Gospel Story Finder

“It’s not fair,” I muttered to no one in particular, but my best friend, Stephanie, heard me.
“What’s not fair?” she asked.
As we walked home from school together, I tried to explain. I began by saying that I’d always been a tomboy and that I’d never learn to be a “little mother,” even though I was the oldest of four children. I absolutely hated doing the dishes, and I hated arguing with my mom.
I kicked a pebble in disgust because home seemed rotten sometimes.
“Not only that,” I complained, “my parents don’t even live under the same roof.” Stephanie, who had only recently begun teaching me about the Church, was very quiet for a moment. Later, she would tell me that during that time in her life she had been hesitant about establishing friendships with people whose homes had such a different atmosphere than what she was used to. Nevertheless, she quickly came to a decision.
After walking along the road a little farther, she decided to use a scripture, rather than trying to tell me what was wrong with my attitude. Quoting the words of Nephi she said:
“And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Ne. 3:7).
The quotation from her church’s scriptures was new to me because I had never read the Book of Mormon, although she had challenged me to do so. Stephanie knew that I’d been taught the Ten Commandments and that I was familiar with the commandment to honor parents. She told me that I could obey the commandments because the Lord would help me, and that I could solve my problems by trusting that the Lord would prepare a way for me.
Today, four years later, I enjoy a really good friendship with both of my parents. I am also a member of the Church. Although I experienced family pressure not to join and I only had a small testimony, I persisted, waited, and built up my testimony.
Finally, ten days after my 18th birthday, I was able to be baptized. How did I last so long without becoming discouraged or giving up? I trusted in the Lord, and he prepared a way for me to obey his commandments.

Hey, wanna buy a cool pen? It has four different colors.
Where’d you get it? How much do you want for it?
My dad gave it to me. You can have it for a dollar.
Dad did say I could spend part of my birthday money any way I wanted.
Do you know where he got that pen? He saw some kid drop it and grabbed it before the kid turned around. He bragged about it to me.
Later, at afternoon recess …
I don’t want anything that was stolen. Just give me my money back.
Too bad. I already spent the money on nachos for lunch.
What am I going to do with this?
… and it has four colors, and it was a birthday present …
Are you looking for this?
Maybe I lost a dollar, but I get to keep my self-respect.

Over a hundred years later, the educator Dr. Robert Gordon Sproul described this condition in modern Christian churches in these words: “We have the peculiar spectacle of a nation, which to a limited extent practices Christianity without actively believing in Christianity. We are asked to turn to the church for enlightenment but when we do we find that the voice of the church is not inspired. The voice of the church today is the echo of our own voices. … The way out is the sound of a voice, not our voice. … It is the task of the pastors to hear this voice, cause us to hear it and tell us what it says. … Without it we are no more capable of saving the earth than we were capable of creating it in the first place.”

The youth in Bradford Ward delivered 200 flyers in their local area for their harvest appeal, supporting the Bradford Metropolitan Food Bank. Local member Pauline was speechless when the printer who made the flyers to advertise the event told her, “Under the circumstances we won’t charge to do these for you as it’s a worthy cause.” On collection day, several people from the local Muslim community came to donate food, including a dad and his teenage son who had just been to a kickboxing class. The father said, “We always go for fast food after kickboxing, but we wanted to come here first today to give this food to those who need extra help.”

I used to not like going to church because I felt I had no friends there. At school, I had friends I could laugh with. But I felt that the young women at church were different from me or might not like my personality. I started pretending to be asleep so I wouldn’t have to attend church.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic came, and we went through a time of losing things. I live with my mom and grandma. My mom lost her job, and we thought we would have to give up our home. I started looking for a cheaper place to live, but I didn’t find any. Instead, I found the Savior.
The Church started broadcasting church services online, and my mother would make me wake up and watch, which helped me to “fake it till I made it.” I felt like the Savior was reaching out to me, even if I wasn’t reaching out to Him. And when I started to reach out to Him, He made His hand more reachable. Losing things helped me find the Savior.
I felt like the Savior was reaching out to me, even if I wasn’t reaching out to Him.
Our bishop gave me a calling, and the other young women became my friends because I opened myself to them. Since I’d felt like I didn’t have friends, I realized others might experience this too. It made me think I should make the first move and reach out.
In the end, the Lord helped my mother find a new job. Thankfully, we still live in our home, and the Savior made it a holier place. I still laugh with my friends at school too. But nothing beats the joy the Savior offers.

Eight-year-old Alice Minerva Richards recorded that during the meeting on April 7, she “heard beautiful music, beyond anything [she had ever] heard elsewhere … and saw angels.” When she returned home, she told her younger brothers and sisters about her experience.

Because marriage has never been a strong religious or social tradition in Cape Verde, many mothers and fathers who want to join the Church must first get married. For example, Claudimire and Margarida Cardosa, merchants at Praia’s open-air market, lived together for 26 years before their oldest of eight children, 19-year-old KaiuKa, joined the Church. Three other siblings accepted the gospel before Claudimire and Margarida decided to join the Church in June 1993. Before they were baptized, they were joined as a couple in a marriage ceremony at Praia’s civil registry.

In the beginning, there were only five families in the branch, and they met in President Manoï’s home. Meetings eventually moved to a theater, then to another (where classrooms were created by pushing boxes of beer and soft drinks together), and then to a Chinese restaurant.
“The branch was my heart,” Brother Manoï says. “But where we met was not good. During our meetings, people were either lining up to go to a movie, or the proprietor was banging whiskey bottles around. We needed a chapel of our own.”
Land for a chapel was finally purchased in 1970. Part of the branch’s fund-raising effort was performing Polynesian dances for the cruise ships that brought tourists to Nouméa. After one of their performances on board ship, the captain invited the branch members to his room. There they discovered he was a Latter-day Saint from Utah. Their mutual membership in the Lord’s Church created an immediate bond. That experience was a highlight because there was little contact with Church members outside the islands during those early years.

My brain was fried! I had read one page in my history book three times without remembering one thing that was written. It was well after midnight when I rubbed my burning eyes and slammed the book shut. I wanted to do well on my final test, but the time had come to give up studying because nothing else was going into my throbbing head.
I set my history book down and picked up a different book of history. The familiar soft brown leather of my Book of Mormon felt soothing as I opened to Alma to do my nightly reading. I was not expecting to learn anything in this frame of mind, but to my complete surprise my pounding headache ceased and I felt a warm comforting peace envelop my body.
My mind was calm and alert. The words were clear and easy to understand. It was as though my kind Heavenly Father were speaking directly to me.

Jamie closed the shed door quietly and carried the heavy pail down the snow-covered trail to the deer feeding station. Carefully, he made three small piles of corn about six feet apart. Then, looking around, Jamie smiled and started up the trail to the warm cabin. He knew the deer had been watching him.
Jamie knocked the snow from his boots and, looking once more toward the white birch forest, slipped inside the cabin.
High in the loft where Jamie slept was a wide window close to the floor where he could watch the deer come to feed.
Jamie had named the doe and her fawns Mama, Flag, and Stomper. He had watched the fawns grow since spring when they were tiny, wobbly creatures no taller than the brush where they bedded down at night.
Ever since Jamie had named them, he had waited for the day when he would be able to feed them by hand and play with them and call them by name. But Jamie’s father had said it couldn’t be. “Animals in the wild must protect themselves from danger, and humans are a very great danger,” he explained. “If Flag and Stomper became your friends, they might not fear a hunter. We can feed the deer during the winter, but we must not make pets of them. They need to feel fear to survive.”
Jamie understood. He wanted his forest friends to survive. But he felt that somehow, someway, he could show the deer that he alone was their friend.
Later, as he watched from his window in the loft, the deer came out of the forest. First came Mama, slowly sniffing the wind and moving her ears to catch every sound. Then Flag bounced into the clearing and went straight to the corn. Stomper, Jamie knew, would wait out of sight in the brush. Then, when Flag and Mama were eating, he would appear at the far corn pile and stomp his feet—THUMP, THUMP, THUMP—while he ate.
All afternoon a fine snow fell, and by evening three more inches of it were added to the snow already on the ground.
After supper Jamie slipped on his heavy woolen jacket and his warm boots and stepped out into the cold winter night. The bright white light of the February moon cast long shadows as he walked down the wooded trail. He stopped and looked back at the cabin. The yellow orange light from the windows shone brightly on the white birches, on the snow-covered woodpile, and on the more distant snow-covered lake.
CRUNCH!
Jamie turned his head and listened. He pulled his hood back and listened again … THUMP, THUMP.
Jamie held his breath. Can it be? he wondered. It sounds like …
THUMP, THUMP. It was louder now, and Jamie’s heart beat faster as he tried to catch his breath. He knew what it was—who it was. Not moving a muscle, Jamie waited for it to come closer.
THUMP, THUMP.
“Stomper?” Jamie breathed quietly the name of his favorite deer. “Stomper?” He turned ever so slowly and waited, holding his breath. “Stomper?” he whispered again.
Then, as though he had been there all the while, as though he were a part of the frozen ground and snow-covered trees, Stomper appeared not ten feet away.
“Stomper,” Jamie whispered once more, letting his breath out slowly.
Stomper stood erect and tall, his eyes fixed on Jamie. The deer picked up his right leg, bent it, and—THUMP—stomped his foot hard on the frozen ground. Jamie dared not move, though he desperately wanted to touch the deer, just once.
Stomper moved one step toward Jamie! And then another! The deer stretched out its neck so close to Jamie that Jamie could hear him breathe. Jamie reached out slowly. Stomper didn’t move.
All of a sudden there was a terrific snort, a whistling snort, and Stomper wheeled about. “Mama!” Jamie gasped as the doe rushed toward Stomper, kicking her front feet and rearing up at the young deer.
“Jamie!” It was his father’s voice. “Come here, Son.” His father was crouched by the side of the trail.
Stomper and his mother bounded through the forest and stopped some distance away.
“Dad! You knew! And Stomper’s mother knew too!”
“Jamie,” his father said, “I guess both of us parents knew what would happen if you two had an encounter,” he said sympathetically. Putting his arm around Jamie’s shoulder, his father walked with him back to the cabin.
High up on the hill, the deer stood and watched the man and his son walking back to the lighted cabin. The doe licked the face of her little buck, and they turned and walked slowly into the winter forest.

A girl in Guatemala asked him a question. He answered and gave her a hug. He told her to do her best to follow Jesus.

A few years ago, I had a life-changing experience during a sacrament meeting in our home ward in Arizona. As the sacrament prayer indicated our willingness to “take upon [ourselves] the name of [Jesus Christ],” the Holy Ghost reminded me that Jesus has many names. This question then came to my heart: “Which of Jesus’s names should I take upon myself this week?”
Three names came to my mind, and I wrote them down. Each of those three names contained Christlike attributes that I wanted to develop more fully. In the week that followed, I focused on those three names and tried to embrace their corresponding attributes and characteristics. Since that time, I’ve continued to ask that question as part of my personal worship: “Which of Jesus’s names should I take upon myself this week?” Answering that question and striving to develop the related Christlike attributes has blessed my life.

Aleisha Keller, 14, of the Ogden Utah Weber Heights Stake explains, “Three councils, each including 10 stakes, presented a 20-minute dance and musical program. Our stake represented youth from Scotland dancing to live bagpipe music, and the whole group also sang three songs, including ‘Called to Serve,’ when each of us held up our own copy of the Book of Mormon.

“But my favorite part of the youth spectacular,” she says, “was the last song, ‘Arise!’ Some of the words are: ‘Arise, shine forth! Be a light unto the world!’ It made me feel wonderful inside that we can all work together to be a standard to everyone we associate with.”

Cheating at school is practically expected where I live. But I still live up to my standards and am respected for it. And you will be too.
I can tell you this because one guy was mad at me because I wouldn’t let him cheat off my test. He didn’t like me for a long time. But at the end of the year, he was able to joke about it. Be an example and others will follow. When you get depressed about things like this, pray. It truly helps.
Peggy Dyer, 15Evergreen, Colorado

Here’s a question you’ve probably already heard, especially if you’re not 16 yet. “Why can’t you date until you’re 16?”
You might tell your friends that your church leaders and parents have counseled against dating before 16, and that you have decided on your own that that’s pretty good advice.
Then your friends will probably ask, “Why?”
“Well,” you can reply, “I think a lot of it has to do with timing. I think I’ve got plenty of time to date before I get married, so I’m in no hurry.
“And it boils down to trust and obedience. I trust my parents and Church leaders enough to think that they want what’s best for me.”

How did you meet your best friend? Alexandra W. from California and Katie C. from Oregon met because their grandmas are best friends. Even though their families live far apart, these girls have a lot in common. They are both in second grade, they both love ice cream, and they both have been baptized. Both girls also had a special general conference experience that they will always remember.
Our grandmas decided it would be fun to celebrate our eighth birthdays by going to Salt Lake City for general conference. We explored the Church History Museum. At one exhibit, we helped tie a quilt. We also saw an actor dressed up as the prophet Brigham Young.
There were lots of things to see in Utah! Here we are at This Is the Place Monument, where Brigham Young told the pioneers they had finished their journey across the plains.
The most exciting day of all was Saturday morning. We walked into the Conference Center with thousands of people from all over the world. Our grandmas helped us find our seats. Suddenly everyone in the Conference Center became quiet, and we stood up to show respect as President Monson walked into the room. We saw the prophet of God! We listened to the prophet and General Authorities speak, and we heard the Tabernacle Choir sing.
Did you know that before the Conference Center was built, general conference was held in the Tabernacle on Temple Square? The organ pipes behind us should look familiar—a picture of them is on the front of every green hymnbook!
Now that we are back home again, we like to look back and remember. We remember not only the fun things we saw and did but also the special feelings we had when we heard and saw the prophet of God. We know that we have a Father in Heaven who loves us and that Jesus Christ is our Savior. And that is worth remembering!

When I was a young child, our family was anxious for the return of Uncle Orson. My mother had deep feelings about the matter, which she implanted in her children. For some reason I always watched for Uncle Orson to come to the back door of our home. I remember on a number of occasions when a peddler would come to the back door. I would pull on my mother’s dress to get her attention and ask, “Is this Uncle Orson?” But the answer was always no.
It was many years later that mother shared the story with me of her younger brother. Uncle Orson was born in 1881. Fourteen months later his father died, leaving him without the guidance of a father during those critical early years. When he was 17 years old, he, with a group of other boys his own age, went to Saltair, a dance pavilion on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Before the evening was over, they became drunk and ended up in the county jail.
The following morning, parents and family members came to the jail house and obtained their sons’ releases. Many of them put their arms around their sons and helped them become responsible citizens in the community. But unknown to my grandmother, Uncle Orson was released from jail, given a one-way ticket to the Northwest, and told never to return.
Mother said that on occasions she would hear her mother crying in her bedroom during the night. When she went to her mother’s side, her mother would say, “I wonder where my wandering boy is tonight.”
Uncle Orson likely worked in the lumber camps of the Northwest in an atmosphere that was not conducive to living the principles of the gospel. If he were living today, he would be very old. It is most likely that he has gone to the world of spirits by now. I’ve been searching the scriptures to find out what happened to Uncle Orson.

A true story from Puerto Rico.
Miguel opened his piano music and stared at the black notes on the page. His teacher had just given him a new song to play. It looked really complicated! This one would take a while to learn.
He placed his fingers on the keys and started looking for the right notes on the piano. Plink, plink, PLUNK. Again and again he kept hitting the wrong keys as he played.
Why couldn’t he get the notes right? This song was a lot harder than the Primary songs he loved to play. He was so frustrated! He pounded his hands down on the piano keys. Blonk!
“Miguel?” Mamá called. “Everything OK in there?”
“Yeah.” Miguel sighed. “This song is just hard.”
Mamá walked into the room. “I’m sorry you’re frustrated. Did you pray before you started practicing?”
“No.” Miguel hadn’t thought of that.
“When I’m learning something new, I like to say a prayer before I practice. Heavenly Father is here to help us. It doesn’t matter if you are playing sports, giving a talk in church, or playing the piano. We can always ask Him for help, because we can’t always do it on our own.”
Could prayer really help him learn his new song on the piano? He decided to give it a try.
The next day Miguel sat down at the piano again, ready to practice. But before he started, he remembered to pray.
“Heavenly Father,” he said, “help me to learn my new song. It’s hard to learn, but I know I can do it with Thy help.”
Then he finished by thanking Heavenly Father for his blessings. His arms relaxed, and he was ready to practice.
Slowly he started finding the notes on the keys and playing them one after another. He kept on practicing. Before he knew it, he could play the beginning of the song! He didn’t even notice how long he had been practicing.
Mamá popped her head into the room. “Wow, Miguel. It’s sounding great!”
“Thanks!” said Miguel. “I think saying a prayer before I practiced helped me be patient and learn a little bit at a time.” He flipped through the pages of the song. “It’s better than trying to learn it all at once.”
“You’ve got a good start!” Mamá said with a smile. “Before you know it, you’ll learn the whole song.”
Miguel smiled back. Then he put his hands on the keys and started to play.
“Pray, he is there; Speak, He is list’ning. You are His child; His love now surrounds you.”
“A Child’s Prayer” (Children’s Songbook, 12)
Illustrations by Tracy Nishimura Bishop

A year after Carlos joined the Church, he and María decided their house was too small for their growing family. So Carlos designed and built a new, larger home. It is beautiful and spacious—with lots of room for children and friends. Nathalia is practicing the piano in the living room. Verónica is doing homework at the dining room table. Marcelo is outside playing with Alfie, their cocker spaniel. And Sandra and Andrea are giving their dolls a party. Guests are treated like family here. A barbecue, a covered patio, a trampoline, and a swimming pool are out back. The garden is full of vegetables, pineapples, and sugar cane. And the trees are heavy with fruit: bananas, oranges, guavas, avocados, and mangos.

Carlos dedicated their home when it was finished. “A spirit of love and happiness reigns here,” he says. “We’re trying to comply with what the Lord wants. And all these things have been added to us, just as the scriptures say.

In 1816 the French physician René Laënnec was convinced that if he could listen carefully to the sounds made by his patients’ lungs and hearts, he would hear many clues to their conditions. But he found it difficult to isolate the swish of the lungs or the lub-dub of the beating heart. Many of his patients were so fat that the sounds coming from their chests were lost.
One day Dr. Laënnec was watching children play on a pile of timber. He saw one boy put his ear to the end of a long beam while another tapped on the opposite end. The sound traveled along the wood. At once Laënnec saw the answer to his problem. He hurried back to his hospital, took a paper-covered book, and rolled it tightly into a tube. To everyone’s astonishment, he then put one end of the tube to a patient’s chest and applied his ear to the other. As he expected, he heard the heart sounds clearly. Then he made little wooden “listening trumpets” on a lathe, and the stethoscope was invented.