Soviet Union dramatically changed the boundaries of our missionary fields of labor. Who has not been grateful for the expansion of the work among our brothers and sisters across Africa, eastern Europe, and elsewhere? Thrilling stories of a new generation of Mormon pioneers living in such places as Mongolia and India and in nations unfamiliar to myself such as the island chain of Kiribati are just as spiritually exciting and stimulating as almost any story from the first 100 years of the Restoration.

In 1997 I began a year of service at the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. During the following year we met with members of the Church from various nations of the earth and from various ethnicities living, working, and worshiping in the Holy Land. A real surprise to me was a branch composed of native members of the Church in Jordan and Israel—some returned missionaries and endowed in the temple. Since then, along with other professors—David Seely, Jim Toronto, and Paul Hoskisson—I have spoken to members of the Church who gather together weekly to worship the Lord in Lebanon and Cyprus.

It was in Cyprus that my story comes full circle. One of my assignments during my mission was in Lugano, a beautiful city by a lake in the mountains of southern Switzerland. It was a paradise: Swiss yogurt, Swiss chocolate, and heated buses in the winter! While there I became friends with Trafford and Fernanda Cole, members who lived in Italy. My companion, Elder Chris Meacham, and I spent long hours with them when they visited Lugano. Nearly a year later I was transferred to Padova, Italy, near Venice. There my companion Elder Steve Smoot and I worked closely with the Coles. Young and enthusiastic about the gospel, they both played important roles in the small branch of the Church. If they were ever pessimistic about the Church’s future in Italy, they never showed it.

Recently, some 25 years later, I rushed to a small, rented hall in Cyprus where Professor Seely and I were to speak at a missionary fireside. The missionaries had placed an ad in the local paper announcing the meeting: “Two American University Professors Will Speak on Paul’s Life and Labors.” Paul had visited the island nearly 2,000 years ago, and now we were there to talk to members and nonmembers of the Church about his life and ministry.

As we made our way into the building, we were introduced to some of the local members, visitors, guests, and missionaries serving on the island. I was impressed with the group of young elders and sisters. They were assigned to the Athens Greece Mission and were serving at this time on the island of Cyprus. They came from many lands, including Canada, England, Sweden, Germany, and France. But as the group opened up, there he was: Elder Cole. Yes, it was the son of Trafford and Fernanda Cole—the young couple I had known previously in Italy. Elder Cole was a second-generation Italian speaking modern Greek as a Latter-day Saint missionary in Cyprus!

Of course my story can be duplicated dozens of times by many of you here today. My students are returned missionaries from California, Montana, Chile, France, Russia, Mongolia, India, Korea, etcetera. My colleagues serve as mission presidents throughout the world—in places that seemed closed forever but that have now been opened by the hand of the Lord. The gospel is spreading across the nations of the earth. Although we are relatively few in number, nevertheless the destiny of this Church is such that before the Lord’s coming there shall be Saints upon all the face of the earth.

It had been a good year for pumpkins. That was the trouble.
“I really have to congratulate you, honey,” my mother said to my father. “I never dreamed I’d ever be married to a successful pumpkin farmer, but here I am.”
My father smiled. “I’m a regular Johnny Pumpkinseed,” he said.
I asked, “What are you going to do with all these pumpkins, Dad? There must be a million of them!”
“They’re going to market first thing tomorrow morning, Dot. Pumpkins like these will make me a rich man.”
“How rich?”
“Rich enough to pay the bills, if he’s lucky.” That was my mother’s line.
My father had been a machinist in an auto factory. When it closed down, he borrowed some money and said that he was going to make his dream come true. Mother told everyone that he was “going into pumpkins.”
Dad had said what he always said, “If I can make my dream come true, you can take an art class and work on your dream.” My mother had always wanted to study commercial art, but there was never enough money for it. I heard her tell Dad that she was going to do this as soon as we kids got through school.
“But,” my mother had wailed, “if your dream doesn’t pay off, we’ll be in worse debt than ever. Wouldn’t you like to get retrained in computers?”
“Dear, you have a negative attitude,” Dad said as he lifted a pumpkin to test the weight and solidness of it. “I hope it doesn’t rub off on the children.”
It might rub off on my little brothers, but I knew it wouldn’t rub off on me. I loved the farm too much. I figured if we could make it work, I’d be able to get a horse someday.
Well, here we were, looking at enough pumpkins to make a million Cinderellas’ dreams come true. We all picked pumpkins and loaded them into the back of the pickup. Then we picked another load and filled the back of the station wagon. It didn’t take many. Some were too big for me to carry.
The biggest pumpkin of all was too big for the station wagon. Dad saved that one for its seeds—and for the Biggest Pumpkin contest at the county fair.
Dad drove the truck, and Mom drove the station wagon into town. Sure enough, Dad sold the lot of them at the first supermarket. We had a party that night. I went out after supper and looked at all the rest of the pumpkins shining in the sunset like pure gold. For the first time, I was glad that my father had lost his factory job and decided to live off the land.
Then trouble came to Pumpkinland. It had been a good year for pumpkins—not just for us Martindales but for all the other pumpkin farmers as well. After we’d sold a few more loads of pumpkins, Dad stopped taking his pickup into town. The markets had plenty of pumpkins.
My mother made and froze pumpkin recipes until there was no more space.
Dad said, “I wonder what Johnny Appleseed would have done?”
“He would have moved to town and gone into computers,” my mother said.
Dad decided to open a roadside stand. All the time I wasn’t in school, I helped to work at the stand with Mother. It was fun at first, when the customers came to buy pumpkins. But soon they were whizzing by without so much as a wave.
“We need a sign,” I said that Thursday afternoon.
“What for, Dot? They can see this pile of pumpkins a mile away.”
“We need a sign that really stops traffic.”
Mother had been painting on a small canvas while we sat there watching customers ignore us. “Bring me the biggest pumpkin you can carry,” she said.
In a few minutes, Mother had painted “PUMPKINS” on it.
“It needs a picture,” I said.
She added a purple spider with long white fangs. I had to laugh.
The pumpkin took its place in front of the stand, facing the coming traffic where it could do its best to lure customers. My mother had such fun painting the sign that she painted a few more spiders on a few more pumpkins. I set them out front too.
The next cars that stopped bought all the spider pumpkins for Halloween. That encouraged Mother, and she painted jack-o’-lantern faces on pumpkins. Before long they sold too. Now, the shed roof didn’t have to fall on us to show us we had a good thing going. Mother painted pumpkins as fast as she could—weird faces, snakes, funny faces, and more purple spiders. Friday there was no school, and all day we sold her painted pumpkins. And those were about the only pumpkins we sold.
That evening when we told my father, he said, “Well, well, I never thought I’d be married to a successful commercial pumpkin artist, but here I am.”
My mother said, “Thank you, Johnny Pumpkinseed.”
After that, Mother couldn’t paint fast enough. She made some stencils and outlined the figures on the pumpkins. Then I filled in the outlines, and she followed with the details. We worked most of the night. Bright and early Saturday morning we were back in business.
Dad came home jubilant to tell us that he’d talked a chain of doughnut shops into giving away a free pumpkin with every two dozen doughnuts sold.
“With or without faces?” my mother asked.
“Ah! That’s the best part,” Dad announced. “They want some of your painted pumpkins to decorate the inside and then a truckload of unpainted ones to pile out front to give away.
Finally we were able to see the end of the pumpkins. We didn’t sell them all, but we did have enough money to pay the bills.
“There’s even enough left over for a horse,” Dad told me.
I thought about this for a long time, then decided that the money should go for an art course for Mother. It was her turn.

If you want to be in our gang, you have to prove your courage,” Tyler said. “Just peek into the Crazy Man’s workshop and then tell us what you saw.”
I swallowed hard and looked at the little yellow house and white workshop almost hidden among oak and elm trees. There was a chain link fence all around them, and the gate was locked. A big sign said KEEP OUT!
“Who is the Crazy Man?” I asked, barely getting the words out in a wheeze, “And why does he live alone in that creepy old place?”
“Because he’s crazy,” Royce snorted.
“So why do you want to bother him?”
“You’re chicken!” Tyler muttered, turning away.
“I’m not either!” I protested loudly, but I felt an aching in my stomach.
“Do it then. He won’t catch you. He eats supper at this time of day.” Tyler wasn’t smiling.
Royce grinned. It wasn’t a friendly grin, but I was new here, and these were the only friends I had. I didn’t want to lose them.
“Will you wait for me?” I asked.
Royce nodded. “Yeah—we want to hear about it. Now get going.”
Slowly I crossed the street. All I knew about the Crazy Man was what Royce and Tyler had told me. He lived by himself and carried a heavy walking stick and didn’t talk to anybody. All day long he could be heard pounding and sawing and talking to himself inside his shop.
All the kids were afraid of him. They said that he was making coffins in there. They said that if anybody went into his yard, the Crazy Man would beat him with a stick and lock him in an underground dungeon. I didn’t quite believe all that, but I didn’t really want to find out, either.
I stopped at the fence and peered into the yard. There was no grass, just lots of weeds and brush and trees. I studied the house. The blinds were closed, and nobody seemed to be looking out, so I pulled myself over the fence and dropped behind an oak tree.
The sun was going down, and huge, creepy shadows were everywhere. Hunched over, I crept through the bushes and weeds to the workshop behind the Crazy Man’s house. I was just standing up to look in a window, when I heard a screen door bang. Then I heard someone coming—someone who was talking to himself! Without really thinking, I tried the door of the workshop. It wasn’t locked, so I opened it and went in to hide.
The workshop was almost completely dark because there were only two small windows. I leaned against the wall, sucking in big gulps of air. Then the door was flung open, and in walked the Crazy Man!
He didn’t see me at first, because I was behind the door and everything was still dark. He slammed the door and walked to the middle of the shop and pulled a string. A bright light flooded the shop.
I wanted to run and never stop, but I was too scared to move. The shop was filled with parts of beds and dressers and cabinets and all sorts of things. I couldn’t see any coffins.
The Crazy Man started working with his back to me. Then he turned to grab a board and saw me standing there. I could feel my eyes swelling up until I was sure they were going to pop right out of my head.
The Crazy Man was old. He had deep wrinkles in his face and black bushy eyebrows. He looked as mean and crazy as Tyler and Royce had said he was. “What’re you doing here, boy?” he growled, taking a step toward me. “Who let you in here?”
I tried to think, but the only thing that came into my head was a picture of the Crazy Man dragging me down into his dungeon.
“Can’t you talk?”
“I came to see you,” I finally managed to whisper.
“What for?”
I shrugged.
“Well, I don’t like kids bothering me while I work. You aiming to bother me?”
I shook my head furiously.
“And I don’t let kids just hang around and do nothing. Are you going to help me?”
“Wh-What do you want me to do?”
“I need that four-by-four in the corner.”
I didn’t waste any time. I grabbed the four-by-four and took it to the Crazy Man, and he started working on it. He talked the whole time. He asked me about my family—why we’d moved, who my friends were. Sometimes he just muttered to himself, complaining about the wood, the tools, the light, or anything else that bothered him. He made me work, too, but I didn’t mind. I figured that as long as I was working, he wouldn’t throw me in his dungeon.
“Boy,” the Crazy Man growled at me, “there’s a big box of old scrap boards in the back corner. You could make yourself useful and haul them to the woodpile outside.”
I breathed a sigh of relief—I could slip away without the Crazy Man knowing. I hurried to the back of the shop and found the box. As I grabbed an armful of scrap boards, a stick caught my eye. It was round and long, with neat carvings all over it: flowers, people, animals, suns. I pulled it from the box and studied it. It was one of the prettiest pieces of wood I’d ever seen. “You don’t want to throw this away, do you?” I asked, holding it up.
The Crazy Man squinted toward me. “What is it?” he demanded, coming over to where I stood. He grabbed the wood from my hands, looked at it, then tossed it into the box again. “That’s nothing,” he muttered. “Throw it away.”
“But it’s pretty,” I protested, reaching for the stick again. He shook his head. “It’s just something I practiced on.”
“Practiced for what?”
He waved his hand about. I had been too scared to look closely at the things in the shop before. Nearly all of them had carvings on them. Beautiful carvings. There was a huge bed headboard with a giant smiling sun in the middle. There was a dresser with flying geese carved in the front.
“You made all these things?” I gasped.
The Crazy Man nodded.
“Wow! That’s great carving for a crazy m—” I stopped suddenly and covered my mouth with my hand. I thought I was going to faint.
The Crazy Man started to laugh. “Crazy, eh? Is that why you came, to see what a crazy man was like?”
“I didn’t mean … ,” I croaked, but the rest of the words got caught in my throat.
The Crazy Man went back to his work. “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. I won’t hurt you.”
I glanced at the door, then back at the pile of scrap boards. After a moment I started hauling the boards out to the woodpile. When I was finished, I watched him work on a small table.
“My name’s George,” he said suddenly. “George Blake.”
Funny—once the Crazy Man had a name, I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. “I’m Jimmy—Jimmy Johnson.”
A while later, Mr. Blake said, “Do you think it’s right to trespass on private property?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t seem like the kind of boy who would play tricks on an old man. Whose idea was this?”
I told him about Royce and Tyler without using their names.
“They thought I was dangerous,” he said, “but I didn’t see them rushing in to save you. Do you think that they’re really your friends?”
I shook my head. “Could I come again tomorrow?”
“If you want to.”
The next day after I had helped Mr. Blake for a while, he nodded toward a back corner. “There’s something there that you might want to look at.”
I looked in the corner and found a walking stick just my size. The bottom part was smooth and round. It got thicker near the top. The very top was carved into the smiling face of a boy, and there were small carvings beneath that. Jimmy was carved down the stick.
“The varnish is still drying, and it needs another coat. But it should be ready by tomorrow. That one wasn’t for practice. You can keep it. It’s for helping me yesterday.”
While we worked together, Mr. Blake said, “Listen, boy, I know it’s hard being new in town. But stick to what’s right, and you’ll find friends who feel the same way. Then you and I can teach them how to make walking sticks and lots of other things.”
I grinned. “You’re pretty nice for a crazy man.”
“Hand me that chisel,” Mr. Blake growled, but I knew he wasn’t really angry. Yesterday he had been “the Crazy Man.” Today he was my friend.

The Fowkes family had been having emergency drills during family home evenings for several years. This training helped them instinctively do the right things when the quake hit. Nathan, 13, who was studying in the library, immediately dove under a table that protected him from being hit by a tall cabinet of books. His younger brother and sister ducked under the kitchen table at home and missed being hit by falling china. just three weeks before the quake, Sister Fowkes had shown her son Kendall, 9, how to turn off the gas, electricity, and water in the house, so he could earn a Cub Scout achievement. This knowledge saved the family from a flooded basement, since the quake caused a water pipe to break.
Ten years earlier the Fowkes had made some other preparations. Following two consecutive dreams about being in an earthquake, Sister Fowkes insisted that her husband string wire in front of the shelves in their fruit room before they left on vacation. Eventually their foresight paid off. While they had over 200 bottles stacked seven shelves high, none were broken.

Anciently, certain women sacrificed as they testified and lived the teachings of Jesus. Certain women in the early days of the Restoration did the same. Drusilla Hendricks and her family were among those who, as new converts, suffered during the persecution of the Saints in Clay County, Missouri. Her husband was permanently paralyzed during the Battle of Crooked River. She was left to care for him as well as provide for her family.

“At one particularly distressing time, when the family was out of food, she remembered that a voice told her, ‘Hold on, for the Lord will provide.’”

When her son was needed to volunteer for the Mormon Battalion, at first Drusilla resisted and wrestled in prayer with Heavenly Father until “it was as though a voice said to her, ‘Do you not want the highest glory?’ She answered naturally, ‘Yes,’ and the voice continued, ‘How do you think to gain it save by making the greatest sacrifices?’”8

After the New Era printed “Walk Tall, You’re a Daughter of God,” our stake gathered together a special group of young women and taught them the song. My daughter and I heard them sing it at a stake Mutual event. This song touched Shannon deeply. She heard it again at girls’ camp that year. At the close of that camp an event took place which I shall remember as long as forever. We closed camp testimony meeting singing this wonderful song. As we sang “Walk Tall, You’re a Daughter of God,” Shannon and I embraced each other, crying and singing all at once. Thank you for that memory! I had less than a year left of holding my daughter. At the last she was in too much pain to be touched, and finally she was paralyzed so she couldn’t hug me anymore either.

When Henry and Mary entered Salt Lake City on September 15, 1866, it had been more than four years since they had seen their mother. Henry walked proudly at the head of the train, his clothes in tatters, his hair sticking out in all directions. In honor of the occasion, he was wearing a pair of boots, many sizes too large, that he had discovered in a burned-out pony express station.
His mother was nowhere to be seen. When the company halted for the last time, Henry sat on a crate in a wagon, heartsick, watching the happy reunions between loved ones. At last he saw a woman in a red and white plaid shawl approaching. He went to her and said, “Hey, Mother.”
“Is that you, Henry?” she asked. “Where is Mary?” Mary was hiding inside a wagon, ashamed of her ragged clothing. The family was finally reunited. However, there was sad news. During her journey to Utah, Sister Roberts had watched her baby, Thomas, weaken and die. She had buried him in a donated breadbox coffin along the way.

A few months ago, while participating in a service activity I was able to observe a sister who was heavily expecting. I wondered how much she would be able to offer while carrying such a physically demanding load. The agility and energy with which this sister moved to help lift a load for another needing relief, seemed to have lightened her own load. President Spencer W. Kimball (1895-1985) observed, “Only when you lift a burden, God will lift your burden. Divine paradox this! The man who staggers and falls because his burden is too great can lighten that burden by taking on the weight of another’s burden.”3

When I was in my final year of elementary school, all of the students went camping in Negros Occidental, Philippines, before our graduation. We pitched our tents at the campsite and had a good time exploring among the guava and mango trees. When night came, my parents came to check on me. They told me to be very careful, and then they left.
One of my classmates invited my friends and me to take a ride with him and his older cousin. His cousin drove us around, and we had fun until—to my surprise—my classmates brought out beer and cigarettes. We parked the car near the campsite, and they began to drink the beers and smoke in the car. They invited me to join them, but I refused.
I said I wouldn’t join in because smoking would shorten my lifespan. I also said that it is against my beliefs, because I have been taught the Word of Wisdom. I told them that the Word of Wisdom is a law that teaches that we should keep our bodies clean, because they are temples of God. I told them we must avoid smoking; drinking alcohol, tea, and coffee; and taking drugs. My best friend and I left the group and slept in our tent.
When I went home, I was happy to tell my dad that I had not joined my classmates but instead had taught them about the Word of Wisdom. I was happy the Holy Ghost was there to guide me and give me the courage to speak to my friends.
From this experience I learned that our obedience will be tested when we are on our own, without parents or others to support us. I feel grateful for the Word of Wisdom and am committed to obey it. When I am old enough, I will go on a mission and teach many people the importance of the Word of Wisdom.

Last semester I had an especially gray day. I was sick with the flu, worried about the seemingly endless and unresolvable trials faced by my loved ones, and discouraged about my work. I sat in my office replaying the film of woe. As I reran one particularly awful scene, I got a surprise. This time through the scene included a presence standing by me, resting a reassuring hand on my shoulder. The surprise shook me out of my bleak mood. I was reminded in that moment that there is so much more to reality than I imagine. As one of our hymns reminds us, “O know you not that angels are near you.” (Orson Pratt Huish, “Come unto Jesus,” Hymn 117). I remembered other occasions when I felt the presence of a loved one from the spirit world. This unseen world is real. Even though we have trials, the Lord, his angels, and our loved ones are near to us and concerned. We can take strength and renewal in opening our spiritual sense to that world, remembering that that we are known, loved, and cheered on.

Normandie Luscher, 29, a Master of Fine Arts student in Maryland, USA, uses her artwork for good. “I’ve been focusing a lot over the last couple of years on the most important commandment, to love God and to love our neighbor,” she explains. “In my artwork I’ve been focusing on telling stories. We can really learn how to be compassionate and love our neighbors more by listening to them and hearing their stories.”
A self-proclaimed “idea person,” Normandie brings people together for good in many ways. A school project led her to put on a fundraiser for a local women’s shelter: a gallery show featuring paintings she created telling the story of Job through a woman’s perspective. “Other women came and shared their stories and their experiences,” she explains. “And I thought that was a really powerful thing.”
Another idea Normandie pursued was for a collaborate zine (a self-published or online magazine). She reached out to other artists, and together they told Book of Mormon stories through the lens of contemporary art.
Personally, Normandie has found that she can be an influence for good by opening up to others. “I’ve been working on developing the courage to be vulnerable and share my own experiences and perspectives. Art is about being honest and sharing ideas. So in terms of being a force for good, I’m just trying to embrace those ideas of being honest and courageous and reaching out to other people and communicating through visual art.”
She encourages other young adults to develop courage to do good too. “Don’t be afraid of not being able to do enough,” she says. “I think a lot of people get overwhelmed with, ‘There’s nothing that I can do,’ and falling into that fallacy prevents so much good from being done. Don’t be afraid. Be courageous to move forward and to act.”

A few years ago, while teaching a missionary prep class at BYU, I asked students to practice extending commitments every week of the course. I explained that I did not expect them to invite someone to be baptized, just help someone else do what that person really wanted to do but had not yet been able to do without some outside help. One student explained to me how she had called a non-LDS friend in her home state just to see how she was doing. Her friend told her that she had developed a drinking problem and that she was thinking of dropping out of school and returning home. She said that she had become so discouraged, she was thinking of taking her own life.

My student asked her if she wanted some help. Becoming emotional, her friend consented. My student then said to her friend:
In our Church we have the Book of Mormon. One verse we've been studying talks about some missionaries who got so discouraged they wanted to give up and go back home, but then they prayed and fasted and the Lord comforted them and said, "bear with patience thine afflictions, and I will give unto you success" (Alma 26:27). I know that the Lord will help you. I know that he can help you overcome your drinking problem. I know He can help you succeed. Will you pray that He can do that?
Her friend agreed to pray. Later my student then said to me:
I can't actually believe I did that. I didn't know if she would be offended or if my invitation to pray would help her, but I felt that it would, so I did it. A week later my friend called me back and said, "I just want you to know that you saved my life. I'm getting some help with my drinking problem, and I've decided to stay in school. I'm not so discouraged anymore. You really saved my life."

This student was building up the soul of her friend.

Finally, I learned that there are many kinds of pioneers. I am a first-generation member of the Church. My family was not happy with my decision to be baptized, which made it difficult for me to attend my meetings. Our small branch struggled because of a lack of members, especially priesthood holders. Eventually it became evident that the mission was going to close it.
As a result, I decided to move to Canada, which was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. I was an only child and loved my parents very much, as they loved me, but my testimony would have been at risk had I stayed in an area where I couldn’t attend church. I can still remember the night I left—my father running alongside the train blowing kisses to me while my mother looked on. My heart was breaking, but I knew I had to leave.
I arrived in Calgary, Alberta, on Mother’s Day in May 1967. I attended church with the members I was staying with and cried through the whole meeting. I remember writing letters home to my parents with tears streaming down my face, telling them I loved Canada but missed England and my family so much.
I struggled to adjust to my new life, suffering homesickness, loneliness, and disappointments, but I stayed true to the gospel. I attended all of my meetings and accepted callings. These were my pioneer days.
Eventually I met my husband. We were sealed in the Cardston Alberta Temple and raised three children in the Church.