Gospel Story Finder

When the alarm went off at 5:00 a.m., 17-year-old Yee Mun Lim got out of bed and got ready for the day. She left the house at 5:20 for seminary. At 6:30 a.m. she hurried to school, where she stayed until 7:00 p.m. for classes and cocurricular activities. Then she rushed to the stake center by public transport to practice for the stake musical production.

This was the standard routine of most youth in the Singapore Stake every Friday for five months. Sometimes exhaustion and fatigue set in, but throughout the entire preparation for the musical production, When a Prophet Speaks, there were no complaints or regrets, because the youth felt that the sacrifices they made were worthwhile. “This is the most amazing, awesome, spiritually uplifting, fun-filled, and heartwarming event I ever took part in,” said Yee Mun.

Illustration by Mark Robison
Abby loved her house. But not the coat closet. She was afraid a monster would jump out of it. Abby always ran by it as fast as she could.
“Why do we even have a closet, Mommy?” Abby asked one day. “I don’t like being afraid.”
“Sometimes we’re afraid of what we can’t see,” Mommy said. “You can’t see what’s behind the door. Maybe that’s what scares you.”
“I always think there might be monsters,” Abby said.
“I promise there are no monsters. But you could say a prayer to Heavenly Father and ask Him to help you not feel scared,” Mommy said.
“OK,” Abby said.
The next day Abby was playing in her room. Mommy called her to come eat. Abby jumped up. Dinner smelled really good.
She started down the hall. Then she saw the coat closet waiting at the end.
Abby’s tummy felt tight. She thought about what might be hiding behind the closet door. She wanted to run. Then she thought about what Mommy had said. Abby stopped walking. She folded her arms.
“Please help me to not be so afraid,” Annie prayed.
Abby took two slow steps. She didn’t feel afraid any more! She felt warm and safe. She felt like she did when Mommy gave her a hug.
This time Abby didn’t run past the closet. She stopped right in front of it. She reached out. She touched the handle. Her tummy got tight for a few seconds, but then she remembered her happy feeling. She turned the knob and pulled the door open.
Abby laughed. “Hey! There aren’t any monsters in here. Just a bunch of coats.”
She folded her arms again. She bowed her head. “Heavenly Father, thank you for helping me not be afraid.”
Abby smiled and closed the closet door. She was hungry!

This is the testimony of two wonderful young people I met recently in Mexico, Brother and Sister Alvarez. They told me that since they were baptized eight months ago, rather than the estrangement from family and friends they had feared, they were finding a new love and respect being given to them, besides all the wonderful new friends that they had found among their brothers and sisters in the Church. They had prospered materially, and above all they had found a peace and nearness to their Heavenly Father that they had never known before.

My parents have served in the temple for more than 30 years—Dad as a sealer, Mom as an ordinance worker. They also served five full-time missions together—in Riverside, California; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Nairobi, Kenya; the Nauvoo Illinois Temple; and the Monterrey Mexico Temple. In Mexico they worked hard to learn a new language, which wasn’t easy at 80 years of age. But they sought to do the will of the Lord rather than to pursue their own desires in life.

When I was almost eight years old, my father, a doctor, died of an ailment he caught from one of his patients. A few months later, my mother left my little brother and sister and me in the care of her parents and went away to attend a university so she could earn enough money to support us. But the stress of her husband’s death, combined with the stress of leaving her children affected her health very seriously, and she was placed in the care of a nurse. I didn’t see her for many months.
I had lost my father, and for a time, I lost my mother, too. I was very unhappy and did not do well in school. I didn’t learn how to write cursive, and to this day I can hardly write in cursive except my own signature. My spelling was terrible,and my math was worse. My teacher would have the class pass their arithmetic papers forward one seat to be corrected; then we had to announce the results out loud. On a 20-problem exercise, I’d usually get 15 or 16 wrong answers. I believed I was the dumbest boy in the room. I remember one occasion when some classmates threw snowballs at me and called me stupid.
Mother recovered, and when she was able to take care of us, we moved to Vernal, Utah, where Pearl Shaffer became my fifth-grade teacher. What she did for me can never be repaid. She had confidence in me, and as a result I regained confidence in myself. She helped me to learn. By the time I finished my fifth-grade year, I was competing with the better students.

Levi describes being at end of his first semester of law school when he was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. He was too afraid to speak in class, in church, or even on the phone. In law school, professors commonly pick on one student and spend the entire class period drilling that student on what he is supposed to know, and often, the finals are oral exams. Levi just couldn’t go on. But with the help of his law school advisor, he withdrew from school for a year to receive professional help and to force himself to find jobs that would help him such as working at a phone center calling people and to participate in church by volunteering to read a scripture. Levi is back in law school, and he writes: “The Lord really does watch out for us. I am so aware of heavenly help in my life right now. I feel like I am being lifted up and carried through some days. For example, today I was called on in one of my classes. I started out all right and then got very nervous and just felt shaky and awful. When I was finished “being on the hook” as we law students say, I just shook it right off. I didn’t hardly even give it a second thought, and I went on and had a productive day. I am learning to do this regularly and am able to do it because I ask the Lord if my performance is acceptable to Him. The answer I am always getting is yes. I am doing things that I once doubted that I could do.”

It had been four years since I had come home for Easter, so I had looked forward to the break from school and the Easter activities with my family. We were in the kitchen fixing supper Friday night when I asked Mom about the family reunion she was organizing.
“Everyone wants to go back to the lake,” she told me as she chopped vegetables. “But during the six-hour car trip last year …” I looked up as the chopping ceased and her voice broke. Tears crept from the corners of her eyes, and her face crumpled. “I thought I was going to die. I really thought I was going to die.”
I didn’t know how to respond to my gentle, patient mother when she talked about the possibility of her death. I wanted to hug her until her shoulders stopped shaking. I wanted to tell her everything would be all right—the doctors would find out what this disease was and give her medicine and fix everything. But I couldn’t.
I had refused to think of death throughout the year of her sickness, even as I fasted and prayed and hoped. Still I watched her weaken and suffer. She wasn’t vocal in her suffering. She just worked harder because she was unable to sleep at night or even sit down. The pain clutched at her heart and made her shake whenever she tried to relax. But soon her suffering became visible in the dark circles around her eyes and the fatigue deep in her eyes themselves.
Discouragement soon accompanied the pain. After a full year of visiting doctors and undergoing tests, she was distressed when the specialists were unable to discover what was causing the intense pain around her heart. The test results all came back normal. Nothing was wrong, the doctors said.
But we knew the situation wasn’t normal. My mother did not normally pace the floor at night or stop in the middle of vacuuming to sob. And my mother, who had faced many types of pain in her life without ever complaining, did not normally talk about dying.
During the two days before Easter, I tried again to think of something I could do to help her. But her disease had left us all feeling powerless. Even my father, a doctor, could not fix the situation, in spite of his years of training, experience, and knowledge. I could not alleviate her burdens—she even wanted to do most housework herself, because resting made the pain worse. So she was always working, working to the point of exhaustion. And because there was so little we could do to relieve her suffering, she seemed to suffer alone.
We went to church on Easter morning. As I glanced at my mother sitting beside me, my thoughts wandered back to her high, cracked voice and the chilling sentence that had consumed me since Friday night—“I thought I was going to die.”
Suddenly my mother rose from the bench and made her way to the pulpit.
“On this Easter Sunday,” she began, “I want to bear my testimony of Jesus Christ’s Atonement. King Benjamin said that Christ ‘shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer’ (Mosiah 3:7; emphasis added). Many of you may not know that I have been sick lately. The nights have been long”—her voice softened as she continued—“but not lonely. During the worst of it, the Savior has been my friend, my support. I testify that Jesus Christ knows our suffering because He experienced it—and more. He will lift us from our sorrows just as He lifted us from an eternal death.”
As my mom bore her testimony, a new picture of suffering replaced my former preoccupation with my mother and myself. It was a picture of the Savior in the Garden of Gethsemane, full of such anguish that He bled from every pore as He suffered for all, including my mother’s physical agony and my own emotional pain.
I realized then that I did not need to tell my mother that it would be OK. We couldn’t fix everything, but she was comforted by her knowledge that the Savior already had.

The challenges that face us and our families as disciples of Christ are somewhat different than those of Joshua’s Israelites. Let me illustrate with an experience. Our family lived for many years in the state of Florida. Because Florida has a high concentration of sand, lawns there are planted with a large broadleaf grass we call Saint Augustine. A formidable enemy of a Florida lawn is a small, brown insect called a mole cricket.

One evening as my neighbor and I stood on the front steps, he noticed a little bug crossing my sidewalk. “You better spray your lawn,” he warned. “There goes a mole cricket.” I had sprayed the lawn with insecticide not too many weeks previously, and I hardly felt that I had the time or money to do it again so soon.

In the light of the next morning, I examined my lawn closely. It was lush and beautifully green. I looked down into the grass to see if I could see any of the little bugs. I could see none. I remember thinking, “Well, maybe that little mole cricket was just passing through my yard on the way to my neighbor’s yard.”

I watched my lawn for more than a week, looking for signs of invaders, but none was evident. I congratulated myself that I had not overreacted to my neighbor’s warning.

The story, however, has a sad ending. I came out the front door one morning, about 10 days after the conversation with my neighbor. Shockingly, as if it had happened overnight, brown spots covered my lawn. I ran to the garden store, bought the insecticide, and sprayed immediately, but it was too late. The lawn was ruined, and to return it to its former state required a new crop of sod, long hours of work, and large expense.

My neighbor’s warning was central to my lawn’s welfare. He saw things I could not see. He knew something I did not know. He knew that mole crickets live underground and are active only at night, making my daytime examinations ineffective. He knew that mole crickets did not eat the leaves of the grass but rather found nourishment in the roots. He knew that these little inch-long creatures could eat a lot of roots before I would ever see the effect above the ground. I paid a dear price for my smug independence.

Zintle Vuyiswa Njoli, 16, remembers when she was 12 years old and drifting away from the Church. “I was a recent convert, brand new in Young Women. I felt uncomfortable and a bit kept out,” she recalls. “I started backsliding. I was discouraged and I didn’t want to come anymore.” Then music came to her rescue.
“A Relief Society sister came to my house. She knew I loved music, and she gave my mother a stack of CDs with Church music for me to listen to. I couldn’t resist. When I came to a hymn called ‘Be Still, My Soul’ [Hymns, no. 124], I cried and cried. The words said exactly what I needed to hear. After that, anytime I felt upset or disheartened, I would sing those words to remind me to be patient and trust in the Lord. That song brought me back and kept me in the Church.”

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf: I was assigned to accompany then-Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf to reorganize a stake and select a new stake president in Texas. After our interviews, we both had good feelings about a certain man. He asked me if I felt this was the right man. I answered that I thought he was the right man, but that I did not feel that I had received a firm spiritual confirmation. We continued to discuss and pray and still I did not feel that I had the solid confirmation I wanted, so he simply asked me, "Well, do you have a better idea?" It was time to make the decision. We went ahead and called the man and as we went forward, it became clear that he was certainly the Lord's choice. Brigham Young said it this way:
"If I do not know the will of my Father, and what he requires of me in a certain transaction, if I ask Him to give me wisdom concerning any requirement in life, or in regard to my own course, ...or those I preside over, and get no answer from Him, and then do the very best that judgment will teach me, He is bound to...honor that transaction, and He will do so to all intents and purposes."[8]
If you do your homework, study it out, and earnestly plead with the Lord for an answer and do not feel you have received it--go ahead with your best judgment and the Lord will either back up your decision or He will soon warn you that you are going down the wrong path.

In early 2022, I was assigned to New Zealand’s Huntly, Waikato area. I’d been out on my mission for about a year by then, and was asked to train my companion, Elder Kafalava, who was brand new to the field.
One day, a recent convert named Brother Tengu wanted to do missionary work with us. I didn’t know much about Brother Tengu then, except that he’d only joined the Church four months earlier and he loved the Book of Mormon. We didn’t have any appointments that day, so we decided to knock on doors.
We found our way to the home of a certain man, a M?ori fella. He opened the door, and I thought he looked a bit — different. But we started talking to him, and at least he was talking to us.
He told us he didn’t believe in God. “I believe in soundwaves and frequencies,” he said and then showed us a range of musical instruments he’d carved and strung together into a necklace of sorts.
After a while I was discouraged, thinking, “Man, this isn’t going anywhere.” But Elder Kafalava continued talking to the man at the door as Brother Tengu stood nearby, holding a copy of the Book of Mormon.
All of a sudden, I received a powerful prompting to perform the haka for this man. “Give him the haka?” I laughed to myself. “There is no way I’m doing that!” But I couldn’t fight the impression, so I asked the man, “Hey. Do you mind if I give you the haka?”
After some hesitation, the man was amused. “Okay then. Go for it, Bro. Sure!”
“Just before I give you this haka,” I said, “let me tell you what it means.” I explained that it is our mission haka, that it reminds us why we preach the gospel. It describes missionaries as warriors of light, protected by the power of God as we share the sacred message of eternal life.
After I recited its English translation, I launched into it, and then there I was, all by myself on that porch—this white guy from Salt Lake City, Utah—fervently grabbing the sky and pulling it down to my chest as I performed our mission haka for a M?ori stranger.
I’m sure the neighbours were wondering what was going on. Elder Kafalava was too new to know this haka, so he provided moral support, but as I continued to pound my thighs and chant, I saw that Brother Tengu was now holding his Book of Mormon out—arm awkwardly extended, straight ahead—towards the man at the door.
I looked at our recent convert, thinking, “What are you doing? You’re ruining my haka.” Then I noticed how mesmerised the man at the door was, not by me, but by the Book of Mormon.
Sure enough, when I finished the haka, the man gestured and said, “So, what’s this book?” Brother Tengu proceeded to bear his powerful testimony. He talked about the oppressive darkness that once enfolded him so fully that he even considered taking his own life. He talked about the pivotal moment when a friend at school asked him if he’d like to meet the missionaries.
Brother Tengu expressed gratitude for those missionaries, but said it was the Book of Mormon—which he was still holding out in front of him—that truly led him to light. He testified that the Book of Mormon answered every one of his questions, that it brought him peace. “It saved my life!” he said.
In awe, the man at the door extended his own arm forward and asked, “Can I touch it?” And then, with his hand on its cover, the man began to pray over the Book of Mormon.
We left that copy with him, and as we drove away, I marvelled at how strange this day had been. If nothing else came of this encounter, it would at least make a great journal entry!
When we visited him again a week later, the man called out to us, “Hey, I got a question for you brothers: How do I get baptised?”
I was in shock. It turns out, the man had read the entire book of Alma, and Alma talked a lot about baptism. And now, “I want to get baptised,” he said, “and I want you to baptise me.”
I think back in amazement at that experience. We were only instruments in God’s hands, following the promptings of the Holy Ghost to go knock on a door, to open our mouths and to give a man the haka.
In turn, he was inspired to read the Book of Mormon and was converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon is the true converter. It is what makes faith.
The man at the door was baptised two months later. He recently received the Aaronic Priesthood. This has been a testimony to me that conversion is a miracle.

But getting a foothold on the island did not come easily. The earlier effort to place missionaries was met with resistance and threats of danger. “Simmering anti-French sentiment by native Corsicans was increasing in the early 1990s,” Brother Thatcher said.
The native Corsicans showed their displeasure of outsiders by making homemade bombs to destroy foreign businesses and property. “It was not uncommon,” said then-Elder Darin Dewsnup, “to hear multiple explosions every day in the city. We were not French, but we were not Corsican either.”
The missionaries were warned of the dangers, and when a bomb exploded in their neighborhood, the four missionaries on the island were withdrawn to another part of the mission in mainland France.
“Our missionaries were no longer on the island,” Brother Thatcher said, saying this setback was an opportunity to learn and grow.
To better understand heaven’s purposes, the missionaries committed to study the life and ministry of the Savior to better learn His ways. They studied His acts of service and compassion, which included feeding and healing and loving. They concluded that service was important in gaining the confidence of the people and serving in the Lord’s way.
With a renewed focus to serve, three missionaries were sent to reopen work on Corsica in March 1992. This time, they were sent to the island’s second-largest city, Bastia. There they resolved to meet people in a natural manner instead of knocking on doors, which sometimes had caused fear among residents.
“Our prayers were answered. We realized service could demonstrate our sincerity to the community and soften the hearts of people who resisted outsiders,” Brother Thatcher said.
The new missionaries introduced themselves to residents by offering to help any way they could. They weeded family gardens, fixed cars, and in the case of the mayor, painted his weathered hotel. They often made friends, and their efforts were appreciated. They were nearly always asked to sit down to a glass of “limonata” (lemonade) and to “tell us about your church,” Brother Thatcher said. Soon, “our fortunes dramatically changed.”
An early referral led to the baptism of the Lota family, which then led to another referral. When missionaries entered the home of the referral, the mother of the family, who had been praying to know truth, “fell to her knees and wept in gratitude to the Lord for answering her prayers.”

As early Saints reached Utah, President Brigham Young issued calls to some of them to serve missions to many nations of the world, to others to colonize areas outside the Salt Lake Valley. George Careless was prepared to accept any call he received.
“Brother George,” President Young said, “I have a mission for you. … I want you to take the Tabernacle Choir … and lay a foundation for good music in Utah.” Brother Careless accepted the call.
Born in London on September 24, 1839, George displayed musical talent early in life. His father, a woodcarver, berated his son for “wasting time” with music and told him to learn a trade. George went to work in a shoemaking company, but his heart wasn’t in it. The plant foreman, a music lover who collected violins, loaned him one of them, and George soon learned to play it.
When he was ten years old, he was offered a place in a London choir school, where boys earned their academic and musical education by singing in a church or cathedral. It was a wonderful opportunity, but George turned it down. He had recently joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was eager to participate fully in it.
George’s father never accepted his devotion to music and told him to either give it up or leave the family. So when he was thirteen, George left home.
Later, the shoe factory foreman loaned George the money to attend the Royal Academy of Music. After graduating in three years rather than the usual four, he was hired as a member of an orchestra that gave concerts in the Crystal Palace, England’s showplace for the arts. With his first earnings, he repaid the foreman.
At the same time, George worked to improve the musical activities of the Church in England. He directed a London Conference choir, earning it such a high reputation that it was invited to perform at several of London’s leading concert halls.
His career was progressing so well that Elder William C. Staines encouraged him to move to Utah before he became so famous that it would be almost impossible to leave those who went to hear him. Six weeks later, George sailed for America. On his ship, the Hudson, he led a choir composed of Saints who were immigrating to Utah. He arrived in New York City on July 19, 1864. From there he suffered illness and hunger much of the rest of the way.
Arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, George was given the depressing news that the few professional musicians already there were unable to make a living with their music. Even so, he was determined to teach music even if he starved. By the end of the next month, he had twenty-four paying pupils. The going rate for a series of lessons in the Salt Lake Valley was a hundred pounds of flour.
When President Young called him to his musical mission, George replied, “I will do the best I can with the material I can get.”
The prophet responded, “You will have to make that.”
Organizing a choir in the rough conditions of frontier living took determination and grit as well as talent. At his first rehearsal of the choir, only forty members were present. The Tabernacle, still under construction, had no heating or lighting. Choir members held a candle in one hand, their music in the other.
On October 8, 1873, the Salt Lake Tabernacle Choir joined with choirs from fourteen surrounding communities to perform at General Conference. Some of the choirs had to travel several days to reach Salt Lake City.
When Brigham Young died in 1877, George assembled a 220-member choir to perform a hymn he composed for the funeral.
After serving eleven years as director of the Tabernacle Choir, George resigned his post in 1880. His mission was to continue, though, when President John Taylor asked him to head a committee to write music for all the hymns to be included in The Latter-day Saints’ Psalmody, published in 1889. The Psalmody contained 330 hymns, three-fourths of them set to music by Mormon composers. One of Brother Careless’s compositions is the well-known sacrament hymn “He Died! The Great Redeemer Died.”
George Careless fulfilled his mission to lay a foundation for good music, not just in Utah but in the whole Church.

I think of my experience through the years, traveling through the various missions where we’ve had youth firesides. I’m going to refer to one that was held in Carthage, Illinois, where the Prophet Joseph and his brother Hyrum were martyred. We held a fireside there on Sunday morning. We had it in the biggest chapel on the university campus. There were about 1,500 young people there; some of them had traveled for over a thousand miles to be there at that youth conference and to attend that fireside. We had a couple of benches down in front kept vacant for the young people who wanted to bear their testimonies. We met from eight in the morning until twelve noon, and there was not a minute’s time lost. When one young person was nearly through bearing testimony, another would be standing right there by that microphone ready to take over. And there those young people who were gathered from all over the area, thousands of miles, would stand with tears in their voices and tears in their eyes bearing their testimonies, thanking God for the Mormon missionaries who had come to their homes and brought the gospel. I said to myself, “Talk about hidden knowledge; what more could you ask than that?”

As Cami gazed across the valley toward the mountains, she thought that the Flathead River Valley in Montana was the most beautiful spot on earth. She grinned, remembering her Arizona cousins’ argument that Arizona was the most beautiful spot.
From the porch she could gaze across the emerald green of the grassy valley and beyond to the deeper green of the tree-clad hills. In the distance, blue mountains crowned with white framed the picture. There’s no doubt about it, she decided, the Flathead is the most beautiful spot!
“Hi, Cami!” her friend called, interrupting her thoughts.
“Hi, Jenay.”
Jenay lived next door and had been a friend ever since they were old enough to walk. She joined Cami on the porch, and together they gazed at the beauty beyond. But Jenay soon broke the silence—she was for action, not views!
“A bunch of us girls are going to the water slide!” she said excitedly. “Do you want to go?”
“Sounds great!” Cami replied. “I haven’t been there yet this year! I was wondering what I’d do today. Now that Dad works on Saturday, we never do anything!”
“Oh, we’re not going today,” Jenay explained. “I’m going shopping today. We’re going tomorrow.”
“But tomorrow’s Sunday!” Cami wailed. “I can’t go on Sunday!”
“Sunday’s the best day at the slide,” Jenay answered. “Maybe your folks will let you go just this once. There’ll be lots of kids there, and the price is cheaper on Sunday. Besides, we’re having a picnic afterward in the park. Mom said that she’d make fried chicken. Mandie’s mom is making potato salad, and Kendra’s mom is making a chocolate cake. It’s going to be the greatest day ever!”
Jenay hardly noticed Cami’s dampened enthusiasm. The party sounded like great fun to Cami, but her family had a firm rule against doing things like that on Sunday.
As her mom drove into the driveway, Jenay jumped up and said good-bye to Cami.
The beauties of nature didn’t seem so attractive anymore to Cami, and after Jenay left, Cami got up and went into the house. “Hi, Mom,” she said.
“That wasn’t a happy ‘Hi.’ Did I hear Jenay out there?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“She didn’t stay long. What did she want?”
“She invited me to go to the water slide with her and some other kids.”
Mrs. Craig smiled at her daughter. “That’s wonderful. I know that you’ve been wanting to go, and we haven’t been able to.”
Cami had two younger brothers and twin seven-month-old sisters. She knew that it would be too much for her mother to take them all to the slide by herself.
“I’m not going,” Cami said, trying to sound happy.
“Why not?” her mother asked, puzzled. “You love to swim, and it looks like it’s a perfect day.”
“Yeah, today’s perfect, but the girls are going tomorrow.”
Sister Craig looked at the sad face before her. “I see.”
“Mom?” Cami asked. “Would it hurt just once to break the Sabbath? Couldn’t I go just this once? It’s after church.”
Pouring a glass of cool milk, Mrs. Craig placed it in front of her daughter with a slice of warm cake. “Well, Cami, you’re almost twelve now. I think that you’re old enough to start making your own decisions about such things. As a family, we’ve decided that we’ll keep the Sabbath day holy, but you can make your own choice this time. As the scripture says, we are free to act, or choose, for ourselves.” *
“That’s no choice!” Cami said wryly. “The rest of the scripture tells us that the real choice is between ‘everlasting death or the way of eternal life.’”
Her mother began to laugh. “Well, you still have the choice. But remember every choice has a—”
“Consequence,” Cami finished for her. She’d heard that ever since she could remember.
With Jenay gone and nothing special to do, Cami decided to help her mother. “Who’s sick?” she asked, watching her mom cut more cake slices and arrange them on her best glass cake plate. Whenever Mom did that, it meant that she was taking it to someone.
“Granny Thomas. The Relief Society has asked me to take her a meal tomorrow, and since tomorrow is Sunday—”
“We prepare today!” Cami declared, finishing her mom’s statement. “May I help?” Cami asked.
“Sure,” Mom said. “Why don’t you make the chicken pasta salad. The recipe’s on the counter.”
Cami put the pasta on the stove, then poured hot water over the peas to thaw them. She chopped celery and cut up the baked chicken into little pieces. As soon as the pasta was ready, she mixed everything together with sour cream and mayonnaise. It looked so good that she took a taste. It was good! She was proud of how well it turned out.
She put the salad into the refrigerator as her mom pulled fragrant hot rolls from the oven. “They’re not quite done,” she told Cami. “But that way Granny can reheat them.” Granny Thomas wasn’t really their grandmother, but everyone in the ward called her that. In fact, everyone who knew Granny had never called her anything else!
Seeing how tired Mom was by the time they had finished, Cami took her brothers down to the creek so that her mother could rest. She helped Matt and Josh bait their hooks and watched to see if they caught anything. There were fish in the creek, but the boys rarely caught them without Dad’s expert help.
Tired that night but happy, Cami quickly fell asleep. Early the next morning she got up and helped her mom and dad get the boys and her twin sisters ready for church. It was a big task to get everyone dressed and fed before church started.
When church was over, the family got into the car and headed for home. They passed the water slide, where laughing children screamed as they slid down the chutes. Cami turned her head away. She had made her choice.
As soon as the twins were fed and put down for a nap, Cami went with her mother to take the food to Granny Thomas. It was fun to visit Granny, who lived in a log cabin tucked away on a pine-clad slope. The pines and ferns there smelled good, and the cabin had interesting little nooks and crannies.
Since Granny had arthritis and couldn’t get around well, they let themselves into the cabin. Granny was resting in bed, and Mom helped her get up. Cami washed Granny’s face with a warm, wet cloth.
“Thank you, Cami,” she said, her wrinkled face blossoming into a smile. “Mmmm. I can smell your mom’s whole wheat rolls. That makes me hungry. Have you eaten?”
“No,” Cami admitted. “Dad’s taking care of the kids. Mom and I thought that we’d eat with you.”
“Company always makes food taste better,” Granny said happily.
Cami had to agree. Mom and Granny praised the chicken salad, and they all enjoyed the rolls with butter oozing down their sides. It was a wonderful feast, topped by Granny’s laughter. She had the quickest wit and kept them laughing while they ate.
Granny brought a jar of fresh cream and poured it over Mom’s chocolate cake. Never had Cami tasted anything so good!
The next day Cami hurried over to Jenay’s to see what the party had been like. She knocked on the door, and Mrs. White answered. “She’s in her room, honey. Go on up.”
Entering her friend’s room, Cami was surprised to find her in bed. “What happened to you?” she asked.
“I got too much sun,” Jenay said, obviously in pain. “All of us forgot to use our sunscreen lotion. I didn’t get any sleep last night!”
Cami told about her day at church and about visiting Granny Thomas. She shared a funny story that Granny had told about when she and her husband had homesteaded their land. As she talked, she realized that she hadn’t really missed going to the water slide. She knew that she’d get to go there another time. Her Sunday had been a happy one, and she felt good about making the right choice.

Towards the end of 1989, a friend of mine, Gregory Mutete, came home in our then small township of Dangamvura—situated in Mutare, Zimbabwe. He reported to me and Christopher Bangwayo—our other friend—that he had secured employment as a gardener from a missionary couple named Grant and Sharol Wilson. They had offered him a book called the Book of Mormon, but he had refused to take it—wanting first to confer with the two of us. As a group of three tightly knit teenage friends, we all had to agree before deciding to embark on any form of adventure, which we believed this was going to be. Little did we know that this was a beginning of a journey that would try our faith to the limit. We were skeptical about these missionaries—based on the lessons we had received in school—so we were prepared to disprove all theories they were to share with us.
A decision was taken that Gregory should invite the couple to visit us and to answer some of our questions. The following day the couple drove Gregory to my home and also delivered the Book of Mormon, which they introduced to us together with the story of Joseph Smith. All sounded like a fiction story from a movie script. How could a fourteen-year-old boy see God and His Son, Jesus Christ, and literally talk with them? It was preposterous, to say the least. This was my first time exercising my faith and putting to the test the invitation extended to us and find out for myself through prayer as Joseph Smith did.
In my nineteen-year-old mind, I felt that if fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith was able to see God and Jesus Christ, then I—being 19 years old—would also have the same experience, if not better. I retired to a high mountain close to our home, found a quiet place, knelt and delivered my supplication to God. For at least fifteen minutes I was talking to my God. You may have already guessed what happened after that heartfelt prayer. God and Jesus Christ did not appear to me. Instead as I embarked on my journey back home, I had this total feeling of peace and contentment envelop my whole being. At that moment I did not realize what it was until after some time much later when I realized that it was the language of the Holy Ghost confirming to me that what had been taught to me was truth. After that marvelous experience the three of us were baptized. It took us exactly eight days from the day we met the missionary couple to the day we were baptized.

My father grew up on the island of Java in Indonesia. During World War II, he was forcefully separated from his family and interned in a concentration camp, where he suffered unspeakable hardships at a young age.

After more than 65 years of marriage, my mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, passed away in February. My father, at the age of 92 and still living at home, visited her as often as he could until she passed away. Some time ago he mentioned to my younger siblings that the dreadful experiences in the camp in Indonesia during World War II had prepared him to patiently care for his wife for so many years as she fell ill and deteriorated from this horrible disease and also for the fateful day he had to entrust her primary care to others and could not be by her side anymore. Their motto has been and still is to “Just carry on,” having a perfect hope in Christ to be raised up at the last day and to dwell with Him in glory forever.

As the crowds milled around the booths, a distinguished looking group of men in dark hats and coats appeared carrying a bucket, an easel, and some pictures. One of the men upended the bucket and mounted it while another set up the easel. Soon the crowd was being treated to an authentic 19th century street meeting—authentic, that is, except for the bullhorn that the preacher used. The meeting started with four of the missionaries singing “Sweet Is the Work” in beautiful harmony, followed by a gospel sermon and another hymn. Wags from the local wards provided some unsolicited heckling, but the elders handled it in fine form, turning the barbs back on their assailants. Then a man from the Spanish Branch wandered by and shouted, “Puras mentiras!” (It’s all a lie!) in a voice of pious conviction.
“What this good brother says is true—whatever it was he said!” the missionary exclaimed, pointing his cane for emphasis. Another street meeting was held every quarter hour or so, with a different stake or full-time missionary preaching each time.

Years ago, while on business in Brazil, I sat next to a man on a flight who had recently lost his only daughter in a car accident. He was heartbroken and without hope. When the moment was right, we spoke of sacred things that can bind families together for eternity. I shared my testimony that through Christ, he and his daughter could be reunited forever. His despair turned to hope, and he wept with this newfound knowledge.
I do not know if this man ever joined the Church, but in that moment, I know he found hope available only through the sacrifice and blessings of Jesus Christ.

I knew the Joseph Smith story was true the first time I heard it. I was 15 then and living with my aunt’s family in Montélimar, France. Three of the children in the family were already members of the Church. The youngest daughter, my cousin, was not.
She and I went to the closest branch at Valence. There the missionaries told us the story of the young latter-day prophet, and it touched me profoundly. I had heard my cousin’s family discuss the restoration of the gospel at home before, but as I heard it in detail for the first time from these young men, it reached my soul.
They told me of the promise in Moroni 10:4–5 [Moro. 10:4–5] in the Book of Mormon and said that I could know the truthfulness of what was written there if I would ask God sincerely. They also said I could know if their message was true. That same evening, brimming over with a desire to know, I knelt and prayed. I was elated by the warm and wonderful feeling that flooded my soul. I knew this was a response from the Lord and that the gospel had indeed been restored by Jesus Christ, as the missionaries said.
My cousins had shown me a good example of love and concern for each other. I hadn’t been much interested in their church’s doctrine, but I had admired their ideals for family life. Now, however, I wanted to know more about the Church. I went with my cousins to a youth conference in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, and made many LDS friends there. During the testimony meeting, I stood and told them about my experience when I had prayed about Moroni’s promise.
My understanding grew rapidly, but soon my father intervened. He didn’t like the idea of me investigating a “new” church. My parents were separated, and no one knew where my mother was, but I felt obligated to honor my father’s wishes, at least until I was no longer a minor. My contact with the Saints as a group dropped off somewhat, but I knew in my heart that someday I would be baptized.
My oldest cousin went into the army, and then he left on a mission. During the two years he was gone, I kept thinking about the feelings I had felt. I always had a testimony of Joseph Smith, right from the start. His story seemed so logical, and the confirmation of the Spirit came so quickly that I couldn’t ignore it. When my cousin returned from his mission, I met him in Montélimar, and we rode together back to Antibes (near Nice), which is my hometown. All the way there we talked about the Church, and I accepted many new ideas.
The Lord also had something else in mind to help me. I was in agricultural school in Lyons at the time, and when I returned to my studies, I arranged to do some field study for three months in Aix-en-Provence. There, with my cousin, I heard all of the missionary discussions thoroughly, and the small testimony inside me became a big one. I was baptized on July 26, 1975, and I still feel as strongly today as I did then that Joseph Smith was and is a prophet of God.
I am thankful that I was able to see the gospel in action in my aunt’s home. Their example combined with the witness of the Spirit to let me know that the Lord has built a program for families that I want to follow.
Editor’s note: Since this story was written, José has served honorably in the France Paris Mission.