Gospel Story Finder

Sarah walked along the wagon rut. She could see the dust from the wagon train in the distance. Granny Glover walked beside her in the parallel rut. The two lines of wagon tracks wound ahead through the prairie grass as far as they could see. Sometimes I feel like I’ll be walking in these ruts forever, Sarah thought. She and Granny had been walking since their family left Florence, Nebraska, three weeks earlier. Sarah looked out for Granny; Granny looked out for Sarah.
“Put your bonnet on, lass,” Granny said. Her Scottish brogue rolled across the emptiness of the prairie and was lost in the sway of the grass. Sarah pretended not to hear. “Sarah Jane Skelton, put your bonnet on your wee head, before you’re cooked like a bit o’ back bacon.”
“Oh, wouldn’t back bacon taste good right now?” Sarah exclaimed, looking up at the sky as if she was searching for bacon in the clouds.
“Aye, lass, it surely would.” Granny followed Sarah’s gaze to the clouds. “But we’ve got naught but dust to eat for many a mile, so slip that bonnet back on your head or you’ll be seeing stars long afore the sun goes down.”
Sarah dutifully pulled her bonnet back onto her head. “Granny,” she said, “what day is it?”
“It’s Saturday. Tomorrow we rest.”
“Do you think we’ll get into camp early enough to wash in the river? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wash this dust away?”
“Aye, lass. Surely it would be fine.” They walked on in silence.
At first, Sarah’s mother had insisted that Granny Glover ride in the wagon. However, the first day’s ride bumped and jostled her so much that by the end of the day she could not stand.
“I’m old, but I’m not feeble,” Granny had said the next morning. “I’ll walk if you please.”
“Sarah, stay with Granny,” was all Sarah’s mother had said. So Sarah walked every day with Granny. She longed to play alongside the wagon with her younger sisters or watch the hens with the other girls her age, but her mother said that Granny must not walk alone. Granny walked even more slowly than the oxen pulling the wagons. When the wagons stopped for the night just before sundown, Sarah and Granny usually had an hour’s walk in darkness before they made it to camp. The sounds of the songs of Zion often greeted them long before they reached the wagon train.
The first week, Sarah was so tired and her body ached so much that all she could do at day’s end was eat a bit of biscuit, wrap up in a quilt, say a short prayer, and fall asleep. Now she was much stronger. She knew that the Lord was helping her and that if she had to, she could walk across the prairie forever. But she dreamed of the day they’d reach the Valley. Her Uncle William was already there. He had written to them about the Zion the Saints were building “in the tops of the mountains.”
A comfortable quiet settled over the prairie. Sometimes Granny talked about the days when Sarah’s mother was a little girl and they were homesteading in Nova Scotia, Canada. Sometimes she told of her own lively childhood in Scotland. Often they sang their favorite hymns and folk songs. Or Granny recited one of the poems of Robert Burns; she was teaching them to Sarah.
Today they were happy to just walk quietly together. Sarah pushed her bonnet off her head, letting it hang down her back. Granny Glover pre-tended to not notice.
Granny and Sarah kept up their slow, steady pace all day. The sun sank lower and lower in the prairie sky. “Do you see the wagon?” Granny asked when it was just about sundown. Sarah’s sharp eyes scanned the trail ahead.
Sarah’s parents pulled out of the wagon train and waited for Sarah and Granny whenever they could, but Mother was expecting a baby, and Sarah’s three younger sisters were often hungry and tired at the end of the long day’s march. Father had camp duties to attend to on many evenings.
“No, Granny, just dust.”
The sun slipped beneath the horizon, and darkness blanketed the prairie. It was hard to see in the dim starlight. Granny stumbled, and Sarah took her arm to steady her. “Thanks, darlin’. It won’t be far now,” she said.
They walked slowly on through the darkness, carefully following the wagon ruts. In the distance a mournful howl broke the silence. One wolf. Then another. Then another. A chorus of howls filled the lonely night air.
Granny and Sarah continued their slow pace. The wolves howled again. Sarah gripped Granny’s arm tighter. “Oh, Granny,” she said with fear in her voice, “please hurry. The wolves will get us.”
Granny placed her hand over Sarah’s and squeezed. “Don’t worry, lass,” she said. “The wolves won’t get us.”
Sarah turned and looked at Granny. She could see her calm green eyes looking intently at her through the darkness. “We’re on the Lord’s errand, lass. The wolves won’t touch us. There be angels a-guardin’ us all the way to Zion.”
A calm, peaceful feeling flooded through Sarah’s body, washing her fear away. The wolves continued to howl, but their eerie music no longer frightened Sarah. The peace that enveloped her crowded out her fear. From a distance they heard the Saints singing, “Come, come, ye Saints, no toil nor labor fear,”* and saw the flickering campfires glowing against the darkness.
“All is well, lass,” Granny said. “All is well.” Sarah smiled, filled with a happiness and peace she had not known before.

In Alvin F. Meredith’s final year of high school in Tennessee, USA, he was selected as his school’s athlete of the year by a group of Christian student athletes.
Shortly afterward, his coach notified him that the state leadership of the group had disqualified him because they didn’t recognize The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a Christian faith.
His coach, “a really good Christian man,” asked the organization to send someone to the school to meet with the young athlete. The organization’s representative came to the high school and explained 10 points of doctrine that he felt justified their decision to disqualify the Latter-day Saint athlete. Upon seeing a Bible in the man’s bag, Elder Meredith asked if the two of them could review some verses.
“We looked at each of those 10 points and went to Chronicles and James and the book of Revelation and Corinthians,” Elder Meredith said. “My faith was challenged, and through the fire of that challenge, it was strengthened and has never wavered since.”

The scriptures say the Sabbath day is a holy day, a joyful and delightful day, a day of rest, a day to celebrate.1 But a few years ago, while in my late teens, I found Sundays miserable. Instead of peace, I felt stress. Instead of joy, sadness. Instead of hope, guilt. I had a full-on case of the Sabbath blues.
Each Sunday morning, after an embarrassing amount of time hiding under my covers, I’d finally admit it was indeed Sunday and get dressed for church. At church, I’d review my past week. During the sacrament, I would add up all my failures, never finishing before the first speaker got up. The rest of church became a battle of staving off tears as the guilt intensified with the new regret of feeling so rotten at church.
The afternoon was much the same. I’d feel guilt about past choices, stress about future choices, and sadness about present circumstances. Without school and extracurricular activities to distract me, I would spend my time dwelling on negative thoughts.
After listening to, reading, and then re-reading President Russell M. Nelson’s April 2015 general conference talk about how the Sabbath is a delight, I prayed for peace on and love for the Sabbath rather than the misery I currently felt.2 And an answer came.
I felt prompted to shift my focus from my woes to my relationship with Heavenly Father and the Savior. Rather than ponder my failures, I took time to ponder Their involvement in my life.
When negative thoughts came, I repeated to myself what I knew and believed about God and Jesus Christ: I am a child of God. He loves me. Jesus Christ is my Brother, and He atoned for me. They want me to be happy and return to Them. The Sabbath is a gift from God.
I began to exercise faith in this testimony.
Changing my focus led me to also reconsider how I approached the sacrament. For so long I had treated the sacrament as time to punish myself. But that’s not its purpose. The sacrament is a sacred ordinance to renew our covenants. It is a chance to become clean again through the atoning power of Jesus Christ. Focusing on the ordinance and the covenant with faith and a repentant heart, I realized that the sacrament offered peace as I accepted the gift of forgiveness, kept my covenants, and received the Lord’s Spirit (see D&C 20:77, 79).
Thinking of Christ’s Atonement during the sacrament brought another gift to my mind. Not only could I be forgiven, but I could also receive healing because my Savior took upon Himself my pain and infirmities (see Alma 7:11–12). Through His Atonement and the sacrament, I could find peace and strength on the Sabbath—or on any other day—rather than stress and sadness.
And I found that peace. My Savior is there for me on Sundays and always!
This wasn’t a one-week fix. It was a struggle, and it took time. “But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Romans 8:25). I kept working on my focus and praying to feel love for the Sabbath.
In time, I did find peace and delight on that holy day, but I couldn’t quit there or I’d again slide into the Sabbath slumps. Each week requires diligent focus on the Savior and the purpose of the Sabbath, but I know the promise of peace and joy is true.

Not too long ago I was assigned by the First Presidency to interview a man who had been excommunicated from the Church for adultery. It had required eight years for him to work his way through the long and sometimes painful process of reinstatement in the Church, and now he was sitting before me in an interview to determine his worthiness for a possible restoration of his priesthood and temple blessings. I asked him this simple question: “Looking back on this traumatic time in your life, how did it happen?”
Tears began to flow freely down his cheeks as he tried to respond. At last he was able to speak. “Brother Ballard,” he said, “it all started the day I picked up a pornographic magazine in the barber shop. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen anything like that, and it intrigued me. I wanted to see more and more. And then I wanted to see things that were progressively more explicit. And then it wasn’t enough to just look at pictures—I wanted to actually participate in some of the activities I was looking at. Eventually I was untrue to my wife and my family, and unfaithful to the covenants I had made with my Heavenly Father in His holy house.”
The man continued through his tears: “I’m not trying to shift blame for the choices I made. I knew better than to do what I did, and I alone am responsible for my sins. But there’s no question in my mind that exposure to pornography played a significant role in my spiritual decline.”

Returning from her mission, Flora prepared to marry Ezra Taft Benson, who by then had graduated from Brigham Young University. On 10 September 1926, Flora Amussen left a handsome monthly allowance to begin married life on a meager subsistence with her beloved T.
“I had inherited from my father quite a portion of worldly goods in stocks and dividends,” Sister Benson explains. “I turned all of this over to my widowed mother at the time of my marriage. I chose to marry a man who was rich spiritually, not materially. I preferred that whatever positions of honor or material things would come to us we would achieve together, starting at the bottom.”
Hours after the ceremony, the newlyweds left Salt Lake City to take a seventy-dollar-a-month postgraduate scholarship at Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa. They traveled east in a used Ford Model T pickup truck that contained all their earthly possessions, camping along the way in a leaky tent.
While her husband worked on his Master of Science degree, Sister Benson took courses in home economics. The couple learned new ways to make their money stretch through the month, always taking out seven dollars first to pay the Lord his tenth. “The lessons I learned were priceless,” Sister Benson recalls. “Money could not buy them. We lived on the Lord’s help and the love that bound us together.”

Will Strickland flipped switches, turned dials, and moved levers on the lighted control panel; the metal robot sitting at the far end of the living room stood up and walked ponderously toward him. Will’s fingers moved rapidly among the controls as he piloted the robot in a slow circle about the room.
At last!
He finally had the robot perfected to the point where it could walk more than six steps without falling on its chrome steel skull.
He spoke into the microphone, and his voice echoed back to him from the small speaker inside the robot’s mouth. “Testing—testing—I’m a jolly good fellow today; I’ve decided to be a good robot and cooperate with the poor mortal who worked so hard to put me together.”
He switched the control panel off and walked over to the robot, pushing gently against it to test its balance in a standing position. Pretty solid. It was exactly his own height, five feet ten, but it outweighed him by six pounds; it had a little more metal in its system than he had.
He left the robot standing there and turned to the cubical metal frame that towered nearly to the ceiling, dominating the small living room. A steel skeleton, the same height as both Will and the robot but weighing only 127 pounds, hung suspended from the top of the frame by vertical bars that socketed into its shoulders, leaving its feet dangling six inches above the floor.
The “skeleton” was actually a new control unit he had designed to replace the conventional control panel. Even though the control panel worked, it was so complicated that the operator needed the skill and coordination of a jet pilot to evoke the most elementary motions in the robot. A small child could walk or pick up something in his hand without having to understand how his muscles worked in opposition to one another to provide balance and control. With the control skeleton, a man could operate a robot as easily as he could operate his own body, simply by strapping himself to the skeleton and doing whatever he wanted the robot to do; the robot would copy his motions, “reading” them electronically through the motions of the skeleton.
Since the only way he could make the robot walk was to walk himself, and since it would be next to useless to have a robot if he had to follow along behind it whereever it went, he had suspended the skeleton in the air so its feet wouldn’t touch the floor. This way the man and the skeleton would do their walking in the air and leave the traveling to the robot. The robot could walk all over town while the man and the skeleton remained in this room, suspended from the overhead frame.
He had visions of a future filled with robots working on the surface of the moon, on other planets, and interplanetary space, doing dangerous work that needed to be done while the operators of the robots remained in safer areas.
But before all this could happen, he had to make the first one work.
He stepped inside the frame and pushed the button that lowered the skeleton until its feet touched the floor. Then he backed up to the skeleton and stepped on top of its flat feet, strapping them to his own as though he were putting on a pair of roller skates. He worked his way up to his ankles, calves, and upper legs, fastening the straps; the right leg of the skeleton fit snugly against the right side of his own right leg, and the left leg fit similarly on the other side of his body. The shoulders of the skeleton rested on top of his own, and its arms came down just to the outside of his own. He slipped his hands into the metallic gauntlets at the ends of the arms and finished strapping in.
He pressed the suspension button and the vertical bars lifted him until his feet cleared the floor by six inches; then he switched on the power to the skeleton control unit and raised his right arm to shoulder height. The robot raised its right arm halfway to shoulder height and stopped.
He made a careful walking motion; the robot lurched forward and fell with a shattering crash.
“Blast!” Will growled.
“Blast!” the robot agreed.
He listened for a moment but heard no footsteps pounding up the stairwell; that was one thing he could be thankful for. The tenants in the apartment just below his used to come scrambling up the stairs every time the robot fell.
They had not been very understanding about the cause of science; they were devout proponents of peace and quiet. They’d told him so several times, at the tops of their lungs.
Then one day he’d had the robot answer the door.
They hadn’t been back since.
He switched off the power, lowered his feet to the floor, and unstrapped from the skeleton. This was enough for one day’s work; the robot had walked consistently well under the control of the panel, and this was the most success he’d tasted since he’d begun this project. Now he knew that the remaining trouble had to be somewhere in the motion-translation unit of the control skeleton.
But that could wait till tomorrow. Friday night was no time to be working on a robot, especially when he had a date with Carol.
He picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hello.” It was Carol’s voice.
“Hi, Carol, this is Will. What time shall I come by tonight?”
“Oh, it’s you. … Sorry, but I won’t be able to make it to the dance tonight. Something came up.”
He hesitated. “But, Carol,—we’ve had this date for three weeks.”
“Well, I just can’t go.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Something just came up.”
He swallowed, and his throat hurt. “As I recall, something came up last time, too.”
She laughed. “Did it? Shame on me. Well, I don’t really have time to talk to you now, Will; I have things to do. See you around campus sometime.”
The phone clicked in his ear. He slammed it into the cradle.
This was the fifth time she’d done this to him!
“And by George, it’s the last!” He stalked into the bedroom and whipped his shirt off, ripping off the bottom button, which he had neglected to unbutton.
“I’m going to that dance stag! And as for Carol,” he slung his pants at the bed and missed, “She’s seen the last of me!”
He jerked on a clean pair of pants and a new shirt; he cinched his necktie ferociously, strangling himself, and coughed a couple of times before he could loosen it.
As he wrenched open the door of his apartment, he cast one last glance back at the robot, which was now sitting quietly in its usual chair; then he slammed the door splinteringly shut behind him.
There were several nice girls at the dance, but most of them had dates. He danced a few dances but didn’t meet any staglet girls who particularly impressed him.
In spite of every gram of will power he could muster, he always caught himself comparing them to Carol.
Then he saw a girl at the far end of the dance floor who, at first glance, compared favorably with Carol. He looked more closely.
Great Scott! It was Carol!
She was dancing with a tall, handsome fellow who looked sophisticated but stupid.
And she was enjoying herself.
When the music stopped, he strolled over to them, controlling himself every second. “May I have the next one?” he asked politely.
Carol turned a little pink.
The tall fellow stiffened. “Why don’t you get with it and go hustle your own date?”
Will stepped forward dangerously. “I thought I had one,” he explained, “until about an hour ago.” He glanced at Carol. “But something came up.”
“You’ll have to excuse us now, Will,” Carol said smoothly, “they’re starting to dance again. And you really shouldn’t be in the middle of the dance floor if you’re not going to dance.”
She danced away with her tall, dark hero.
Will stormed off the floor. “I’ll get even with you, baby, if it takes 20 years!”
He bolted out the exit and headed for home.
He thundered into his apartment and punched the door shut with a frustrated fist. He began to pace to and fro in front of the quietly seated robot.
Carol would break a date with him whenever, wherever, and however she felt like it. And that was usually whenever some good-looking goon came along and gave her the eye. If he were a handsome animal, it seemed to make no difference to Carol if he didn’t have the wits to tie his shoes.
Carol didn’t care. To her an empty head was as good as a full one, as long as it had a flashy covering. She was the flightiest girl he’d ever known.
Also the most beautiful. And certainly the most intelligent, except for her little mental problem concerning men.
In the beginning she’d given him the rush and totally overwhelmed him. Six weeks later she was finished with him and on to the next conquest, wastebasketting him like a used kleenex.
He discovered later, by personal observation, that three weeks was her usual toleration limit for any one fellow. Unfortunately, she was nice-looking enough that she never had any difficulty at all in snagging replacements for her rejects. Whenever she had a new one in the net, she just started breaking dates with her latest victim until he got the message and gave up.
But Will wouldn’t give up. He didn’t have much trouble getting the message, but giving up was not a part of his psychology, at least not after having come to know the real Carol. He was in love with that girl.
“I hate her!” he growled.
The robot sat silently in front of him, like a metal Mona Lisa. Uncontrollably he began to try to explain Carol to his mute companion.
“Inside I know she’s a wonderful, sensitive person. She’s just afraid of commitment. And she’s brilliant,” he added in ultimate defense. He’d discovered that almost by accident when he’d seen the grade point average on her semester report one day before she had hastily stuffed it into her purse. She seemed to consider her intelligence a deficit. And it was with most of the guys she dated.
Suddenly he stared at the robot as if he really saw him for the first time. He approached the uncooperative control unit with the pure light of fanaticism shining in his eyes.
“Now, sister, we’re going to see who’s boss! Now I’m really motivated!”
He worked all night. At 6:30 Saturday morning he strapped himself to the control skeleton for the fourth time and raised his right arm to shoulder height.
The robot’s right arm lifted to shoulder height!
He took one careful step forward. The robot did likewise!
He threw his fists to the heavens and shouted jubilantly!
The robot raised steel fists to the skies and cheered earnestly.
He walked the robot cautiously about the room, making sure of its balance with each stride. What a strange sensation, hanging from the frame and making walking motions but going nowhere, while a robot on the other side of the room did his walking for him.
Physically, he felt as though he were actually walking. The skeleton transmitted the force of his muscles to the robot, and the robot transmitted the forces acting on it back to the skeleton.
He sat the robot down on the davenport. His own legs actually moved upward, so that he appeared to be sitting on air, but he was really sitting supported by the legs of the control skeleton, which, in turn, were held up by the forces transmitted to them by the legs of the seated robot.
The skeleton had a system of wire muscles that duplicated the functions of the muscles in the human body and these muscles were actually applying the forces necessary to hold up his legs. But they received their instructions electronically from the legs of the robot.
As long as no one shut off his electricity, he could sit there in the air until he starved to death. Which reminded him, he’d better not forget to pay his light bill before Tuesday.
He made the robot lie down on the davenport. His body stretched out horizontally in the air, lifted by the wire muscles of the vertical bars like a giant forearm being lifted by a flexing bicep.
When he closed his eyes, his body told him he was lying securely on the davenport—all of his body, that is, except his stomach, which remained stoutly unconvinced.
He brought himself and the robot to a standing position again, lowered the skeleton’s feet to the floor, and turned off the power.
“Whew!” He unstrapped. “Your body tells you one thing, and your eyes accuse your body of perjury. That’s what you’d call cognitive dissonance.”
It was now time to install the robot’s eyes and ears so he could pilot it at a distance. He hadn’t installed them before because he hadn’t wanted to take needless chances of smashing them in one of the robot’s crash landings.
By 10:45 he had the miniaturized TV cameras placed inside the eye sockets and the little radio transmitters inside the ears. He strapped himself to the control skeleton and pulled the audiovisual helmet down over his head. The transistorized TVs in the inside of the helmet, one in front of each eye, gave him not only clear vision, but also three-dimensional depth of field. The twin radio receivers next to his ears gave him a normal sense of hearing from the robot.
When he turned on the power, the first thing he saw was Will Strickland dangling from the great frame like a living puppet. With the steel skeleton strapped to his body and the audio-visual helmet over his head, he looked like nothing the planet Earth could possibly have produced.
He laughed. “Will Strickland, Puppet-Man from Planet X.”
He walked around the frame, fascinated by seeing himself as he really was from all angles. “O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us, to see oursil’s as ithers see us.”
He walked over to the bookshelf and pulled out a volume of Thoreau. He opened it and, with some persistence, succeeded in turning the pages one at a time. He had the sensation of wearing thick gloves.
He put the book back on the shelf. Now that he was confident in his ability to control the robot in every way, he had only one need left to fulfill.
Sleep.
He parked the robot in its chair, switched off the power, and lowered himself to the floor. He unstrapped, walked wearily into the bedroom, and flopped onto the bed without undressing.
The next thing he knew, it was a little past 4:00 and he was hungry. He crawled out of bed, cooked and ate two hamburgers, and drank half a quart of milk.
Then he went to the supply closet and pulled out a box containing fleshy plastic. He began to form a face for the robot, a very handsome face, one that would catch Carol in mid-flight and cause her to abandon this week’s infatuation and teach her a lesson she’d never forget.
At 3:15 Thursday afternoon he finished his work on the robot’s face. He was no sculptor, but he was a good design engineer, and he made the plastic face by taking careful measurements of faces in photographs and reproducing a nose from one, a mouth from another, and so on. The finished product was diabolically handsome.
Then he adjusted the voice box in the robot’s throat so that its voice was altered significantly from his own. If Carol recognized his voice, the game would be over fast.
He dressed the robot in his newest suit and tie, and inspected him for human credibility. He looked a great deal more human than some of the guys he’d seen hanging around on campus.
Twenty minutes later he piloted his cybernetic Cyrano through the door of the library. He noticed, with a mixture of pride and disgust, that the girls were paying much more attention to him than usual.
He was sure that Carol would be in the library, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. She usually sat at the table nearest the door, where she could keep her speculative eyes on all the males entering and where no male could possibly avoid being exposed to a full-length view of Carol Carter.
Carol believed in prime viewing areas.
Sometimes he wondered how he’d ever gotten mixed up with such a girl in the first place. And whenever he did, it never took him long to remember. She’d swooped down on him like a Golden Eagle capturing him in something under four minutes.
He’d never had a chance. Somewhere in the third week of their whirlwind romance she had allowed him to catch a glimpse of her deeper thoughts, though most of the time she kept herself camouflaged behind the irrationality inherent to being a beautiful woman. But why he still loved her after all—
Splat!
Out of the stacks a blur of femininity had flashed, impacting solidly against his chest.
The robot toppled backwards!
He fought wildly for balance; a fall might knock out the audio-visual, maybe even the control unit!
He grasped desperately with both hands. His right hand caught the edge of the stacks and held; his left arm girdled the girl’s waist, bearing her several inches into the air.
She squealed shrilly, breathlessly, in his left ear.
It was Carol!
It would be Carol. This was just another of her clever little tricks to meet a man. Hiding in the stacks and springing out on him like a leopard when he passed by.
The little ambusher …
He set her down gently.
“Ohhhh!” she gasped. “Excuse me.” She was still a little breathless, whether by nature or by design he couldn’t tell, and she stood very close to him, shining her sapphire eyes up into his.
That one never failed her; even as a robot he felt limp all over. He knew that if he had built an olfactory sense into the robot, he would now be mesmerized by her perfume, as well as all the rest.
And Carol didn’t need perfume, as long as she had all the rest.
She looked at him in rapt admiration. “My, but you’re strong.” She felt the arm that had so lately been locked about her waist. “Why, your arm is just like steel! Unbelievable!”
“I, uh, lift weights.”
“You must!” She paused.
“My name’s Carol. Carol Carter. What’s yours?”
“Cy,” he said, searching frantically for a last name. “Cy Burnett.”
“Cy Burnett,” she repeated. “How masculine. It fits you.” She appraised him for a few more seconds. Subconsciously she thought, Cybernet? How interesting. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
“Yes, fairly new.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever seen you before. If I had, I surely would have remembered.” She flashed her eyes up into his and smiled. “Say, have you ever been to the sundial?”
“No.” Not as Cy, he hadn’t. As Will, he’d been there several times with Carol; it was her favorite setting for romance, and she always lured her prey there as soon as it was at all feasible. But her speed today, as far as he knew, broke all her previous records.
“Come on, then,” she urged. “It’s time you had the experience. It’s beautiful there in the late afternoon.”
“Do you go there often?”
She looked at him as though she weren’t sure whether to be embarrassed or not. She decided not to be. “Yes, it’s lovely there. Come on and I’ll show you.”
He followed her from the library.
Will was dismayed at his failure as a man and his success as a robot. There was one consolation: Carol Carter was going to be the one who got hurt this time.
The sundial was surrounded by flowers, trees, and bushes, with a little pond nearby. Carol sat down in the grass and motioned him down beside her.
It was a relief to sit down and rest; he’d been walking his robot now for 45 minutes, nonstop.
“Mmmmmm,” breathed Carol. “Smell those flowers.”
He sniffed, smelled nothing, and remembered the robot wasn’t equipped to smell. “Yes,” he agreed. “Very nice.”
She chatted on and on for nearly an hour. Will wasn’t used to such long discussion periods with her; of late, they had been very brief and very no-nonsense. Remembering that, he abruptly stood up. “Sorry to end this, but I’ve got to get some studying done.”
“That’s too bad,” she said in surprise, “just when we were getting so well acquainted.”
She lowered her lashes at him in a way that stopped his heart, lungs, and brain from their normal duties. “There’s a darling movie playing on campus,” she purred. “Why don’t we go to it together Friday night, and we can continue getting better acquainted?”
First, his pulse came back, then his breath, and finally about half the reasoning power of his brain. “That sounds interesting,” he said and glanced at his watch. “Ten till five. I’d really better get back to the library.” He was being an emotional man of iron.
She sighed, “I suppose so.”
“So long,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “See you around.”
“See you Friday night,” she reminded him. “Do you still have my phone number and address?” she called after him more urgently. “I put it in your left shirt pocket; it’s a little pink slip of paper.”
“It’s still there,” he assured her, patting his chrome steel chest, “right next to my heart.”
They had to walk to the movie Friday night. He didn’t trust Cy with the car yet. Besides, he couldn’t have Cy Burnett show up for a date driving Will Strickland’s car. He told Carol he couldn’t use the car because of technical problems.
She didn’t mind walking; she said the fresh air and exercise would be good for her. And before the evening was over, they had a date for the ballet on Saturday night.
They had a great Saturday night. When he took her home, she kissed him and made sure he remembered that they had a definite date for the following Friday night. He didn’t actually remember making the date with her, but he certainly remembered some broad hints she’d been throwing him throughout the evening.
He was gratified to see just how thoroughly infatuated she had become with Cy Burnett.
This meant that the time was now ripe for Phase Two.
The following Friday evening, Will had his speech well-rehearsed. At 6:40, which was the time he was supposed to be at Carol’s house, he activated the robot’s speaker control and called her.
She picked up the phone in four seconds flat; he was timing her. “Hello.” Her voice was especially musical tonight; he almost relented on his plan.
Almost, but not quite. He’d made a definite commitment to himself.
“Hi, Carol, this is Cy.”
“I know,” she purred, “I’m ready now, so any time you come will be fine with me.”
He hated himself. “Sorry about this, Carol, but I won’t be able to make it tonight.”
“Ohhhh.” The disappointment in her voice gave him a sadistic thrill. “What happened, Cy?”
“Something came up.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Something just … came up? But, we had a date, Cy.” Her voice was shaky, as though she were about to cry.
He didn’t feel heroic.
But he forced himself to remember all the times she’d done this to him. “Well, something just came up.” This was an exact quotation from the last time she’d jilted him. He wondered if it would strike a familiar chord in her conscience.
He hoped so.
There was another long interval. “All right, Cy,” she said meekly. “Cy? There’s a wonderful play tomorrow night, Picnic in the Park. I’ve wanted to see it for ever so long. Would you like to … well, what I mean is, if you can’t make it tonight, and since we did have a date …”
Her voice trailed off pathetically. “Sounds okay.” He was glad of a chance to relent a little without breaking his solemn vow. “See you tomorrow night, then.”
“Wonderful. Good night, Cy.”
“Good night, Carol.”
He spent the rest of the evening alone in his apartment, wishing he were with her.
All day Saturday he felt like a brute. A triumphant male brute, to be sure, but still a brute. His feelings alternated between righteous satisfaction and guilty anguish.
Well, she’d done it to him often enough; now they were even.
No, not exactly even.
He’d have to jilt her five or six more times to come anywhere close to being even. But once was enough to prove the point.
Or was it?
As the time drew near for their date that evening, he began to have second thoughts. Maybe two vigorous drops, back to back, would drive the point home a little deeper.
No, she’d suffered enough. She’d sounded almost ready to cry last night and had probably spent a pretty miserable night of it.
It reminded him of the night he’d gone through the time she’d stood him up on a theater date to go bowling with someone she’d met only that afternoon. He’d wandered through the darkest streets he could find, just walking and brooding until 4:00 in the morning, thinking thoughts of despair and hopelessness.
The hopelessness …
He stalked across the room to the phone. He owed her one more time.
He activated the robot’s speaker and dialed the phone.
“Hello? Cy?” She sounded several degrees less sure of herself tonight.
“Hi, Carol. Cy again. Look, I’m going to have to cancel out again tonight. I can’t go with you.”
“But, Cy!” Her voice was close to a wail. “We had a date! What’s the matter, Cy? Why do you keep breaking our dates like this?”
“Things just keep coming up.” His voice was cold and flat. “Well, I don’t have time to talk now; I have things to do. See you on campus sometime.”
She was crying when he hung up on her.
He deactivated the robotic voice, stood up, and threw the theater tickets into the wastebasket. “Now, Carol Carter, how funny do you think a broken date is when you’re the one left holding the broken pieces?”
He left the apartment and wandered aimlessly around the block a few times. He stopped on the corner to pet a big brown dog that came up to him, seeming to sense his forlornness. As he rubbed the dog gently behind the ears, he said, “I wonder why so many people have to be hurt themselves before they have any idea what it’s like?”
He wearily climbed the steps to his apartment and went inside.
What now?
The robot was a success, the control unit was a success, and his plan to hurt Carol was a success. But he didn’t feel like a success.
He just didn’t enjoy hurting people.
Sunday afternoon he made his decision. He would go to see Carol, apologize, and then drop out of her life for good. It was pointless to continue a useless charade.
He activated the robot’s voice and dialed her number.
“Hello …” Her voice was soft and subdued.
“Hello, Carol.”
“Cy!”
“I just wanted to apologize; is it all right if I come over for a little while? What I have to say won’t take long.”
“Sure, come on over, Cy.”
He was confident enough now in his handling of the robot that he didn’t hesitate to drive his car over to Carol’s. He parked two blocks away from her house, around the corner; he still couldn’t let her see Cy Burnett driving Will Strickland’s car.
Carol was sitting on the porch swing, waiting for him. She was wearing her summery blue blouse that matched her eyes and feminine pink skirt that matched her lips.
It was going to be hard to forget her.
“Would you like to go for a walk, Cy? Or would you rather stay here?”
“This is fine.”
She took his hand. “Let’s go out in the back and see the flowers.” She led him around the corner of the house, and they sat in the grass under a big tree. There were flowers growing under all the trees, and a little green birdhouse hung from a limb overhead.
She leaned against him, and he put his arm around her.
“Cy … I really like you …”
Even after I stood you up two nights in a row? I wonder what you really like about me, besides my handsome steel-and-plastic face?
“What do you like about me?” he asked.
She looked shocked. “Why, I just like you. I don’t know why. Why do I like steak and hate lamb chops? It’s just the way I am.”
A good answer. Probably an honest one. And it’s my luck that Cy Burnett looks like steak to you, and Will Strickland looks like lamb chops.
“I really wish I knew what to do about you, Carol.”
She smiled, snuggling a little closer. “It shouldn’t be that hard to solve, Cy. Am I so much of a problem to you?”
If you only knew.
He held her hand gently, careful that his plastic-coated steel fingers caressed without crushing.
At 10:30 in the evening Will walked home in a daze. Rather, Cy walked home, with Will piloting in a daze. At this point he hardly knew who he was.
He preferred being Cy.
It wasn’t until he was more than halfway home that he remembered that he had driven his car to Carol’s place. He didn’t go back for it. He was in no condition to drive, either as a man or as a robot.
He tripped over a hump and nearly fell.
He wasn’t even in condition to walk.
He thoughtfully climbed the steps to his apartment, entered, and paced the floor for half an hour. Finally he went to bed without taking his clothes off.
At 3:00 in the morning he woke up and went to the bathroom to get a drink. He lifted the glass to his lips and poured the water into his mouth, but it didn’t go down; it was like drinking in a dream and still being thirsty. He looked into the mirror.
Great Scott! Cy!
“I’m still a robot!”
He went into the living room and found his mortal self still suspended from the great frame, dutifully operating the control skeleton. This meant that he’d sent the robot to bed and left himself hanging prone in that harness half the night.
Such was Carol Carter’s power over men and robots.
It was an exciting week. He spent his mornings and early afternoons as Will and his late afternoons as Cy; he met Carol every afternoon at the sundial.
He couldn’t stop himself from making dates with her when he was with her; he couldn’t bring himself to break the dates once they were made; and he certainly couldn’t force himself to forget her, though he spent hours in the attempt.
He enjoyed their sundial dates as much as their evening dates; there was really more of an opportunity to talk to one another at the sundial than at a movie or play.
He enjoyed knowing Carol, and he knew her now better than he ever had before. And, almost unwillingly at first, he began confiding more and more of his own feelings to her. Somehow, in the guise of the robot, he wasn’t so afraid of being criticized. After all, Carol would never know when this was over that he, Will, had confided in her, so she couldn’t hurt him.
But after the week was over, in the stark light of a Monday morning, the world looked a little tarnished. Monday morning was a time for analysis.
Carol was extremely sweet to Cy. At present anyway. But what about next week, or the week after that; what would happen the first time another man came along?
The most logical solution was to send in the robot with a new face to take her away from Cy before someone else beat him to it. It was inevitable that she should scrap Cy in a week or two, and this way he would still have the pleasure of her companionship, even if under another identity.
If you can’t beat them, create them!
Wednesday afternoon he piloted his robot onto campus wearing a new face. He went straight to the library. He walked past her customary table near the door, but there was no sign of her.
He forged deeper into the library. Beyond the furthest reaches of the stacks he came upon her, sitting at a little table piled with books.
She was reading Thoreau.
He adjusted his tie and sat down beside her. She glanced up at him quickly, then went back to Thoreau.
He couldn’t believe it! This new face was even handsomer than Cy’s; at least he had thought so. He’d expected her to go out of her mind when she saw it. Maybe she hadn’t gotten a good look at it yet.
“Excuse me,” he said. “What’s that you’re reading?”
She looked up, taking a longer look this time. “Thoreau.” She went back to reading.
Amazing!
She sat reading studiously until nearly 4:00 and then sprang up and headed for the door, carrying her books with her. He knew where she was going; she had a date with Cy at the sundial at 4:15.
He gave her half a minute’s head start and then followed her.
She was sitting in the grass by the sundial when he approached; She was still reading Thoreau. She looked up when he came near, probably expecting Cy, and when she saw he wasn’t, went back to her book.
“May I sit down?” he asked politely.
She looked up again, startled. “Well … I really don’t know what to say. To tell you the truth, I’m expecting a date in just a few minutes.”
“Oh. At the sundial? Unusual. Is this really a definite date, or just a tentative one? If it’s just tentative, maybe you’d like to join me at the cafeteria for a malt and hamburger.”
“Thank you for the offer. But this date is definite.”
His pulse did strange things. “He’s a lucky guy.”
She laughed. “Cy’s not lucky. He’s wonderful.”
He studied her face. “If he has a girl like you, maybe he is at that. Tell me, are you going steady, or is there a chance of someone else getting a date in with you now and then?”
She looked more serious now. “You look like a very nice person, and I’ll tell you the truth. I’m in love with him. I can’t go out with someone else while I’m in love with him.”
“I see.” He stood up. “I appreciate your honesty. If all girls were as truthful as you’ve just been, there’d be fewer miserable men in this world.”
Before their next date, he painted his car, changing the color from white to blue, and put on new seat covers. He needn’t have worried. When Friday night came, he found that Carol paid a great deal more attention to Cy than to the car he was driving.
The weeks went by. Every week he put a new face on the robot and sent it out to take Carol away from Cy. And every week the new face failed.
Carol refused to move one degree from her chosen course. She was in love with Cy.
Together they created an enchanted courtship. They read Thoreau and Emerson together; they saw plays, musicals, and ballets together; they went to dances and good movies together. They spent hours studying together, either in the library, by the sundial, or at her house. They even climbed mountains together, a feat of real coordination for a cybernetic man-robot team like Will and Cy.
They did all the things together that Will had always dreamed of doing with Carol but had never succeeded in doing.
And now a robot was doing them with her.
The day before graduation Cy climbed the hill to the sundial to keep his last rendezvous with Carol. Tomorrow she graduated, and she wasn’t coming back next year; her parents would be coming in the morning to see her graduate and take her home with them for the summer.
And he was stuck here one more year for his master’s.
He could think of three possible ways the romance could end. If he revealed himself as Will, she’d have to accept him or reject him. If he didn’t, only the third alternative was left. He’d have to let her go without ever giving her a chance to make her choice.
If he could have believed that he had even the smallest chance with her, he’d have risked everything for it. But he just didn’t.
She had proven that to him too many times, in too many ways, for there to be any hope left now.
So he would just let her go quietly, remembering him only as Cy. He wanted to at least leave her that much; it was the only good she had ever accepted from him.
He reached the top of the hill and saw her waiting for him, sitting in the grass by the sundial. She waved and smiled when she saw him coming. “You’re early today.”
He smiled back. “You’re even earlier.”
“I didn’t have anything else to do. At least,” she added, “nothing I wanted to do as much.”
He sat down beside her. “Me too.” He put his arm around her and she leaned against him; they were content to be quiet together.
“Carol,” he said finally, “what do you really think of me?”
She looked up at him and stroked his hand. “What a question. I love you, Cy.”
He squeezed her shoulder gently. “I love you too, Carol.”
She looked at him earnestly. “Don’t you know this is my last day here, Cy? Don’t you know my parents are going to take me back with them tomorrow? Unless you want to give me a reason not to go …”
He looked deeply into her eyes.
Is there any chance at all for me as Will? I’d give everything I have for just one chance, if it were really a chance at all.
But there’s nothing. Not a single ray of light.
Nevertheless …
He smashed his fist into the ground.
I love her.
He stood up. I didn’t design this robot to fail! And I wasn’t designed to fail either! Not even if she rejects me. Being rejected by another person isn’t failure; failure is not giving another person the chance to reject you—or accept you …
It’s her future too. I owe her this decision a lot more than I owe her a set of dead memories about a man she loved who didn’t love her enough to marry her. Rejecting Will won’t be as hard on her as thinking for the rest of her life that Cy rejected her. At least she’ll know she was the one who had the power to make the final choice.
And she’ll know who it really was who loved her.
He lifted her to her feet. “Come home with me, Carol. There’s something I have to show you.
He opened the door of his apartment and let her in. The huge control frame was hidden in the bedroom now; he had dismantled it months ago and reassembled it in there in preparation for a visit from Carol, but this was the first time she had ever come.
They sat down on the davenport in the living room. She looked around at the electronics equipment on the shelves and tables. “Why, this is a regular little laboratory, Cy. What all do you do in here?”
“Electronics experiments mainly.”
“Really? I used to be interested in things like that when I was in high school. Show me one of your experiments, Cy.”
“That’s why I brought you here. To show you one of them.”
He paused. Then he put his arms around her and kissed her tenderly, as though it were their last.
She sensed it. “What’s wrong, Cy? You don’t have to leave me because of whatever it is that’s bothering you.”
“I won’t,” he promised. “I’ll marry you tomorrow if you still want me after tonight.” He sat quietly for a moment, gathering courage. How do you tell a girl she’s in love with a man who never was?
He couldn’t. All he could do was show her. He unbuttoned his shirt and exposed his chest. He tore away a broad strip of plastic flesh, revealing the steel underneath.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
He opened the plate in his chest and displayed the electronic circuitry inside.
She gasped, “Cy!” Her body trembled, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “You’re a robot?”
He nodded, unable to speak.
The tears streamed down her cheeks. “But you have a soul, Cy. You could never be what you’ve been to me if you didn’t have a soul.” She sobbed once, and caught her breath, hard. “Your mind … is it … electronic?”
He shook his head. “I have a human mind.”
“And all the rest is mechanical? Electrical?”
“Yes.”
She looked up at him for a moment, her eyes glittering with tears. “Cy, do you really love me? Or was that just another part of the experiment? To see if you could make a girl fall in love with a robot?”
He laid his hand over hers. “I love you, Carol. Very much.”
She closed the plate in his chest and leaned her cheek against the cold steel. “I love you too, Cy. And I’m going to marry you.”
His mind staggered in disbelief! “You’d marry a robot? A chunk of steel and plastic?”
She locked her arms around his chest. “You’re the best man I’ve ever known. I want to marry you, Cy. Whatever you are. I’m in love with you, Cy.”
He was silent for a time. “Would you still love me if my mind were in another body? A human body?”
She kissed him. “I love you, Cy. Whether you’re a mind, a man, or a robot. I want to marry you.”
“Carol … whatever happens in the next few minutes … always remember that I’ll go on loving you no matter what you may do or what your final choice may be. Because what happens now is up to you.”
He stood up and walked to the bedroom door. “My mind is in there.”
She caught her breath. “Is it … disembodied?”
“Would it make a difference?”
She was shaken but didn’t hesitate. “No.”
“It isn’t. I’m a man, Carol. And human enough to fall in love with you.”
“Who are you?” she gasped.
He looked at her keenly. “Does that make a difference?”
“No.” She came off the davenport. “But I have to know. Now!” She raced past him and flung open the bedroom door.
She started in amazement when she saw the gigantic control frame and the occupant suspended from it. But the audio-visual helmet hid the face.
She strode boldly forward and lifted the helmet.
The world jerked from here to there for Will. One instant he was seeing and hearing from Cy’s point of view; the next he was Will again, hanging in his harness. He turned off the control unit and lowered himself to the floor. Released from his control, the robot thundered to the floor.
“Will!”
She stood stunned, speechless.
She faltered backward a step, screaming hysterically. “Will Strickland! You phony! I never want to see you again!”
She stormed from the room, crying bitterly.
Will ripped himself loose from his bindings and plunged after her. “Carol! Wait!”
When he reached the door, he saw Carol kneeling beside Cy’s lifeless form, sobbing uncontrollably and stroking his metal fingers.
Will stood over her. “But Carol, I am Cy.”
She glared up at him. “No, you’re not! You’re nothing like him! Cy was kind and good and honest. He had the greatest soul I’ve ever known. And he was the only man I’ve ever loved. You were always so quiet, so hard to communicate with. Everything I said you seemed to be analyzing and criticizing. How could you be Cy?”
“I’m his soul, Carol. Everything he ever did or said—I was the soul of him.”
She raised a tearful face to him. “But you were just playing a role! You were only pretending to be someone you could never really be.”
He knelt beside her. “The name, the face, and the robot were deceptions. Everything else was real. I’m the same person as Will that I was as Cy. You just never bothered to know me as Will, and I never dared let you know me. That’s all. Everything Cy said to you was what I wanted to say to you. Everything Cy did with you was what I wanted to do with you—but you never gave me the chance.”
She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes brimming with tears. “Will, oh, Will, I was the deceiver. You wore a different face, but you were the same person inside. I wore the same face, but I was a different person to you than I was to Cy.”
Her voice broke. “I’m not worthy of you, Will. Now that I know enough about you to love you, I can see that I’m just not worthy of you.”
He took her by the shoulders. “Did you say you love me?”
She nodded tearfully. “Of course I love you, Will. Is it too late now to tell you that I love you?”
He hugged her to his chest, rocking her gently to and fro. “It’s never too late to tell someone you love him. Not when I’m the one you’re telling.”
She kissed him then, for the first time, still kneeling there beside the fallen Cyrano de Cybernet.

My dream of attending the Air Force Academy was deep-rooted. My father was a career man in the air force, and those summers I spent with him, learning to fly, and becoming familiar with the ins and outs of air force life, were some of the greatest experiences I’ve had. My parents divorced when I was quite young, so I didn’t get to see my father very often, and those times when we were together were very important to me.
During my junior year at Lewiston High School (in Idaho), I made my official application for the Academy appointment. School was going well for me; I was making good grades; I was active in my priests quorum; and in the spring of that year, I was elected student-body president. The possibility of receiving an Academy appointment looked better and better. As much as I wanted it, though, one thought kept repeating itself in my mind: “You should go on a mission.” I knew President Kimball had counseled that every young man in the Church should fulfill a mission, but I felt my case was an exception. If I accepted a mission call, my chances of ever entering the Academy would be very slim, since most cadets went in immediately after high school graduation. I also felt that living a good LDS life while at the Academy would, in a sense, be a mission in itself. Despite my reasoning, however, the prompting continued, and so did my efforts to squelch it.
After school was out, I flew to Virginia to spend the summer with my dad, who is not a member of the Church. Discussing with him the likelihood of winning an appointment made the prospect even more exciting. Dad’s encouragement was motivating, and I returned to Lewiston even more determined to make him proud of me, his son, the future Air Force Academy cadet! The summer had done a fairly good job of deadening my thoughts of serving a mission, but almost the first Sunday I was home, those old, unwelcome feelings began to stir. I realize now that the Holy Ghost was working overtime on me, and since then I have gained a strong testimony of the power of his influence. Every single day my thoughts were occupied with thoughts of the Academy versus a mission. I began reading my patriarchal blessing frequently; it said that when the time came, I would serve a mission. Still, my desires were with the Academy, and I was becoming more and more confused.
During these months I spent a lot of time talking to my former bishop, President Rex Tolman, who is now second counselor in the Lewiston Stake presidency. He is a professor at the Lewis-Clark State College, and I spent hours in his office, trying to sort out my feelings and decide what I should do. He didn’t try to influence my decision, but told me he would support me in whatever I decided. His confidence in me was a great support. As I prayed for guidance in making the right decision, I felt assurance that I would.
Then on October 10, 1976, as I was sitting in testimony meeting, I suddenly knew that I had to go on a mission and that the Academy would have to wait. I had in my jacket pocket a missionary handbook that had been distributed in priests quorum meeting months and months before. I took it out and wrote in Spanish (so no one else would know what I was writing), “When I’m 19, I’ll go on a mission.” I recorded the date, and then I put it away. I didn’t think about it again for a couple of weeks. I’d made my decision, and my conscience wasn’t working quite as hard.
It was just about this time that the nominations to the Academy were being announced. I was named. It was a little hard to explain to some of my friends and teachers that what I had worked for for years, now a reality, was going to be turned down. I went over to the college and talked to President Tolman for about an hour and a half. He said, “Chris, I really think you’ll be happy with this decision. I believe you’ve made the right one.” As we talked I began to have a desire to serve a mission rather than just a feeling of obligation.
Then it came time to tell my dad. I didn’t know what to do; I felt sure that he would never be able to understand or accept my decision. To him the air force was everything, and I knew that when I told him, it would be the last time I’d ever talk to him. I prayed constantly for the courage to tell him, that somehow he would be able to accept it.
When I heard his voice on the other end of the line, I nearly hung up. Somehow, though, the words came out. After I told him, there was at least a full 30 seconds of total silence. I had expected anger and disappointment, but the silence was even more unnerving. Finally he spoke: “Well, Chris, just what is a mission?” He asked me what I would be required to do, how long it would be, where I was going. After listening to my explanation he said firmly, “If that’s what you really want, then I’ll support your decision.” It took me by complete surprise; I couldn’t talk. I gave the phone to my mother and went downstairs to my room.
Since that time my dad and I have kept a regular correspondence going, and he has even offered to help support me financially. My gratitude to him has increased tremendously as I have come to realize more that ever before his great love for me.
I’ve had times since our conversation when I’ve thought, “I had the Academy in my grasp, and I let it go, and now I’ll never get it again.” Those times, though, aren’t very long-lasting and are few and far between. I realize that I won’t die if I don’t get to go to the Academy and that serving a mission is what the Lord wants me to do. I’m excited about it, and nothing will keep me from serving the best that I can!

But, our story does not end there. It goes on to an event in his life and that of his wife, the former Aurelia Campo Barata of Llorente, Samar Province, in the setting of the Rocky Mountains, U.S.A.
Sometime in the first week of September, 1977, Bro. Odulio took a long lingering look at his car—a car that served him well and one that he had taken care of with his own hands as an experienced mechanic. It had to go to the best offeror at a price dictated by a quick-sale situation. Other personal effects also had to go at bargain prices. The reason: he had a goal to be sealed with his wife in a temple of the Lord, and the opportunity to go came when he was designated a participant in the October 1977 Conference in Salt Lake City.
On September 27, Bro. and Sis. Odulio left Philippine soil for the first time in their lives. On October 5, the very day Sis. Odulio celebrated her 40th birthday, they were sealed for eternity in the Salt Lake Temple together with their unborn child (she was then 7 months pregnant). Three days later, on October 8, Bro. Odulio also observed his 40th birthday. Husband and wife had the best birthday celebration ever in a setting that had been their cherished dream since their conversion to the Church.

“Why do my legs feel like bricks?” I thought anxiously as I jogged slowly around the warm-up field at the high school league track meet, where I was desperately hoping to qualify for the upcoming state championship in my favorite race, the 800 meters. My anxiety was more than just the usual pre-race butterflies. I had been battling a cold all week, and having just finished a race, I was worried that I was too exhausted to compete well in my event, which was within the next half hour. I thought about how defeated I would feel to have worked so hard all season only to fail when it counted most.
Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice. “Hey, how are you feeling?” It was Joe, a local track coach who had come to watch the meet.
“Umm, I’ve been better,” I responded truthfully.
“Well, I’m looking forward to seeing you win the 800 today,” Joe smiled encouragingly.
“We’ll see,” I responded, “I haven’t been feeling well, so at this point I just hope I can make it through the race and qualify for State.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Joe said. “Just relax and you’ll do OK!”
I wished I could feel so sure, but waves of doubt continued to wash over me. As the first call for the 800 meters came over the loudspeaker, I tried to mentally prepare myself for the race. Suddenly, I remembered that a prayer before a race always calmed me and helped me focus. I needed that more than ever, so I found a secluded area on the field and silently began to pray.
“Heavenly Father,” I offered quietly, “I feel so weak today and really need Thy help. I am going to try my very best out there on the track, but please meet me halfway.”
I heard the final call for my race and ended my prayer quickly. A warm peace filled my heart, and I knew that Heavenly Father had heard my quiet plea for help. I calmly took my place on the starting line and waited for the starting gun. Suddenly the official yelled, “RUNNERS TAKE YOUR MARK … SET …” and the gun was fired.
I took my first few strides with ease, noting how light my legs were. I felt as though something special was inside of me. I felt strong and swift, despite having felt so terrible only moments before. As I approached the home stretch of the race, I realized I was in the lead, and before I knew it, I was crossing the finish line in first place!
Joe motioned me over to him as I stepped off the track. “Hey, that race was great! I thought you were sick? What got into you?”
I smiled back. “I was sick, and I was praying that I would be able to get through that race!”
Joe chuckled and replied, “That’s great that you prayed, but I don’t think God really cares that much about track and field.”
I paused for a moment and then softly responded, “You’re right! I don’t think He cares very much about track at all, but I know He cares about me.”
As I walked away, I felt the same peace return to my heart that I had felt before my race. I knew Heavenly Father was confirming what I had just told Joe—that He did care about me—and what I had said was true. I thanked Heavenly Father for that assurance. Knowing I was loved by Heavenly Father was the best feeling I had ever felt, even better than winning a race!

On April 1, the paper mill was temporarily shut down. I was reading a pamphlet called The Plan of Salvation when I began to feel a certainty that what I was reading was true. The Holy Ghost was bearing witness, making everything clear to me. I knew that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that the Church was true. I was crying. I had found something so precious. I wanted to tell my co-workers, but they would not understand. I went home early and found Karen at my home. “I know that the plan of salvation is true,” I told her, “and I want to be baptized.” She arranged for the missionaries to teach me.
The following day, I had my first discussion with Elder Johnson and Elder Barangan. I had such a strong desire to be baptized that I went to their home very early the next morning. When I told them of my desire, Elder Johnson told me that to be baptized I must obey the Word of Wisdom and attend church. I said, “I started obeying the Word of Wisdom when I saw the filmstrip, and I have attended the church several times.” They taught me three more discussions. Then on Easter Sunday, 7 April 1985, I was baptized. I felt that this was the very moment I had waited for since I was born.
That day was also Fast Sunday. I fasted, shared my testimony in sacrament meeting, and paid my tithing for the first time. After sharing my testimony, I had an even stronger conviction that I had made the right decision. I felt complete—no longer drifting, but with sure direction. I know that the Spirit bore witness to me.
Since my baptism, I have served a mission and have been an ordinance worker in the Manila Philippines Temple.
I feel so blessed to have the gospel in my life. I know that the Book of Mormon I rescued from the trash is the book that rescued me.

I learned a little about being fair dinkum and being committed by playing rugby. I learned that when I played my hardest, when I gave my all, my enjoyment of the game was greatest.
My favorite year of rugby was the year after high school. The team of which I was a member was both talented and committed. We were the champion team that year. However, one day we were to play a lowly ranked team, and after the game we all had dates to take to the big, annual college dance. I thought that because this would be an easy game, I should try to protect myself from injury so I would be able to enjoy the dance fully. In that game, we were not as committed in the hard contacts as we might have been, and we lost. To make things worse, I ended the match with a very swollen, fat lip that did not enhance my appearance for my big date. Perhaps I needed to learn something.
Lessons were learned from this parable of the fat lip and the broken jaw. Despite my memories of unsatisfied cravings for solid food during the six weeks when I could ingest only liquids, I feel no regrets about my broken jaw because it resulted from my giving my all. But I do have regrets about the fat lip because it symbolized my holding back.

I recently visited with a woman who has been battling a life-threatening disease for over two years. She indicated that prior to her illness, her days were filled with activities such as cleaning her house to perfection and filling it with beautiful furnishings. She visited her hairdresser twice a week and spent money and time each month adding to her wardrobe. Her grandchildren were invited to visit infrequently, for she was always concerned that what she considered her precious possessions might be broken or otherwise ruined by tiny and careless hands.

And then she received the shocking news that her mortal life was in jeopardy and that she might have very limited time left here. She said that at the moment she heard the doctor’s diagnosis, she knew immediately that she would spend whatever time she had remaining with her family and friends and with the gospel at the center of her life, for these represented what was most precious to her.

When the 23-year-old Heber J. Grant was installed as president of the Tooele Stake, he told the Saints that he believed the gospel was true. President Joseph F. Smith, a counselor in the First Presidency, inquired, “Heber, you said you believe the gospel with all your heart, … but you did not bear your testimony that you know it is true. Don’t you know absolutely that this gospel is true?”
Heber answered, “I do not.” Joseph F. Smith then turned to John Taylor, the President of the Church, and said, “I am in favor of undoing this afternoon what we did this morning. I do not think any man should preside over a stake who has not a perfect and abiding knowledge of the divinity of this work.”
President Taylor replied, “Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, [Heber] knows it just as well as you do. The only thing that he does not know is that he does know it.”
Within a few weeks that testimony was realized, and young Heber J. Grant shed tears of gratitude for the perfect, abiding, and absolute testimony that came into his life.

Peter Jeppson took the gasoline pump hose out of his tank and with a quick twist of his wrist, secured the tank cap. It was late Saturday night, and he had stopped for gasoline on his way home from his date. He was still thinking of his best friend’s news—a mission call. Peter, himself, would be sending in his own papers in just a few weeks.
As Peter drove through an intersection into the traffic on the main highway leading into Boise, Idaho, his car smashed head-on into another. On impact, the windshield of his car was knocked out and shattered on the street. The full gas tank located in the front of his rear-engined car burst.
Gas sloshed up the hood right through the open window catching me right in the eyes, covering me and the inside of the car completely. Somehow flames were ignited, and the car burst into a blazing fire. It was then that some people who were passing by saw the accident and quickly stopped. Three men were able to get close enough to my car to open the door. The flames were two times as high as the car. They couldn’t find me because the flames were so intense. They threw their coats in the open car door to cover the flames until they could see my hand. The three of them grabbed my hand and pulled me from the wreckage. They rolled me over and over to put out the fire.
Peter had borrowed his brother’s thick, Scottish wool sweater for his date that night. The trunk of his body and his arms down to the wrists, the areas covered by the sweater, were the only parts not burned. It was the fact that he was wearing this sweater that saved his life.
In 1965, Peter was living in his hometown of Boise, Idaho, preparing for a mission like many of his friends. The day of the accident changed all that. He was forced into an experience that would test him to the limit. And it was his triumph over adversity that changed his life.

In a stake conference in Campinas, Brazil, I enjoyed a soul-restoring experience of listening to the gifted, able, and charming president of the stake Relief Society, Sister Vilma Figuereda. She told of the great excitement and personal revelation she received regarding the truthfulness of the Church when she first heard its message from the missionaries. She was literally twice born, with energy, conviction, and a desire to tell all of her acquaintances and others of the healing and sanctifying message of the gospel. She walked over so many cobblestones and on so many sidewalks that she would wear out a pair of shoes each month. Her husband, at that time not a member of the Church but concerned about the many demands upon the limited resources of the family, asked her, “Couldn’t the Church at least buy you a pair of shoes?” The soles of her shoes were worn thin, but the inner soul of her being was fully restored.

Jason’s 13-year-old brother, Alex, has autism. That means he has a difficult time dealing with changes and interacting with others. “He’s smart, but he thinks slowly,” Jason explains. “He’s gentle and softhearted. He usually gives smiles and hugs.” But he can also get upset, so Jason has learned how to calm him down, and when to get help from an adult. He has also helped Alex learn to say “sorry” or “excuse me,” because sometimes he will eat too fast and burp, or bump into people without meaning to.

The group had arrived in Mount Watson’s neighborhood, but the trek to the summit would begin the next day, after dinner and a good night’s rest. What the young ladies hadn’t counted on was rain—buckets of it. Maybe the mountain wanted to see how sincere they were about the climb. “The rain came while we were trying to get our dinner. It put out our fire and everything. Soggy macaroni, soggy everything,” said 15-year-old Becky Thomas. “But it was good, wasn’t it?” laughed, Suanne, her 17-year-old sister.
There were the inevitable problems of leaky tents, soaked sleeping bags, and dripping clothes. Luckily, Bishop Thomas, who had been rained out once on a similar trip, had hauled along a box of plastic garbage sacks. A large face hole punched in one corner transformed a sack into a makeshift rain coat and offered some protection until dinner was done. (To avoid danger, the use of the plastic bags was carefully supervised.) Later that evening, when one tent was flooded, those in well-pitched shelters courteously doubled up so that everyone could be dry and warm. There were also the usual sleeping struggles of avoiding roots, pointed rocks, and bumps in the ground, but eventually everyone managed to doze off.
The next day the girls left their backpacks behind, carrying with them only canteens and crackers and cheese for lunch, and mounted the assault on the peak. As the elevation increased, forests gave way to scattered trees, trees gave place to shrubbery, and finally, there was nothing to climb but barren, broken rock.
“For safety’s sake, we have a system—we keep talking to each other and keep each other aware of where we are,” Sister Visker said. “That way, if loose rocks fall, we’re able to give warning and get out of the way.”
“It was hard climbing,” said 16-year-old RaLene Neal. “Sometimes we were on our hands and knees.”
“But we had our fun, too,” 17-year-old Shelly Michelsen wrote in her journal. “We took turns sliding down a glacier and had a super time. Then we pushed on along the ridge until we reached our goal. I sat down as close to the edge as I dared and, like the others, looked in all directions. A cool breeze was blowing around my hot face, but I felt calm and restful. We were so filled with the beauty of our surroundings—the rippling lakes, the pine forests, mountains in all directions, even out into Wyoming. I felt very in tune with my Father. I thought of how he must have felt when he looked over all he created and saw that it was good.”
“One of the men in the ward told us before we left that it couldn’t be done, that we couldn’t climb to the top of Mount Watson,” Becky Palmer, 15, said. “So when we got there we felt like we had achieved the impossible.”
“I thought,” Shelly continued, “that even though we’re not always up in the mountains, we can still have the same feeling, the same reverence for God’s work. I think life with its hardships is a big mountain, but if we keep at it, there’s a time when we’ll reach the top and look down at what we’ve done, and we’ll know that it’s good, too.”
Maria Lecon, 15, said she was “most impressed with the spirit we felt up there. I knew that the Lo.”
For Edie Coats, 17, it was a time of gratitude. “We just moved here from Virginia, and I was a little bit scared. But the first Sunday, everyone was so friendly to me. They were coming on this trip the next Saturday, and they wanted me along! I think by coming on the trip, I really got to know the girls in my ward.”
Most of the girls kept journals of their experiences and feelings, and there on the mountaintop, the group paused and wrote poems. “I felt like every poem was sort of a journal in itself,” Shelly said, “because it came from the heart and described a special time in our lives.” At a morning meeting the next day, the young ladies read their verses to each other.
Of course, the slide down the snowbanks left a pleasant memory, too. “We used the same garbage sacks we had used before in the rain as ’sleds,’” said Rachel Palmer, 17. “The glacier was less slick at the bottom—it looked steeper than it was. But a couple of times we did have to use our feet for brakes.”
Dinner that night and breakfast the following morning were cooked and served in number 10 cans, the main “pan” carried on the excursion. “We did bring utensils and a skillet or two, but the large cans really helped keep weight in the packs to a minimum,” Sister Visker explained. Around the campfire the girls each shared one positive thing they had learned about someone else since the trip began and also drew names to see who they would be the “wood elf” for. Wood elves do mysterious, anonymous kind deeds for someone else in a camping group.
The next day was to have been spent “puddle jumping” (visiting one lake after another). “But when we got to the first one, Wall Lake,” said Marlene Neal, 15, “we liked it so well that we stayed.” Activities at the lake included cliff diving, fishing, and swimming.
“We had to check it out and make sure it was safe before we started cliff diving,” Marlene explained. “We had to make sure there were no rocks on the bottom and that the water was deep enough. And an adult supervisor trained in lifeguarding and first aid had to be there all the time, too.”
At first, the divers were scaring the fish away, so the swimmers moved to another location. Then one of those fishing scared the fish away! “Sister Visker helped me get a little fake fly way out away from the shore,” Maria said. “As soon as it landed in the water, a big fish came along. It scared me, so I threw a rock at it.”
Marlene also had her problems fishing: “I’d hook the grass at the bottom and all my lures and sinkers would get torn off. But it was still fun.”
The various activities of the day left the girls tired, but not too worn out to express their feelings during a testimony meeting. They read their favorite scriptures to each other, spoke again of their love for nature, for the gospel, and for the Lord, and talked about the lessons they had learned on their trip: lessons of perseverance, sacrifice, relaxation, and sharing the load.
“It’s unbelievable the feeling you get on top of a mountain,” said Sandy Kay, 17. “If you have an open mind and a humble heart, it can really help straighten out your priorities and help you see the reason why we’re here.”
The next morning the girls had loaded up their gear and they were on the trail home. But they weren’t rushing away. Somehow they wanted to linger just a bit longer, savoring the strength of the hills they had learned to love.

It was a busy day in our Costa Mesa, California, home. But then, with ten children and one on the way, every day was a bit hectic. On this particular day, however, I was having trouble doing even routine chores—all because of one little boy.
Len, who was three at the time, was on my heels no matter where I went. Whenever I stopped to do something and turned around, I would trip over him. Several times I patiently suggested fun activities to keep him occupied.
“Wouldn’t you like to play on the swing set?” I asked again. But he simply smiled an innocent smile and said, “Oh, that’s all right, Mommy. I’d rather be in here with you.” Then he continued to bounce happily along behind me.
After stepping on his toes for the fifth time, I began to lose my patience and insisted that he go outside and play with the other children.
When I asked him why he was acting this way, he looked up at me with sweet green eyes and said, “Well, Mommy, in Primary my teacher told me to walk in Jesus’ footsteps. But I can’t see him, so I’m walking in yours.”
I gathered Len in my arms and held him close. Tears of love and humility spilled over from the prayer that grew in my heart—a prayer of thanks for the simple yet beautiful perspective of a three-year-old boy. His words reminded me of my vital role as mother.
It is sobering to realize that I am a crucial link between my children and the Savior. But I rejoice in knowing that since a mother is a partner with God, I am in a position to receive guidance from him, for he truly cares and wants all of us to walk in heavenly footsteps.

Shortly after our marriage in the Salt Lake Temple, Jim and I found ourselves living in a rented cottage on the Oregon coast. Jim was a topographic engineer for the government, in charge of checking and correcting a map of the Oregon coastline. Each morning he would leave with another engineer to continue the work of the previous day. His work was difficult because the coast was heavily forested.
One evening as I was about to start dinner, a strong impression came into my mind that my dinner preparations were not important. Jim would not be home for dinner that night. Another thought followed: Jim was in trouble and needed my help!
I did not hear a voice, but the message came as clearly into my mind as if it had been spoken. I had to help him, but where was he? He worked each day along the coast, but I had no idea where he was working that day. I felt impelled to get in the car and drive to the main highway, but in which direction should I turn? With only slight hesitation, I felt that I should turn south. I then passed many side roads, any one of which could have been the area of Jim’s work.
I was impressed to leave the highway and follow one of the single-lane roads. It was raining, and after a mile or two the road became a muddy trail. I decided I had better turn around and head back. It was getting dark, and I thought, “It was silly of me to have come.”
But no sooner had I turned onto the highway than I came upon two tired, despondent engineers, so covered with mud that no one else would have wanted to pick them up. Jim and his co-worker told me that their truck had become stuck in a mud hole. They had tried to free it but finally left it and hiked through dense undergrowth back to the main highway.
“How did you know where we were?” they wondered, relieved that I had found them. My relief was equal to theirs as I explained how I had been guided by the Spirit.
As Jim and I knelt in prayer that evening, we gave thanks for the influence of the Holy Ghost, which had come to me in answer to my husband’s prayers for help.

Illustrations by Shauna Mooney Kawasaki
Matt: I don’t understand what he’s talking about.
Mom: It can be hard at your age. But if you listen carefully, you’ll understand something from each talk.
Dad: In every conference there seems to be at least one message just for me. Maybe there will be for you too.
Later—Matt: I did understand some things, but I don’t think any of it was just for me.
Mom: You know, when we listen to conference, the messages don’t come just from the speakers. The Spirit can speak to us too.
Dad: That’s right. It isn’t only what we understand that counts. It’s what we feel.
That evening—Matt: When I listened to President Hinckley, I didn’t understand everything he said. But I had a good feeling that he really is a prophet.
Dad: That was a conference message just for you—one you’ll remember your whole life.