Gospel Story Finder

With all the preparations completed, all the shopping, talks, and goodbyes with dear friends and family, my wife and I headed for the security check at the Salt Lake City International Airport with our badges prominently displayed. A nice woman just behind us in line asked the question, “Where are you serving?” As we passed through the security checkpoint, we couldn’t help but notice the subtle glances and smiles that came from the security supervisors in their elevated booth as we walked past.

While waiting for our connecting flight in Atlanta, we were approached by a government contractor who was establishing a military support facility in southern Utah and who was a member of our Church. He asked us the same questions. He was a tough, military-trained man who reached out in the most tender of ways to two servants on their way to their assignment.

And so, our mission started with the blessing of having the power of the badge.

The diary also serves as a family record. Because the family is the most important unit in eternity, a record of it should be at least as important as minutes of Church meetings. My journal is such a record, discussing births, deaths, illnesses, achievements, and the individual interests, tastes, and personalities of each member of my family. As one example, here is how my diary described our young family’s normal nighttime routine six years ago while I was in graduate school:
“(January 22, 1971) Nightly ritual—Daddy walks thru door about 6 P.M. Jeff (2) grabs his legs, Scott (9 months) follows him in bedroom. Coat etc. off. Both boys on lap in big green chair. Julie (nearly 4) waits in wings. Scott terribly fussy. Dinner. Julie cleans up plate, eats vegetables as it ‘makes her tough.’ Jeff so-so. Scott doesn’t let Linda eat. After dinner: PJ time. Julie easy. Chase Jeff down. Change him. Piggy back rides to Scott’s room. Tell all nursery rhymes off curtains. Prayers—both do it. Bed. Phonograph (Julie wants ‘Lemon Sisters’). Close door except for 6?, Scott tries to go in. Julie needs drink, etc. Jeff crawls out of crib over chest of drawers—gets Julie. Finally settle down. Dad restless. Doesn’t get studying til 9. Lin to bed by 10 or 11. Bill by 12. Kids wake up. 4 nites of 7 one ends up in bed with us.”

When Ron married his wife, Melanie, in the Salt Lake Temple on September 4, 1973, they decided to always put the Lord first in their marriage and family. That commitment was tested in 1996. Ron was in the middle of a successful career when he was called to return to New York—this time as president of the New York New York North Mission. Remembering the lesson he had learned as a young man, he immediately quit his job to accept the call.
“You want me to go serve,” he said to Heavenly Father, “then I’ll go serve.”
As a mission president, he remembered another lesson—one he had learned from his professional experience: “People are more important than anything else.”1

A young woman I know was a little frustrated with friends questioning her standards: “Why can’t you date before 16?” “Why don’t you drink?” When she prayed about how to handle this situation, this idea came to her mind: “I’m going to put a For the Strength of Youth booklet in my jeans pocket. When people question me about, for example, dating, I’ll give them the book and tell them to read the section on dating.”

It turned out to be a great idea! In three months she gave out 52 copies of For the Strength of Youth. And three new friends started attending church with her.

This young woman was bold in a friendly way and didn’t apologize for her standards. When youth live standards clearly and without apology, others will respect them and look to their example.Mary N. Cook, second counselor in the Young Women general presidency.

Real missionary work is, of course, based on real love, and an experience of these fine young Latter-day Saints proves it. They worked for a long time to reactivate a member of the priests quorum, but it soon became clear that he wasn’t interested. They made it equally clear to him that they still wanted to be his friends, and recognizing their sincerity he was happy to have it that way. When he was in the hospital some time later, they visited him often, not to activate him, but just because they loved him. He got the message without their having to give it to him and took the first steps toward becoming active again.

A few years ago, when I was meeting with my team captains before the beginning of the year, I asked, “What do you want for this team? What do you want to accomplish?”

Without hesitation they said they had met previously and thought that NCAA regionals were great, but they wanted to compete at the national championship. At the time we were an up-and-coming team. This would be the first year I had my own players I had recruited. I didn’t know exactly what we were capable of. But I knew that if that is what they wanted, we could create a plan to get it. We just needed to work really hard to get it and have complete buy-in from everyone. We talked about the plan of attack and introduced it to the team. The most important part was that this was their desire, their want, and their goal. My job was to show them how to get it and to hold them accountable to the things they said they would do to get it.

Winning in golf is a very difficult thing to do. You can have a long career, make millions of dollars, and never win, and yet you can still be considered successful. Winning once a year as a team is quite a big deal. Those teams who do it more than once are elite.

This particular year, with what we wanted clearly defined and our why as solid as could be, we won five out of nine events, including our first conference championship since 1992. After our conference win, we headed to regionals. There it didn’t matter what you had done previously. You now had to place in the top six in the field of eighteen to advance to the national championship. The teams were put into four regions, and we were sent to Louisiana to play at a very difficult golf course against a very difficult field with conditions that we were not used to. We would play three rounds of eighteen holes to determine our fate.

With one round to go, we were in fifth place. But we had one more day left. On the final day I checked to see where we were after nine holes, which meant we had nine holes to go. We were behind about six strokes. Deep down I knew that anything could happen, and I thought to myself, “Okay, ladies, if you want to go to nationals, then now is the time to take us there.”

As we were playing the fifteenth hole, I saw us make some key mistakes that caused some big scores. I thought, “No, no, no!”

But on the scoreboard we were somehow now even with the team ahead of us. I looked at our girls. They were calm, stoic. They appeared to know exactly why they were there and what they wanted to accomplish. With a look of confidence that they would not be denied their goal, they proceeded to the next hole to play as if the mistakes hadn’t happened.

When we had three holes to go, the team with which we were tied had finished. Now it was up to us. We had to have all four counting players finish one under on the last three holes to make it to nationals. This was no small feat. Our sophomore hit a clutch approach shot on the last hole to secure the birdie that we needed. When I asked her what she was thinking, knowing that she would have to wait forty-five minutes for the rest of her team to finish, she said, “I wasn’t thinking, let alone breathing.”

Now it was up to the next three counting players to finish strong. I was with our junior, who hit her approach in the greenside bunker on the last hole. With a difficult up-and-down, she curled in a ten-foot putt to secure our one-stroke lead.

Now all we needed was our last two players to finish par or better. The entire left side of the finishing hole on this golf course was water. If you missed left, you had to take a penalty and add a stroke to your score. We learned later that the opposing team lost eight shots on that hole alone. Our conference player of the year was up next and had left herself with a nerve-wracking fifteen-foot putt to save par. With a small chance to make it, she willed the ball into the hole.

With our number-one player still to finish, we received a text message that she had a short putt for birdie to give us a two-stroke advantage. But she hit the putt too hard and made an improbable three-putt to put us into a tie. I met her in the fairway on the last hole to discuss the approach. She felt confident in a six iron and let it rip. With what her dad says was the best six iron of her life, she put her approach ten feet or so above the hole. We dissected that putt from every angle to make sure we knew exactly how she should play that putt. The ball just happened to be sitting on a ledge, and from one angle it looked like the ball would go left. From the other angle it looked like it would go right. So we decided to play it straight. When later asked why she smiled before she hit the putt, she commented, “Because I knew I was going to make it.” As the putt dropped and the crowd roared, an opposing coach called it “the most exciting moment in golf that she has been a part of.”

We had now accomplished our goal of qualifying for the national championship. What was unique about this experience is that we were the first BYU team to require the NCAA to move their national championship since one of the rounds was played on Sunday. The girls handled it like pros and put BYU women’s golf on the map. They defined what they wanted. Every day they worked to get a little closer to that goal. They remembered their why each day, and they proceeded with confidence even through adversity to ultimately be awarded their goal. And afterward we celebrated in true BYU fashion by toasting our chocolate milks at a Louisiana Waffle House at 2 a.m.

Another provider of brilliant sunshine is the Howard Family. Carol and Lee have established a remarkable legacy in their neighborhood. Each month, they host a wonderful dinner for all of the widows and newcomers in their ward and related neighborhood. A carefully crafted invitation is sent to each individual, inviting him or her to come to dinner. When these sisters and others come to their home, they enjoy a wonderful social and a scrumptious meal--gifts cheerfully given by Lee and Carol and gifts gladly received by the sweet widowed sisters and newcomers.

My mother, Marcia Egan, now 91, loves attending this social each month in the company of her contemporaries and newcomers. She believes Carol and Lee are well on their way to sainthood now. They have been doing this for 10 years. They do this out of the best kind of motivation, love. They, like the Savior, are going about doing good. In doing so, they are becoming like Him.

It may seem like Shellee’s got it made. Being deaf hasn’t kept her from dancing, doing well in school, or making friends. However, it has made the gospel harder for her to understand than it is for most teenagers.
Only in the last year has Shellee attended a deaf ward, so until then she had to fend for herself at church. “I never knew how much she was actually getting,” says Janell Frost, one of Shellee’s Primary and Young Women teachers.
Fortunately, Pleasant Grove High School has a deaf seminary teacher whose class Shellee can attend. “Seminary has helped me a lot,” she says. “For example, I didn’t know I would live again after I die. I was so happy because then I knew I would see Grandma again.” Shellee hadn’t been able to grasp that concept until then, although she has always been an active member of the Church.
Reading the scriptures is hard for Shellee because of the vocabulary. She doesn’t recognize words from having heard them in conversation; she has to learn each word individually by looking it up. Words like nevertheless are hard enough to understand when you’ve heard other people use them. How is a deaf person to understand it without help?
Shellee’s seminary teacher is helping to solve this problem with drawings. She has her students draw pictures in their scriptures that go along with the stories so they can have a better idea of what is going on. “It helps a lot,” Shellee says.
In part, Shellee wants to go on a mission because she has had a difficult time understanding the gospel principles. “I want to go on a deaf mission so I can learn more. I want to help those who are lost.”
Whether they are obvious or not, we all have our barriers to overcome—even smart, outgoing, cheerleaders who accidentally leave their radios blaring. But when we work together and keep on trying, those barriers come crumbling down.

Their first stop in India was Edwin’s brother’s house. Edwin’s parents and siblings were there too. Right away, Edwin and Elsie started teaching them. Their family was happy to learn about the gospel.
A few weeks later, Edwin and his family gathered around the swimming pool in his brother’s yard. The pool had been cleaned, painted, and filled with fresh water. Everyone was wearing white. The women wore flowing saris that draped over their shoulders. The men wore loose Indian-style jackets and trousers.
Edwin stood in the pool with his father. “Samuel David,” Edwin said, “having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Edwin felt happy as he baptized his father. He felt even happier when he baptized his mom next. By the end of the day, Edwin had baptized 18 people!
The next day, Edwin and Elsie rode a train for six hours. They visited more family members and taught them about the gospel. Edwin baptized four more of his relatives in a nearby river.
When Edwin and Elsie finished their mission, there were enough new members to start one of the first branches of the Church in India! Edwin and Elsie were happy when they returned to Samoa. They were grateful Heavenly Father had sent them on a mission!

As a young man, I remember my mother placing her and my father’s temple clothes on the kitchen table. She would then take a temple robe and carefully iron each pleat on an ironing board. She always took her time. This is one of my earliest memories as a youth.
At the time, I did not fully appreciate the temple, but as I watched my mother iron her and my father’s temple clothes, I could see how important the temple was to them. Their example taught me how sacred the temple is and how vital it is to “stand … in holy places, and be not moved” (Doctrine and Covenants 87:8).

Latter-day Saints joined other Christian groups in Boston, Massachusetts, to donate food for those in need.

Latter-day Saints in Massachusetts, USA, have been working with the Azusa Christian Community and Catholic Charities to bring food to the poor in Boston, Malden, and Springfield. In November 2022 the Church donated 3,000 frozen turkeys and 40 tons of nonperishable food.

Three semitrucks of food from the Bishops’ Central Storehouse in Salt Lake City arrived in Boston on November 19. A thousand turkeys were delivered to Catholic Charities Boston to help them in their distribution of 1,400 Thanksgiving meals to households in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood. The other 2,000 turkeys, along with the 40 tons of food, were unloaded at a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in Newton. And then came the volunteers—about 400 of them—who spent their Saturday unloading provisions and repackaging them into 2,000 food kits.

Two of those volunteers, Charles Inouye and his son Kan, helped deliver and set up long tables and dollies in the meetinghouse parking lot. Kan helped open and stack cardboard boxes. His dad worked the forklift.

“Jesus taught that the sun shines on everyone and that the rain falls on the just and the unjust,” Brother Inouye said. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what ‘be ye therefore perfect’ means [Matthew 5:48]. Can we be like the sun and the rain—perfectly giving to anyone, anywhere, anytime?”

The Reverend Eugene Rivers, who leads the Azusa Christian Community, visited Newton that morning. He said people of faith and goodwill who come together in good causes are society’s “last best hope” to prevent us from sinking into deeper division.

“Unless faith communities more actively engage one another, it does not bode well for this country,” the Reverend Rivers said.

Faith groups coming together as they are in Boston is, the Reverend Rivers said, a wise and effective Christian solution—and the “only promising option our country has” to achieve unity and wholeness.

Illustrations by David Malan
As a young man, I looked forward to the day when I would serve a full-time mission. When I finally entered the mission field, I discovered that missionary service was not what I had expected—it was better. It was harder than I thought, but the satisfaction that came from doing what the Lord asked of me was indescribable.
Never before had I experienced the joy of helping someone attend church. Never before had I felt the thrill of hearing someone say, “Sure, come on in” so that they could hear the restored gospel. Never before had I sensed the reality of the power that came as we declared repentance. Never before had I prayed with such real intent. Never before had an hour of scripture study gone by so fast. Never before had I been brought to tears by the realization of my imperfections. Never before had I experienced the devastation that comes with the words, “Elders, please don’t come by my house anymore.” Never before had I gotten a blister on my foot the size of my thumb. Never before had I felt so protected. Never before had I felt so much responsibility for my actions because I wore the name “Jesus Christ” on my chest.
Never before had I been so close to my Heavenly Father as I came to be during my full-time mission.

The people who come to BYU for our annual conference are often deeply moved by what they experience here. One of my favorite statements comes from another friend who is currently the head of religious affairs in Albania. He had the opportunity last fall, the day before our academic conference started, to attend the Sunday morning session of general conference in the new Conference Center. Some of you who stood in lines to get into conference this past weekend can appreciate what he saw. This is what he said about the experience:

I have been in [my position as head of religious affairs] for a year, and I have seen a lot. But now I am totally convinced that religion should be an essential part of people’s lives. In my country, people line up for bread; today I saw thousands of your people standing in line . . . to worship.

This kind of impression changes perspectives on the importance of religious freedom. I returned a month ago from a conference that same man had organized in Albania aimed at pointing the way toward a good law on religious associations that can bless the lives of people in that poor and struggling country for years to come. These stories indicate only a few of the many approaches that can help promote religious freedom.

Then gradually the thoughts of my ancestors who had walked this trail began to fill my heart. First it was Jared and Cornelia with their two-year-old son. I felt the chill in the air, but that chill was nothing compared to the freezing conditions Jared and his little family had experienced during their exodus. Cornelia died somewhere between Nauvoo and Salt Lake. I imagined Jared weeping as he picked up his son and continued on.
My heart began to swell with emotion; it felt as though Sarah had joined me. Jared and Cornelia with their little son were with me also. We walked together amid the light and shadow, past and present merging on this trail—this trail of hope, this trail of tears. In a way I can’t explain, they were with me and awakened in me our shared love of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I realized that my testimony burns in me because it had burned in them—passed from generation to generation—each laying the foundation for the next. I wept with gratitude.
Soon my husband, who had been photographing elsewhere, caught up with me. I stood close to him as I told him of my experience. He, like those Nauvoo Saints, was the first in his family to believe the gospel. And he, like those who had walked this trail more than 150 years before, would not be the last to believe. His testimony and mine nurtured the testimonies that now burn in the hearts of our children, just as the testimonies of Jared and Cornelia and Sarah nurtured the testimonies of thousands of their descendants.

I would like to finish my thoughts with one of my favorite stories that has been handed down over many generations from an old and, by now, anonymous rabbi. This may be a rabbinical story, but it is a story that was lived by a Christian called Raoul Wallenberg.

This wise, old rabbi had his students gathered around him one day, and he asked them the following question: “How can you tell the moment at which the night begins to turn to day?”

His brightest student raised his hand and said, “Well, I think it is when you are walking through the village and it is dark and you are still far off, but you can tell the roof of your own home from that of your neighbor.”

The rabbi said, “No, that is not the way to tell when night begins to turn to day.”

A second student spoke up and said, “It is perhaps the moment when a man who is walking through the woods at twilight sees a large animal approaching him and he can tell whether it is a bull or a large dog.”

The rabbi shook his head no and gave this answer: “The moment when the night has begun to turn to day is the moment when you can look into the face of a stranger and you recognize that he is your brother.”

That is the meaning and message of Raoul Wallenberg’s life. In the midst of the darkest night the world had known, he looked into the faces of strangers who looked so different from himself and saw that they were his brothers and his sisters. In recognizing this, he brought light into the terrible darkness and hastened the coming of the dawn.

My first visit to the church was at the beginning of June 2024, and it was a Fast Sunday. In hindsight, what a brilliant first session it was. Hearing other people talk about the strength and power that they have found through The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints filled me with hope. Straight after the sacrament meeting, I spoke with the full-time missionaries and asked them if I could start working towards becoming a member of the Church. The Elders invited me to read the Book of Mormon and I also started to attend weekly lessons, which taught me more about the gospel and the mission of the Church. I was baptised on 27th July and my husband was baptised on 24th October.

Wilford Woodruff, as President of the Church, described his experience in the offices of the priesthood:
“I heard the first sermon I ever heard in this Church. The next day I was baptized. … I was ordained a Teacher. My mission immediately commenced. … I went through that whole mission as a Teacher. … At the conference I was ordained a Priest. … After I was ordained a Priest I was sent … on a mission to the southern country. That was in the fall of 1834. I had a companion with me, and we started out without purse and scrip. I traveled alone a good many miles and preached the Gospel, and I baptized a number that I could not confirm in the Church, because I was only a Priest. … I traveled some time preaching the Gospel before I was ordained an Elder. …
“[Now] I have been some fifty-four years a member of the Twelve Apostles. I have traveled with that and other quorums now for sixty years; and I want to say to this assembly that I was just as much sustained by the power of God while holding the office of a Teacher, and especially while officiating in the vineyard as a Priest, as I ever was as an Apostle. There is no difference in this so long as we do our duty.”1

I have always been impressed with an experience President Hugh B. Brown, former member of the First Presidency, shared with me when I was serving a mission under his direction in the British Isles. He told about his mother’s encouraging words as he left on his mission when he was about 20 years of age. This essentially was her message, as I recall:
“Hugh, you remember when you were a little boy and you would have a bad dream or wake up in the night frightened, you would call from your room: ‘Mother, are you there?’ and I would answer and try to comfort you and remove your fears. Now as you go on a mission and out into the world there will be times when you will be frightened, when you feel weak, inadequate, alone, and have problems.
“I want you to know that you can call to your Heavenly Father as you used to call to me and say: ‘Father, are you there? I need your help.’ Do this with the knowledge that He is there and that He will be ready to help you if you will do your part, and live worthy of your blessings and needs. I want to reassure you that He is there and will answer your prayers and needs for your best good.”

It was a sunny Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, when Mt. St. Helens blew her top with a blast 500 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The top 1,400 feet of the mountain were blown off, killing at least 22 people, wiping out homes, displacing families, creating steaming mudslides and floods that demolished bridges and logging camps, and blanketing much of the northwestern United States and parts eastward with a fine gritty, gray volcanic ash. Over a billion dollars in crops, timber, and property were lost; cities and schools closed down; food and water supplies were sometimes cut off; and people stayed in their homes.
The chalky ash covered trees, houses, fields, streets, everything, like tons of powdered sugar, but it was far from sweet. It clogged car engines, swirled up in white clouds like dense fog whenever cars drove through it (making driving extremely dangerous), choked out new crops, weighed heavily on rooftops and awnings and people’s minds. You could shovel it from your walk to the street, but it often blew back, and how did you get it out of the street, anyway. For most people it was a gritty nightmare that eventually city bulldozers and trucks would help handle.
For the young Latter-day Saints living in volcano territory, the disaster became a time of faith, service, and closeness to our Heavenly Father.
“I was in sacrament meeting when it happened,” said Joyce Allsop, 19, of the Yakima Fifth Ward, Yakima Washington Stake, about a hundred miles from Mt. St. Helens. “I looked out the window and everything was getting darker and darker. There were flashes of eerie, orange-red lightning through the ash particles, like nothing I’ve ever seen before, but no rain. The thunder came so close that we all ducked, and the building shook. We thought it would fall down on us. Then everything turned pitch black, at 10:00 in the morning, and stayed that way for 24 hours.
“Outside, ashes were falling like snow, only you could feel it, like sand pelting you. Then it started coming down like a heavy, gritty rain.”
The members of Joyce’s ward were told that the volcano had erupted and that the roads were extremely hazardous, with visibility down to zero. She and a friend decided to drive the 20 miles home, because they wanted to be with their families.
“As soon as we got into the car, we said a prayer to help us get home. We started out and could barely see anything, it was so dark. Cars where pulled off in ditches to the side of the road because people couldn’t see where the road was. Most people had no idea where they were. The only way we ever made it home was with the Lord’s help.
“When we got home, we got calls from all sorts of concerned people, some we hardly even knew, checking that we’d made it home safely,” she added.
The abrupt change from a peaceful, secure life to not knowing what would happen gave Joyce a lot to think about.
“I realized how blessed we were to get home safely. And I thought, if this is anything like the Second Coming, we have to be more prepared. I think I could also relate a little to how the Nephites must have felt when Christ was crucified, when it turned pitch black. Those words from the Book of Mormon suddenly took on new meaning.
“I also understood how powerful the forces of nature are and how quickly the world could be destroyed. And I realized, more fully why we need to have food storage and clothing, supplies, and water on hand. As soon as the general public in Yakima heard that the roads were closed because of the eruption, they all rushed to stock up on supplies. Now a lot of the single people from home are starting their own food storage programs,” said Joyce.
Sheryl Hague of Yakima was also at church when the volcano erupted. “I thought it was a blessing that we were all in church when it happened, in a safe place,” she said, “I go to a singles’ branch, but I knew my family was in church at their ward, and my dad, who’s a stake president, was in church somewhere. My bishop was making sure we had wet paper towels over our mouths so we didn’t breathe the dust in, and people were making sure that everyone who wanted a ride home had it and that we were all okay. Right away we organized a calling committee to make sure that everyone had food and any help they needed.”
Many of the Young Adults at Sheryl’s ward opted to stay at the institute building where church was being held, until things quieted down. Food was brought in to the group by the Relief Society and elders quorum presidents.
“The prophet tells us constantly to be prepared, but often we don’t really listen until something like this happens, which is too bad,” added Sheryl. “During the first day especially I thought a lot about the Second Coming and how if you’re not prepared you’re going to panic, like a lot of unprepared people here did. I found out how important food storage is, too. Some people here didn’t have enough food to last them for even a couple of days. On the radio people were advised to store water, which our family had already done long before. We stored quite a bit more, though, including a bathtub full.”
Immediately after the shock of the eruption, even with the uncertainty of not knowing what was going to happen, the young people of wards across Washington jumped wholeheartedly into helping other people. Calling committees checked to see that ward members were safe; teachers and priests quorums and the young women organized to help clean chapels and homes. Volcanic ash started flying as young volunteers got out their shovels and brooms and started the cleanup.
“The youth in my ward were helping even as families started leaving the chapel the morning of the eruption,” said Bishop Terry Brandon of the Yakima Fourth Ward, Yakima Washington Stake. “The teenagers comforted the children, talked with them, and in many cases scooped the young ones into their arms and delivered them safely to waiting cars and their parents. Breathing was uncomfortable, and the falling ash was irritating their eyes, but these youth didn’t care about that.
“Then early the next morning I began receiving phone calls from teens wanting to help anyone who needed it, so we organized a cleanup force. They spent eight, nine hours at a time in the grittiest, dirtiest mess you’ve ever seen helping other people, in addition to the efforts spent in cleaning up their own homes. They took a lot of initiative themselves. All of them helped clean up the stake center.
“It was such a spiritual uplift to work alongside such cheerful youth during a depressing, messy week of cleanup. We have a fine generation of young people here with goals and ideals that just won’t let them be defeated. When we didn’t know if we’d be able to hold church the next Sunday, I was determined we should, just so I could let them know how I felt towards them. I’ve never seen a finer group of young people,” said Bishop Brandon.
Hundreds of young Latter-day Saints across the disaster area swept ash, piled it high into giant gray hills, washed down roofs and streets, wiped it from their ears and hair and faces. And despite the seeming drudgery, some of them even had fun while they did it.
In the Moses Lake Washington Stake, over 150 miles east of the volcano, 33 youth helped clean the stake center, working until 1:00 in the morning so they could return the hoses they’d borrowed from the fire department in time. Scouts in Moses Lake helped clean the homes of ward members. The four teenagers of the Allen Brown family helped a blind ward member clean off his house and yard. The teens in the Don Larson family surprised a ward member who was out of town when the eruption occurred by having his house cleaned up when he got back to town. He then helped clean the chapel grounds and homes of other people. Craig Duvall, a recently returned missionary, cleaned county roads and driveways for a week. Carolyn Whiteman, a 14-year-old Lamanite, went day after day to haul ashes out of the yard of an elderly couple down her street.
“We got a wonderful response from all our people with the cleanup,” said President Lew Judd Allsop of the Yakima Washington Stake. “We had all sorts of help from the youth in our stake when we needed to clean the ash off the roof of the stake center. It was tedious work, sifting the ash out of the gravel on the roof so the roof wouldn’t cave in with the first rain. It was a dirty, gritty job, and I didn’t hear anyone complain about the dust in their eyes or it being terrible, dirty work. Working conditions couldn’t have been worse. Faces were black; there was grit in your ears, your hair, all over. And yet they got the job done, and in good spirits.”

Shortly after the Pacinis moved their growing family to New York, Rosalene went into preterm labor. The doctors considered surgery to deliver the baby because his heart rate kept dropping. But when his heartbeat normalized, the family went home relieved.
At a follow-up appointment a few days later, the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. Their baby boy was delivered a few hours later—stillborn.
“Losing my baby was heart-wrenching,” Rosalene says. “I have never felt as empty as I did after they took his little body from my arms.”
The family flew to Utah to bury him next to Rosalene’s mother. For weeks after, Rosalene couldn’t bear to leave and move on with life.
“I think I understand a little how Elizabeth wondered if she could go on,” Rosalene says. “But she did. We may all find ourselves in that place at some point in our lives. But we can’t stop. We move forward by relying on our Savior more than we did before, and eventually we recognize the miracles that have surrounded us all along.”