Gospel Story Finder

Eventually, Cathy “adopted” a grandfather, a friend of her grandmother.
“My grandfather died when I was very young, so my grandmother started dating Waldo,” said Cathy. “They’d come out to my house to visit, and I enjoyed his friendship. When my grandmother died, he sort of got out of circulation and didn’t have any companionship. My grandmother had more or less taken care of him and fixed him supper each day. So Waldo and I kept in touch, and I decided to adopt him. I’d call and see how he was doing, stop by to see him, visit him on holidays, and take him treats. Now he’s in a rest home, and we keep in close touch.”

The Stevenson family lived in Japan for several years. In 2004 Elder Stevenson was called as president of the Japan Nagoya Mission. Following his call to the Seventy in 2008, he served as a counselor and president in the Asia North Area. He was serving as Area President in 2011 when a major earthquake struck off the coast of northern Japan, triggering a massive tsunami that killed thousands. That experience proved to be a defining moment in his life.
Elder Stevenson helped shape the response of the Church, which provided food, supplies, support, and longer-term assistance.
“That was a manifestation of the Church of Jesus Christ filling one of its divinely appointed responsibilities of caring for the poor and needy,” he recalls. He said it was a sacred privilege to “minister, and bless, and organize assistance.”

May I share a brief but painful moment from my own inadequate efforts as a father?
Early in our married life my young family and I were laboring through graduate school at a university in New England. Pat was the Relief Society president in our ward, and I was serving in our stake presidency. I was going to school full-time and teaching half-time. We had two small children then, with little money and lots of pressures. In fact, our life was about like yours.
One evening I came home from long hours at school, feeling the proverbial weight of the world on my shoulders. Everything seemed to be especially demanding and discouraging and dark. I wondered if the dawn would ever come. Then, as I walked into our small student apartment, there was an unusual silence in the room.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked.
“Matthew has something he wants to tell you,” Pat said.
“Matt, what do you have to tell me?” He was quietly playing with his toys in the corner of the room, trying very hard not to hear me. “Matt,” I said a little louder, “do you have something to tell me?”
He stopped playing, but for a moment didn’t look up. Then these two enormous, tear-filled brown eyes turned toward me, and with the pain only a five-year-old can know, he said, “I didn’t mind Mommy tonight, and I spoke back to her.” With that he burst into tears, and his entire little body shook with grief. A childish indiscretion had been noted, a painful confession had been offered, the growth of a five-year-old was continuing, and loving reconciliation could have been wonderfully underway.
Everything might have been just terrific—except for me. If you can imagine such an idiotic thing, I lost my temper. It wasn’t that I lost it with Matt—it was with a hundred and one other things on my mind; but he didn’t know that, and I wasn’t disciplined enough to admit it. He got the whole load of bricks.
I told him how disappointed I was and how much more I thought I could have expected from him. I sounded like the parental pygmy I was. Then I did what I had never done before in his life—I told him that he was to go straight to bed and that I would not be in to say his prayers with him or to tell him a bedtime story. Muffling his sobs, he obediently went to his bedside, where he knelt—alone—to say his prayers. Then he stained his little pillow with tears his father should have been wiping away.
If you think the silence upon my arrival was heavy, you should have felt it now. Pat did not say a word. She didn’t have to. I felt terrible!
Later, as we knelt by our own bed, my feeble prayer for blessings upon my family fell back on my ears with a horrible, hollow ring. I wanted to get up off my knees right then and go to Matt and ask his forgiveness, but he was long since peacefully asleep.
My relief was not so soon coming; but finally I fell asleep and began to dream, which I seldom do. I dreamed Matt and I were packing two cars for a move. For some reason his mother and baby sister were not present. As we finished I turned to him and said, “Okay, Matt, you drive one car and I’ll drive the other.”
This five-year-old very obediently crawled up on the seat and tried to grasp the massive steering wheel. I walked over to the other car and started the motor. As I began to pull away, I looked to see how my son was doing. He was trying—oh, how he was trying. He tried to reach the pedals, but he couldn’t. He was also turning knobs and pushing buttons, trying to start the motor. He could scarcely be seen over the dashboard, but there staring out at me again were those same immense, tear-filled, beautiful brown eyes. As I pulled away, he cried out, “Daddy, don’t leave me. I don’t know how to do it. I am too little.” And I drove away.
A short time later, driving down that desert road in my dream, I suddenly realized in one stark, horrifying moment what I had done. I slammed my car to a stop, threw open the door, and started to run as fast as I could. I left car, keys, belongings, and all—and I ran. The pavement was so hot it burned my feet, and tears blinded my straining effort to see this child somewhere on the horizon. I kept running, praying, pleading to be forgiven and to find my boy safe and secure.
As I rounded a curve nearly ready to drop from physical and emotional exhaustion, I saw the unfamiliar car I had left Matt to drive. It was pulled carefully off to the side of the road, and he was laughing and playing nearby. An older man was with him, playing and responding to his games. Matt saw me and cried out something like, “Hi, Dad. We’re having fun.” Obviously he had already forgiven and forgotten my terrible transgression against him.
But I dreaded the older man’s gaze, which followed my every move. I tried to say “Thank you,” but his eyes were filled with sorrow and disappointment. I muttered an awkward apology and the stranger said simply, “You should not have left him alone to do this difficult thing. It would not have been asked of you.”
With that, the dream ended, and I shot upright in bed. My pillow was now stained, whether with perspiration or tears I do not know. I threw off the covers and ran to the little metal camp cot that was my son’s bed. There on my knees and through my tears I cradled him in my arms and spoke to him while he slept. I told him that every dad makes mistakes but that they don’t mean to. I told him it wasn’t his fault I had had a bad day. I told him that when boys are five or fifteen, dads sometimes forget and think they are fifty. I told him that I wanted him to be a small boy for a long, long time, because all too soon he would grow up and be a man and wouldn’t be playing on the floor with his toys when I came home. I told him that I loved him and his mother and his sister more than anything in the world and that whatever challenges we had in life we would face them together. I told him that never again would I withhold my affection or my forgiveness from him, and never, I prayed, would he withhold them from me. I told him I was honored to be his father and that I would try with all my heart to be worthy of such a great responsibility.

President Young personally engaged in preaching and baptizing in the Manchester and Preston areas while he continued his various administrative and publishing activities. He had hired the huge Carpenter’s Hall in Manchester for meetings for one year and mentions preaching there “to an attentive congregation of about 1,500.”30 He also tells of organizing the priesthood in Manchester to gather on Sunday mornings and go out street preaching. This provided about 40 “preaching stations,” both for teaching and for notifying gatherers about the regular meetings in Carpenter’s Hall, a procedure that is a regular and effective Mormon proselyting tool even today. But Brigham didn’t just send the elders out. As he recorded, one Sunday in November he “went to the Priesthood meeting in the morning and felt impressed to tell the Brethren to go home. The police, who had been instructed to arrest all street preachers that morning [because of Methodist complaints against the Mormons], took up about twenty, who all proved to be Methodists. When the magistrate learned they were not ‘Mormons,’ they were dismissed.”31

But think of the day when you must know what God would say and what He would do. It has already come for us all—wherever you are in your calling in the priesthood. I grew up in the mission field in the eastern United States during World War II. The members of the Church lived far apart, and there was strict gas rationing. I was the only deacon in the branch. The members gave their fast-offering envelopes to the branch president when they came to fast and testimony meeting in our home.

When I was 13 years old, we moved to Utah to live in a large ward. I remember my first assignment to walk to homes to collect fast offerings. I looked at the name on one of the envelopes I was given and noticed the last name was the same as one of the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. So I knocked on the door with confidence. The man opened the door, looked at me, scowled, and then barked at me to go away. I went away with my head down.

That was nearly 70 years ago, but I still remember the feeling I had that day on the doorstep that there was something I was supposed to have said or done. If only I had prayed in faith as I went out that day, I might have been inspired to stand a moment longer on that doorstep, smile, and say something like: “It is good to meet you. Thank you for what you and your family have given in the past. I look forward to seeing you next month.”

Had I said and done that, he might have been even more irritated—and even offended. But I know now how I might have felt. Rather than feeling sadness or failure as I walked away, I might have felt the soft commendation in my mind and heart: “Well done.”

All of us must speak and act in the name of God in moments when our unaided judgment will not be enough without inspiration. Those moments can come upon us when there is not time to make preparation. That has happened to me often. It did many years ago in a hospital when a father told me and my companion that the doctors had told him that his critically injured three-year-old daughter would die within minutes. As I placed my hands on the one spot on her head not covered with bandages, I had to know, as God’s servant, what He would do and say.

The words came to my mind and my lips that she would live. The doctor standing by me snorted in disgust and asked me to get out of the way. I walked out of that hospital room with a feeling of peace and love. The little girl lived and walked down the aisle into a sacrament meeting on my last day in that city. I still remember the joy and satisfaction I felt from what I had said and done in the Lord’s service for that little girl and her family.

The difference in my feelings at the hospital and the sadness I felt as I walked away from that door as a deacon came from what I had learned about the connection of prayer to priesthood power. As a deacon, I had not yet learned that the power to speak and act in God’s name requires revelation and that to have it when we need it requires praying and working in faith for the companionship of the Holy Ghost.

On the evening before I went to that door for fast offerings, I had said my prayers at bedtime. But for weeks and months before that phone call came from the hospital, I had followed a pattern of prayer and made the effort that President Joseph F. Smith taught will allow God to give us the inspiration necessary for us to have power in the priesthood. He put it simply:

One experience that truly humbled me happened on my mission. I think most missionaries grapple with feelings of inadequacy while trying to bring people to Jesus Christ. On my mission, I spent hours a day just trying to find someone to teach and was rejected over and over. I didn’t feel successful. I didn’t feel that my efforts were enough. Eventually, I began to feel that I was not enough.
While it might not seem like humility was what I needed, when I explained my feelings to my mission president, he helped me see that part of my problem was thinking I was exempt from the problems that missionaries all over the world face. But I am not the first missionary to feel rejected, and I certainly won’t be the last.
Somehow I had convinced myself that my difficulties were entirely my own fault, despite the fact that some of the best missionaries in history—like the original Twelve Apostles, the sons of Mosiah, and Alma the Younger—have faced far worse rejection and persecution than I ever have.
Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I began to be able to feel that I was standing shoulder to shoulder with Jesus Christ in my struggles. And when I felt ashamed of my imperfect efforts, I remembered what President Jeffrey R. Holland, Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, taught: “The Atonement [of Christ] will carry the missionaries perhaps even more importantly than it will carry the investigators. When you struggle, when you are rejected, … you are standing with the best life this world has ever known, the only pure and perfect life ever lived.”
I still look back on this experience when I need to remember to be humble and trust in the Lord.

There is never a situation where good manners are optional. Before his mission, my son would say to me, “It’s okay. I don’t have to have good manners here when I’m just with my friends.” Or my daughter would say, “We don’t have to have good manners here because it’s just us at home. When I go out I’ll do okay.” Then the whole family would be out to dinner and they both would be eating like slobs. I’d say, “I thought you two said that when we go out to dinner you’d have good table manners.” All they could say was “Oops!” They got caught by their bad habits. Good manners need to be practiced.

Let me next mention an Idaho family, Jeff and Joy Underwood, the parents of six children. You may recall, as vividly as I do, last July when it was reported on the television that their daughter Jeralee, age eleven, had gone out to collect for her paper route. Jeralee never returned, “not that day, nor the next day, nor the next, nor ever” to her family in Idaho (see James E. Faust, “Five Loaves and Two Fishes,” Ensign, May 1994, p. 6). After two thousand joined in the search, eventually Jeralee was found, abducted and brutally murdered. How does a family cope with this kind of tragedy? These are faithful members of the Church. Is that what you call joy, a state of happiness? The parents thanked the searchers and offered forgiveness.

I saw this trust in the Underwood family. Sister Underwood said,

I have learned a lot about love this week, and I also know there is a lot of hate. I have looked at the love and want to feel that love, and not the hate. We can forgive. [Faust, Five Loaves, p. 7]

Now, do you have this much trust in the Lord? Could you say that if you had just lost a child to a violent murder, and could you make that statement in the same week?

He blessed the grounds that a sweet and peaceful influence will be there:
And that all who come on these blessed and holy grounds will feel it whether they are members or non-members. This blessing has been fulfilled many, many times.

I answered a phone call at the Temple one day and took an appointment from a brother in Europe who together with his wife were both in their 70's and wanted to come to the Temple in Laie to be sealed. I was interested to know why they would come so far when there were closer Temples to them. He replied that a few years earlier, he and his wife went on a world tour. Hawaii and the Polynesian Cultural Center were both on their itinerary. At PCC they boarded the tram to the Visitors' Center and their lives were changed forever. The Spirit of the Lord touched them there, on the grounds, and it was not long afterwards they joined the Church. They wanted to come back and be sealed here at what is a very special place for them. They did come and it was a great day for us in the Temple.

Cleaning up after a hurricane sounded like it might be fun. That’s what the Boy Scouts of Troop 304 in the Athens Georgia First and Second wards thought when they heard about the hurricane hitting the coast of their neighboring state, South Carolina.
Jacob Keith decided to take on the assistance effort as an Eagle project. At first Jacob was a little hesitant. He said, “I’m not much for calling people I don’t know, but I got used to it after a while. I was surprised how helpful people were. When I called the Scouts, I didn’t think they would want to spend their whole weekend in South Carolina working. But they said yes.”
The group ended up unloading semitrailers into a warehouse. When the boxes were light, they made a game out of it. When the goods were heavy, like the load of doors they had to unload, they just buckled down and got the job done.
The most impressive thing was that the project was planned and carried out completely by the Scouts themselves. Scoutmaster Scott Johnson said, “The relief team thought I was one of the boys. They spoke on the phone to Jacob, so they went to him to make decisions and organize the effort.”
The troop spent two weekends helping distribute relief goods.

Three weeks after our fifth child was born, my husband was called to be the bishop of our newly divided ward. Our stake president, in interviewing us, had expressed his concern about our young family, but he emphasized that Larry had been called by the Lord to this position. My own concerns diminished as we felt the Spirit’s confirmation.
The next few weeks were exhilarating and exhausting for all of us as we experienced what being a bishop’s family meant and as our new son Jeffrey assumed his role in our family life. After the excitement of being a new mother and a new bishop’s wife started to wear off, I realized how tired I was both physically and mentally, and I found myself not coping very well.
It was then that Sister Camilla Kimball helped me. That year Sister Kimball was scheduled to address a Brigham Young University stake Relief Society, and my sister-in-law, the stake Relief Society president, invited my mother-in-law and me to attend. Sister Kimball based her talk on questions members of the stake had submitted to her. Among many others, she responded to the question, “How do you manage your problem-solving effectively when your feelings get hurt, and how do you act instead of react?” Her honest reply was, “I have mostly learned to keep my mouth shut.”
My spirit tuned in on that remark. I knew I was listening to someone who had been where I was, that she too had known the gnawing feeling of loneliness and the bruised sensitivities that sometimes accompany being the wife of someone busily engaged in activities that largely excluded her.
Sister Kimball talked about how to overcome those feelings—the same feelings I was struggling with. She described how she learned to carry her own weight and how she had found that she had to get busy in the Church and simply be happy herself. Then she said, “There is no more demanding job in the Church than being a bishop,” adding that she had great empathy for the wives of bishops, especially those with young families.
After the meeting, my sister-in-law introduced her mother and me to Sister Kimball as she escorted this dear lady to her car. The crowd had waned, and we were standing face to face. I told Sister Kimball that I truly appreciated her remarks about pulling one’s own weight, that she had helped me immensely. I explained that my husband had been a bishop for just two months and that we had five children from ages three months to ten years.
At that point, Camilla Kimball drew me to her and embraced me. As I felt her spirit and her great love, I knew that I was as close to a celestial being as I ever had been in my life. Then as we parted, she stepped back and said, “And you’re every bit as important as he is, and don’t you forget it!”
I went home that night renewed. Somehow Sundays didn’t seem so long and lonely anymore, my task as a bishop’s wife didn’t seem quite so formidable, and I was thrilled to be married to this wonderful man whom the Lord had called to be bishop. My own identity had shed its fuzzy edges and become sharply defined in my own mind once again.

I would like to share a personal experience from my life that illustrates this principle. In my early youth, pride and peer influence began creeping into my life as it does with many adolescents. I began to take offense easily and was quick to anger. In the 1980's the phrase "burn'd ya" was a way to shown how clever you were at putting others down in a way that made them feel frazzled and unable to defend themselves against your clever criticism. Being good at "burning" people fed one's pride and served to build an increasingly rebellious nature. I succumbed to these temptations and at times responded in hurtful ways to my parents and siblings. Despite this great weakness, I had developed a pattern of consistent personal scripture study and prayer which allowed the Holy Ghost to prick my conscience often. Each time I would get angry and arrogant I would feel disappointed in myself. I finally vowed with intense personal commitment that I would quit it.

Overcoming this weakness, however, was not that easy. Day after day I would try to control my anger by sheer will power. Day after day I would falter. My personal prayers began to include petitions to the Lord to help me with this weakness and these petitions became more and more sincere as they continued for perhaps 3 or even 4 years. By the time I was approaching 16 years of age I still hadn't completely overcome this weakness. Sure I had made some progress but came to the frightening realization that although I was doing my very best it just wasn't enough. I began feeling helpless against this obstacle and knew that it stood in the way of my exaltation. My prayers then began sincerely acknowledging that I just couldn't fix it and that I desperately needed his help. I humbly began asking for a miracle.

What occurred throughout the next months happened quietly and almost imperceptibly until one day I was in a situation that normally would have offended me and made me angry. I recall saying to myself "Wow, I don't feel offended or angry at all". When this continued month after month I realized that a miracle had occurred for me. Not only did I not get angry but I had become very patient -- my weakness had been turned into a strength. I humbly witness to you that it was the grace of my Savior that performed this transformation. I testify that "it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do."[20]

Let me give you an example. A mother was diagnosed with cancer. Soon she began treatment, and immediately, the Relief Society sisters went to work, planning how to best help with meals, transportation to medical appointments, and other support. They visited her regularly, providing cheerful companionship. At the same time, the Melchizedek Priesthood quorum sprang into action. They provided labor in adding a remodeled bedroom and bathroom to make it easier to care for the sick sister. The young men lent their hands and backs to participate in that significant effort. And the young women got involved: they cheerfully arranged to faithfully walk the dog each day. As time passed, the ward continued their service, adding and adapting where necessary. It was clearly a labor of love, each member giving of him or herself, unitedly showing caring in individual ways that blessed not only the suffering sister but each member of her family.

After a valiant effort, the sister finally succumbed to the cancer and was laid to rest. Did the ward breathe a sigh of relief and consider the job well done and well over? No, the young women continue to walk the dog daily, the priesthood quorums continue to minister to the father and his family, and the Relief Society sisters continue to reach out in love to ascertain strengths and needs. Brothers and sisters, this is ministering—this is loving as the Savior does!

I was a missionary in Seoul, Korea, and had just been transferred to a new area. The bustling city of millions of people was still overwhelming, and my Korean was far from fluent, but I knew I was where the Lord wanted me to be.
One day my companion and I had the blessing of meeting a member who hadn’t attended church for years. Her father had recently passed away, and she was in great need of spiritual and emotional comfort. We visited her at home, but I was not able to understand much of the conversation.
One night at about 3:00 a.m. our telephone rang. When I answered the phone, I couldn’t understand what the woman was saying at first. She was upset, but I had no idea how to help or what to say.
I began to pray silently. As I prayed I recognized the woman’s voice and realized it was the less-active sister we had recently met. Though I couldn’t completely understand her, I felt she was lonely and needed to know she was loved. But how could I tell her? I couldn’t find the words in English, much less in Korean.
Suddenly I remembered that I had memorized the words to the hymn “I Am a Child of God” (Hymns, no. 301) in Korean. After the sister stopped speaking, I slowly asked if we could sing the hymn together. She said yes. As we sang I felt a wonderful feeling of peace and comfort. It was as if Heavenly Father were holding both of us, reminding us that He loved us and would always be there when we needed Him.
After we finished singing, the sister told me that she would be all right, and we said good night. I walked back into the bedroom, amazed at the Spirit that still lingered in my heart. I was so grateful to know that when a child of God calls for help on a dark night, Father in Heaven will always be there to answer.
Diantha Smith, Utah, USA

As a new mission president, I arrived at our assigned mission with great anticipation of missionary meetings being filled with the Spirit like I remembered as a young missionary. But after completing our first round of zone conferences, I was disappointed. The Spirit was not as abundant as I had hoped, and some missionaries seemed unengaged.
As my wife and I pondered and prayed about how to invite a greater spirit into our lives and the lives of the missionaries, we were led to focus our teaching on the doctrine of Christ and its power to change us. As we pursued this course over the following months, several missionaries came to me sharing regrets about past behaviors and expressing a desire to be more diligent in keeping mission rules and living the gospel.
President Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015), President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, frequently taught: “True doctrine, understood, changes attitudes and behavior. The study of the doctrines of the gospel will improve behavior quicker than a study of behavior will improve behavior.”1 I knew this before, but following this experience with my missionaries, I had a much greater appreciation for the power and virtue of the word of God to change hearts (see Alma 31:5). As our mission progressed and we continued to focus on teaching doctrine, their hearts changed and so did ours. Because we understood doctrine, we understood the “why” of obedience, not simply the “what” and “how.”

Properly handled, a balloon is a perfectly safe thing to “hang around” in, and it isn’t nearly as scary as it looks. “I’m sometimes afraid of heights, so I was worried about going up,” one priest says. “The day of the first flight I climbed into the basket and was checking everything to make sure it was shipshape and wondering when we were going to launch and what it would feel like, when all of a sudden I noticed that we were about a hundred feet up already. I looked down and I wasn’t even afraid.”

Many times throughout my life I have felt prompted that I should pursue my interests in art and develop my abilities. As a result of these promptings and as a result of careful and prayerful consideration, Jennifer and I agreed that I should pursue graduate studies in art after completing my degree at BYU. When the time came I researched numerous programs across the country, pondered options, fasted, prayed, and selected several programs to which I submitted applications. Given all of the factors, this was not an easy task, but we were excited about the possibilities.

After waiting several months I started to receive letters from the various programs I had applied to. Good news: I had options! But Jennifer and I then faced the dilemma of making a decision. We carefully reviewed the pros and cons of the individual programs and we prayed, earnestly seeking divine guidance.

On one occasion during this period of time I walked into an office here on campus and noticed on a desk a letter with the logo for The Ohio State University. Immediately a distinct thought popped into my head: “You should apply there.” I hadn’t previously considered Ohio State. I thought about it for a second, but it was quite late in the year to apply to programs, and given that I already had offers from other schools, I dismissed the thought.

Within a few days of that experience I was walking down a hall here in the Harris Fine Arts Center and saw a poster. You guessed it—the poster featured an Ohio State logo. Again the thought immediately popped into my head: “You should apply there.” I started to get the idea, so I immediately found a computer, did a little bit of research, and, with some disappointment, discovered that the graduate application deadline for Ohio State had passed.

The following day I ran into one of my BYU professors who was—and still is—an influential mentor. He told me that he had been looking for me and explained that he had just gotten off the phone with a colleague from The Ohio State University. The colleague had called seeking recommendations for potential graduate students for his program. My mentor then explained that he had recommended me, and if interested, I should give the professor a call.

Long story short, it turns out that I made the call and things worked out very well. I was offered a most advantageous situation in an excellent art program. The lens was very clear at that moment. We accepted the offer and had a very challenging but valuable experience. I don’t know what would have happened had I attended a different school, but I did know in that moment, as I do today, that our Father in Heaven watches over us and will guide us in important things when we seek His direction.

Some weeks later I received a phone call. It was Cameron’s mother, Joyce. She was the Young Women president; my husband, Van, was the Young Men president. It was routine for her to leave messages with me.
As we spoke, she indicated that she was tying up all loose ends before Cameron’s surgery. Cameron’s surgery? I tried to think. Oh, yes, something to help his hips. The conversation ended, and I hung up the phone.
Suddenly the feeling came to me: Cameron was going to die.
I felt nauseated and weak. I went to my bedroom to pray. Was there something I should do? After praying, I felt a sense of reassurance.
Cameron had his surgery. Joyce called and reported that all had gone well. Still, I sensed something in her voice. Everything seems fine, she said.
The next day as I was trying to organize my day, the telephone rang. It was Jamie, a member of the Relief Society presidency.
“How are you?” I asked politely.
“Not very good,” she answered, as she started to cry. “Cameron passed away last night.”
I sat down.
“I just thought that you should know.”
“Thank you for calling me, Jamie,” I said. “You may never know how much this means.” I hung up the phone, then took down the picture of Jesus healing the man born blind. I wrapped it and thought of a gracious God who prepares answers to prayers before they are uttered. I wrote Cameron’s family a letter that I hoped would comfort them, then I attached it to the gift.

For most of my life, I’ve struggled with repentance. I knew it was important and that I should do it, but I didn’t fully understand it. And because it was something I didn’t do well, I felt discouraged whenever someone would emphasize its importance in a talk.
It got to the point where I even disliked hearing the word repentance because it reminded me of something I wasn’t doing. It seemed as though I was falling behind, and the longer this problem continued, the further behind I got.
Finally, I heard the following statement in general conference from then–Young Men General President Stephen W. Owen, and I began to think differently: “The joy of repentance is more than the joy of living a decent life. It’s the joy of forgiveness, of being clean again, and of drawing closer to God. Once you’ve experienced that joy, no lesser substitute will do.”1
Another general conference talk awakened in me a further desire to do better. President Russell M. Nelson said: “Whether you are diligently moving along the covenant path, have slipped or stepped from the covenant path, or can’t even see the path from where you are now, I plead with you to repent. Experience the strengthening power of daily repentance—of doing and being a little better each day.”2
As I did my best to follow this counsel, I found answers to concerns and gained a better understanding of the blessings of repentance. Yet I wondered what I still didn’t understand about repentance that was making it so hard.
As I prayed for help with repentance, I expressed to Heavenly Father that I truly wanted to change and was willing to change. I knew the Lord would help me. And indeed, He did help me change.
At first, sometimes the change wasn’t permanent and I needed to try again. But the efforts we make matter to the Lord. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught, “With the gift of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the strength of heaven to help us, we can improve, and the great thing about the gospel is we get credit for trying, even if we don’t always succeed.”4
Since gaining this understanding of repentance, I have felt more confident in my ability to follow this counsel given by President Nelson: “Nothing is more liberating, more ennobling, or more crucial to our individual progression than is a regular, daily focus on repentance. Repentance is not an event; it is a process. It is the key to happiness and peace of mind. When coupled with faith, repentance opens our access to the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”5
When I made the decision to repent better, I had no idea it would have such a far-reaching and lasting influence on my life. The blessings that have come are real. I came to realize that the feelings of discouragement I had were from the enemy of my soul, who didn’t want me to repent. I also came to realize that I was not so much always falling behind through my failure to repent as I was sometimes simply forfeiting blessings I could have received if I’d made more of an effort to do the things I could be doing.
As I have continued to do my best to repent each day, I’ve felt God’s love and direction in ways I could have scarcely imagined before. I no longer feel weighed down by sin. I have come to recognize the privilege and blessing that repentance really is. I now understand what Brother Owen said: “Once you’ve experienced [the joy of repentance], no lesser substitute will do.”

Derek Fagan, age 17, has excelled in both school and seminary, and he credits an experience he had just before he received his patriarchal blessing: “We had been talking about patriarchal blessings in seminary. I prayed and asked if I should get mine. Our stake did not have a patriarch at that time, but three days later, our new patriarch was called. I felt it was my answer. That’s when I decided for myself that the Church is true and that I would try harder to do well and choose the right. My patriarchal blessing was amazing. I carry it with me everywhere. Since early-morning seminary started, everything has been clearer. Even in school, I learn very quickly now.”
Derek became the first seminary student in Ireland to memorize all the scripture mastery scriptures. As an extra challenge, he memorized the account of the First Vision as found in Joseph Smith—History.