Gospel Story Finder

For example, her husband departed for a mission to Great Britain in 1839 just 10 days after she had given birth to their daughter Alice. For the 20 months that followed, Mary Ann and their six children struggled. They suffered from illness and survived primarily on corn bread, milk, and a few garden vegetables.3 Mary Ann managed to find a little work to support her family and to care for herself and her ailing children. Yet the Lord helped them through these trials. “That is a great thing,” she wrote to her husband, to “trust in the Lord.”4

I was having a hard day and had some troubling questions on my mind, so I decided to read my scriptures. Suddenly I felt like I should read the New Era, so I started reading the June issue and read “My Journey to Faith.” The last sentence really stood out to me: “I know that Heavenly Father loves each one of us and answers our prayers if we have faith in Him.” So I decided to pray about what was worrying me and trust that God would help me. Ever since, I’ve been at peace. Thank you so much!Karen A., Wyoming

Being an introvert and having to talk to people wasn’t the easiest thing for me. Most of the time I let people approach me, but in high school there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to talk to me. So I was happy that I remembered this old trick I had learned—I smiled. The more someone smiles, the more approachable that person will become. I realized the more I smiled at people, the more they would start talking to me and the easier it became for me to become friends with them.

The last story took place later that fall while a family was taking a pleasant, 3 1/2-mile hike to a beautiful lake in the Cascades. As they returned down the trail later that day, their young daughter started falling behind. They weren’t really too concerned as it was a good trail, it was still light, and they had been on similar hikes before. The parents continued down the trail, arriving at the road just a few minutes ahead of their daughter, so they thought. After waiting for more than an hour for her, they became concerned and started back up the trail in search. This started a search that would last three days and cost thousands of dollars and many man-hours.
The third illustration even more effectively points out the value of always carrying a whistle and being trained in its use. The little girl had wandered off the trail while picking flowers and had gotten lost in the process. After wandering around for many hours, she lay down beside a large tree where she remained in shock and exhaustion for two days while searchers walked all around the area looking for her. When she was finally found on the third day, she was only 100 yards from the trail!

May I share a personal experience to help any who feel anguish when eternal marriage is mentioned since you believe your spouse will not prepare for that sacred experience because of deeply rooted characteristics or habits. About five years into our marriage, we had a growing experience. Our precious two-year-old son Richard died while undergoing surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. Within six weeks, our daughter Andrea passed away at birth. My father, then not a member of the Church, loved little Richard very much. He said to my inactive mother, “I cannot understand how Richard and Jeanene seem to be able to accept the loss of these children.”
Mother, responding to a prompting, said, “Kenneth, they have been sealed in the temple. They know that their children will be with them in the eternities if they live righteously. But you and I will not have our five sons because we have not made those covenants.”
My father pondered those words. He began to meet with the stake missionaries and was soon baptized. In just over a year Mother, Dad, and the children were sealed in the temple. Later, President Kimball put his hands on my father’s head, promised him the vigor and strength of youth, and gave him the sealing power. He worked as a sealer for 11 years in the Washington D.C. Temple with Mother at his side. You do your part. Don’t abandon hope for a temple marriage.

I was called to serve in the New Zealand Wellington Mission. When I knew I needed to go home early, I felt like I had let Heavenly Father and my parents down.
I’ve learned so much from my mission and from this situation. I never needed to rely on Heavenly Father and the Savior’s Atonement like I did when I came home early. I needed to trust God and accept whatever He wanted me to go through and learn. I cannot deny the power of the Atonement and how I’ve truly come to know that Jesus Christ is my Savior. I’ve learned that God humbles me and teaches me through my weaknesses and hard times.
No matter where I am, or whether I have a name tag on my chest, I’m still a disciple of Jesus Christ. I know that the Lord still loves me and is with me, and He wants me to keep serving others. And even though I’m home, I know I’m not a failure because He’s helped me become a better person through this experience.
Natasha Krisanalome, Thailand

“My parents were not active in the Church, but they were wonderful people. I remember my mother teaching me how to pray. I also remember her teaching me over and over the principle of obedience. When I received my first pair of roller skates, Mother cautioned me, ‘Now, don’t go down the hill, because it will be difficult for you. The hard, level surface on the east side of the house will be much easier for you.’ But I wanted the thrill of going down the hill, and it was probably only five minutes later that I came in crying, with both knees badly scraped. Mother pointed out that if I had been obedient, I would not have been hurt. I’ve thought about that a lot of times since then, and I think that if we obey our parents and learn to call on our Heavenly Father and obey His prompting, we will avoid many difficulties.”

For over 40 years, my great-grandfather, J. Hatten Carpenter, served as the recorder for the Manti Utah Temple. Each day he would walk from his home in Manti to the temple to fulfil his duties and responsibilities there. As the temple recorder, he was aware of sacred spiritual experiences that occurred in the temple.
One such experience he shared involved a patriarch watching vicarious baptisms being performed in the temple one day.
He recounts that the patriarch saw “the spirits of those for whom they were officiating in the font by proxy. There the spirits stood awaiting their turn, and, as the Recorder called out the name of a person to be baptized for, the patriarch noticed a pleasant smile come over the face of the spirit whose name had been called, and he would leave the group of fellow spirits and pass over to the side of the Recorder. There he would watch his own baptism performed by proxy, and then with a joyful countenance would pass away [to] make room for the next favored personage who was to enjoy the same privilege”1.
As time went on, the patriarch noticed that some of the spirits looked very sad. He realised that the people in the temple were finished with baptisms for the day. The unhappy spirits were those whose baptisms would not be performed that day.
My great-grandfather said, “‘I often think of this event … for I so often sit at the font, and call off the names for the ordinances to be performed which means so much to the dead.’”2

Jesus Christ told the Prophet Joseph Smith many important things to help us. The Church set up a printing press to print Jesus’s words. That way people would be able to read them.
One day, a group of angry men came. They destroyed the printing press. They threw the pages of the scriptures out into the street.
Two sisters named Mary Elizabeth and Caroline Rollins saw what happened. They ran and gathered the pages in their arms.
The girls hid in a cornfield until the men left. They had saved the scriptures! Those scriptures later became part of the Doctrine and Covenants.

I can still remember my mother speaking softly to me one Saturday afternoon when, as a little boy, I asked her for permission to do something I thought was perfectly reasonable and which she knew was dangerous. I still am amazed at the power she was granted, I believe from the Lord, to turn me around with so few words. As I remember them, they were: “Oh, I suppose you could do that. But the choice is yours.” The only warning was in the emphasis she put on the words could and choice. Yet that was enough for me.

Her power to warn with so few words sprang from three things I knew about her. First, I knew she loved me. Second, I knew she had faced similar situations and had been blessed by making the right choice. And third, she had conveyed to me her sure testimony that the choice I had to make was so important that the Lord would tell me what to do if I asked Him. Love, example, and testimony: those were keys that day, and they have been whenever I have been blessed to hear and then heed the warning of a servant of the Lord.

There is a simple parable that has shaped my thinking and my actions.

After a huge storm, thousands of starfish had been washed ashore and lie dying on the beach. An old man observed a boy pitching starfish after starfish into the sea. He approached the young boy asking, "Why are you doing that? There are so many your efforts wont make any difference!" The young boy looked at the starfish in his and tossing it into the sea replied, "It does to that one." We cannot save all the starfish perishing on the shore, but we can save some and with Gods inspiration directing us, we can save the one he wants saved.

Dear brothers and sisters, although he passed away 20 years ago, there are times I miss my father. Easter promises I will see him again.
When I was in graduate school in England, my father came to visit. His father’s heart knew I missed home.
My father loved adventure except in food. Even in France, noted for its cuisine, he would say, “Let’s eat Chinese food.” A long-serving patriarch in the Church, my father was spiritual and compassionate. One night, as emergency vehicles with loud sirens raced through Paris, he said, “Gerrit, those cries are the wounds of a city.”
On that trip, I felt other cries and wounds. A young woman was selling ice cream from a small pushcart. Her wafer cones were just the size for a single scoop of ice cream. For some reason, a large man confronted the young woman. Yelling and pushing, he tipped over her cart, spilling her ice-cream cones. There was nothing I could do as he crushed the cones with his boots. I can still see the young woman on her knees in the street, trying to save broken wafer pieces, tears of anguish streaming down her face. Her image haunts me, a reminder of the unkindness, uncaring, misunderstanding we too often inflict on each other.

Seventeen-year-old Mackenzie H. took President Pickup’s challenge to heart and began indexing, and she helped her siblings, parents, and grandparents become involved as well. In less than two years, Mackenzie indexed more than 44,000 names. More importantly, Mackenzie and her family felt prompted to seek out their own family names, take them to the temple, and participate in the saving ordinances.

Some years ago I was on a board of directors with a fine man who had been extremely successful in life. I was impressed with his integrity and his loyalty to the Church. I learned that he had gained a testimony and had joined the Church because of seminary. When he married, his wife had been a lifelong member of the Church. He belonged to no church. Through the years and despite her efforts, he showed no interest in attending church with his wife and children. And then he began driving two of his daughters to early-morning seminary. He would remain in the car while they had their class, and then he would drive them to school. One day it was raining, and one of his daughters said, “Come in, Dad. You can sit in the hall.” He accepted the invitation. The door to the classroom was open, and he began to listen. His heart was touched. For the rest of that school year, he attended seminary with his daughters, which led eventually to his membership and a lifetime of activity in the Church. Let seminary help build and strengthen your testimony.

There is a particular challenge we face as Latter-day Saints in establishing and maintaining friendships. Because our commitment to marriage, family, and the Church is so strong, we often feel challenged by constraints of time and energy in reaching out in friendship to others beyond that core group. I experienced this dilemma personally in recent days as I tried to steal a few moments at home to prepare this talk. Twice, friends from my past, whom I love dearly but see only occasionally, dropped in to visit. During what ought to have been choice times of reunion and reminiscence, I ironically found myself growing inwardly impatient for the visits to end so that I could get back to writing my talk about friendship!

I have since felt ashamed. How selfish we can be. How unwilling to be inconvenienced, to give, to bless and be blessed. What kind of parents or neighbors or servants of the Lord Jesus Christ can we be without being a friend? In this information age, is not friendship still the best technology for sharing the truths and way of life we cherish? Is not our reluctance voluntarily to reach out to others in friendship a significant obstacle to helping God accomplish His eternal purposes?

Years ago when I was serving as a bishop, a recently converted family moved into our rural Utah community. These good people had joined the Church in the eastern United States and had been warmly fellowshipped and put to work in a small branch there. When they came to our larger, more-established ward, they somehow slipped through the cracks. Some of the family members, particularly the father, became disenchanted with the Church and its members.

One Sunday morning when I noticed the father was missing from priesthood meeting, I left the meetinghouse and drove to his home. He invited me in, and we had a very honest conversation about the struggle he was having with his new faith and neighbors. After exploring various possibilities for responding to his concerns, none of which seemed to appeal to him very much, I asked him with a tone of frustration in my voice just what we could do to help him. I’ve never forgotten his reply:

“Well, bishop,” he said (and I will need to paraphrase here slightly), “for heaven’s sake, whatever you do, please don’t assign me a friend.”

I learned a great lesson that day. No one wants to become a “project”; we all want spontaneously to be loved. And, if we are to have friends, we want them to be genuine and sincere, not “assigned.”

Brothers and sisters, my message today is very simple: if we truly want to be tools in the hands of our Heavenly Father in bringing to pass His eternal purposes, we need only to be a friend. Consider the power of each one of us, 10 million strong, of our own free will and choice reaching out to those not yet of our faith in unconditional friendship. We would no longer be accused of offering warm bread and a cold shoulder. Imagine the consequences for good if each active family in the Church offered consistent concern and genuine friendship to a less-active family or a new-member family. The power is in each one of us to be a friend. Old and young, rich and poor, educated and humble, in every language and country, we all have the capacity to be a friend.

Our Savior, shortly before His Crucifixion, said to His disciples: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends.” Having been so richly blessed by Christ’s friendship, I pray that we will now be to others what He is to us: a true friend. At no time will we be more Christlike than when we are a friend. I testify of the inestimable value of friends in my own life and express my gratitude to all of them this morning. I know that when we offer ourselves in friendship, we make a most significant contribution to God’s work and to the happiness and progress of His children. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

One of these members was a sister from the beautiful island of Okinawa. The story of her journey to the Hawaii Temple is remarkable. Two decades earlier, she had been married in a traditional arranged Buddhist wedding. Just a few months later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, thrusting the United States into a conflict with Japan. In the wake of battles such as Midway and Iwo Jima, the tides of war pushed the Japanese forces back to the shores of her island home, Okinawa, the last line of defense standing against the Allied forces before the heartlands of Japan.
For a harrowing three months in 1945, the Battle of Okinawa raged. A flotilla of 1,300 American warships encircled and bombarded the island. Military and civilian casualties were enormous. Today a solemn monument in Okinawa lists more than 240,000 known names of people who perished in the battle.
In a desperate attempt to escape the onslaught, this Okinawan woman, her husband, and their two small children sought refuge in a mountain cave. They endured unspeakable misery through the ensuing weeks and months.
One desperate night amidst the battle, with her family near starvation and her husband unconscious, she contemplated ending their suffering with a hand grenade, which the authorities had supplied to her and others for that purpose. However, as she prepared to do so, a profoundly spiritual experience unfolded that gave her a tangible sense of the reality of God and His love for her, which gave her the strength to carry on. In the following days, she revived her husband and fed her family with weeds, honey from a wild beehive, and creatures caught in a nearby stream. Remarkably, they endured six months in the cave until local villagers informed them that the battle had ended.

Another new missionary was so shy and bashful he could not look at me without blushing. I discovered he had been reared on a pig farm and was much more comfortable with pigs than with people. It was very difficult for him to talk to anyone, yet he had a burning desire to be a great missionary. Later, when we attended zone conference in the zone to which he was assigned, the missionary stood to bear his testimony: “President, I have discovered that becoming a missionary is like playing football.” He told of his leaving the farm to attend high school. As he registered for school, he noticed the football team practicing and decided he would like to play, but he didn’t have any football shoes or the money to buy any. Then he remembered that his cousin had been a football star at the school. He visited his cousin, asking whether he could borrow his shoes. His cousin gave him the shoes but warned, “Don’t you disgrace them.”
Our missionary made the team as a defensive tackle. In the first game of the season, he found himself at the first line of scrimmage, hunkered down opposite a great, big, mean senior lineman. He took one look at that fearsome opponent, gulped, and said to himself, “‘I can’t knock him down! But my cousin could—and I’m wearing my cousin’s shoes.’ So I went ahead and knocked him down, and kept on knocking him down all through the game.”
What kind of a missionary do you think he became?

A common symptom people feel when fighting depression and other mental health disorders is a numbness to the Holy Ghost. They often struggle to feel that enlightening, warm feeling inside.
As someone with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, I faced this reality for many years. I didn’t know how the Spirit felt. When my symptoms became bad during college, I ended up in the hospital for a week.
During those dark times inside my mind, I wondered how these illnesses would help me in the long run. How would God use this troubling experience for my good? What purpose did He have for me in giving me this trial?
I asked for priesthood blessings during this time, and there was always one sentence I heard repeatedly: “God has given you the resources to overcome this trial.” Having faith that He would lead me to what I needed in order to heal, I decided to trust my doctors. Little by little, I got the help I needed. Over time, I shared my mental health journey online.
Soon afterward, I began receiving messages from my male friends, asking about my mental health and sharing their similar thoughts and feelings. They asked me for help to know how to fight their numbness. At first I was surprised.
In many cultures, men are expected to always appear strong and never reveal their emotions. That makes it hard for them to admit they need help, and they often suffer in silence.
When this happened for the third time, I realized that my trials had prepared me to help. All those dark moments, all those therapy sessions, all my prayers, and all my efforts to exercise faith as I sought heavenly help taught me to recognize when others are facing similar trials and how to point them toward help.
I have learned the truth of these words from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: “If you had appendicitis, God would expect you to seek a priesthood blessing and get the best medical care available. So too with emotional disorders. Our Father in Heaven expects us to use all of the marvelous gifts He has provided in this glorious dispensation.”1

An example of this is Brad Hall. It seemed that he had everything going for him to be happy and successful. He was an outstanding missionary and was in the last few weeks of his time in Argentina. One night he and his companion heard a noise in their apartment complex. They got up and found an armed burglar. In the course of events, a shot was fired and Elder Hall was struck. In an instant, he became a paraplegic—paralyzed from the waist down, and has since been confined to a wheelchair. He came back to Ricks the next year and made the difficult adjustment to life on campus during the winter, in a wheelchair.

In the spring, when awards where made, Elder Hall was among the top scholars. He proved that you can overcome many difficulties and learn to cope with those you can’t change.

At times an awareness of the elderly is brought into focus by a reminder from one ever so young. May I share with you a Pakistani folktale which illustrates this truth:
An ancient grandmother lived with her daughter and grandson. As she grew frail and feeble, instead of being a help around the house, she became a constant trial. She broke plates and cups, lost knives, spilled water. One day, exasperated because the old woman had broken another precious plate, the daughter sent the grandson to buy his grandmother a wooden plate. The boy hesitated because he knew a wooden plate would humiliate his grandmother. But his mother insisted, so off he went. He returned bringing not one, but two wooden plates.
“I asked you to buy only one,” his mother said. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “But I bought the second one so there would be one for you when you get old.”