Gospel Story Finder

After hearing the stake patriarch speak in sacrament meeting, I felt inspired to ask my bishop for a recommend. Then the patriarch and I set a date. As I entered his house that morning, I knew I was on the right path. We told each other a little about our lives. After that, the patriarch laid his hands upon my head and began to prophesy about my life. I could feel that it was all true and that it was really God that was speaking through the patriarch. I wept. I learned many things about myself that day.
Jared Edge, 18Layton, Utah

I saw him one day,
shaking my flowers
I watched him one day,
trying to push the palm tree
I felt him one day,
pulling on my hair
I wondered one day,
why he carried away so many twigs
I laughed one day,
when he knocked my brother over
I wished one day,
that I could be as free as he,
wished that I could go where I
pleased without being seen
But then one day,
I heard him crying in my chimney
because he couldn’t
find his way home.

“When I left for school,” I’ll say, “a big lion chased me for two blocks.”
“Really?” she’ll say.
“Well,” I’ll say, “it was really Johnson’s cat. But it looked like a big lion to me for just a minute.”
“Oh,” she’ll say. “I’m glad it wasn’t a real lion.”

One day we found 2 headstones full of names, but they were buried in the ground, so we started digging and it took some time to uncover both headstones. But as I was observing what we had just done, I realised that there was a gap between those gravestones. I checked with my shoe, and there it was another huge headstone that we needed to unbury as well.

One day his father called him into his room. It was dimly lit and smelled of pain; the bedside stand groaned with glasses and bottles of pills.
“Have I ever lied to you?” his father asked.
“No.”
“Then don’t lie to me. Am I dying?”
Read the rest online in “Last Camp along the Way,” by Jack Weyland (from July 1980).

This past month, one of the missionaries who served with Sister Ballard and me in Canada shared the details of how small things can compound into near destruction unless the course is corrected. He wrote:
“When I returned from my mission, I married and went to work in the construction industry. Over the next few years we had three children, and during this time I remained active in the Church. The demands of my business became much greater, and I became more determined to do whatever it would take to succeed financially. The effects of this were felt immediately at home; but with the support of an understanding wife, we felt we could endure until things ‘picked up.’”
He went on to say that because of financial strains, his wife began working. He began working long hours and neglected his family and Church duties. His demanding work schedule left him emotionally drained and physically exhausted. He became critical of others, including his family members and Church leaders.
His letter continues:
“As my debt continued to mount, the destruction of my peace and happiness increased. The love and tenderness we once knew as husband and wife had diminished to only memories. We found character flaws in each other and began to focus on them, wounding each other over the smallest incident. I began to blame everyone but myself, taking no responsibility for failures. A great feeling of hopelessness began to fill my heart, and I felt a cloud of darkness envelop me in my desperation.
“We knew our marriage could not endure under such conditions and began to talk in terms of divorce. I decided to get some financial counseling; and after reviewing my finances, it became the joke that I was worth more dead than alive, which seemed funny and rather innocent at the time. After continuing for a few more weeks, the threat of divorce as well as the very real threat of complete financial collapse seemed only a matter of time. The innocent joke of being worth more dead than alive developed into the appearance of a very real solution. I found myself alone at home, facing the crossroads of my decision. The thought came to me to reach out to the Lord one last time. Kneeling, I wept uncontrollably as I cried to the Lord for his mercy and help in my desperate hour.
“A few minutes later, word came that my mission president was in town and wanted to see me in an hour. As I sat with you, I wanted to hide my problems as I had done from everyone else. But your questions came, asking:
“‘How are you?’
“‘Fine.’
“‘How is your wife?’
“‘Doing good.’
“‘How are the children?’
“‘Great.’
“Then came the pause, and you looked into my eyes and asked, ‘How is your business?’ I began to weep as I told you my story.
“During the course of our meeting, you asked me to make you a promise: that I would read the Book of Mormon. After committing to you that I would, you blessed me, telling me to rivet myself to the gospel and to keep the commandments. I left you knowing the Lord had heard my plea for help.”
I am grateful that the Lord answered the prayers of this young man by prompting me to do the seemingly small thing of asking to see him. I did not know of any of his problems at the time but was able to help him to once again take hold of the iron rod of the gospel to guide his life. We must never ignore or pass by the prompting of the Spirit to render service to one another.

I hold in my hand a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon. It was printed in 1830 on a hand-operated letter press at the E. B. Grandin Company in the village of Palmyra, New York.
In June of 1829, Joseph Smith, then 23 years old, called on 23-year-old Mr. Grandin in company with Martin Harris, a local farmer. Mr. Grandin had three months earlier advertised his intent to publish books. Joseph Smith provided pages of a handwritten manuscript.
If the content of the book did not doom it to remain obscure, the account of where it came from certainly would. Imagine an angel directing a teenage boy to the woods where he found buried a stone vault and a set of golden plates.
The writings on the plates were translated by use of a Urim and Thummim, which is referred to a number of times in the Old Testament and described by Hebrew scholars as an instrument “whereby the revelation was given and truth declared.”
Before the book was off the press, pages of it were stolen and printed in the local newspaper, accompanied by ridicule. Opposition was destined to excite mobs to kill the Prophet Joseph Smith and drive those who believed him into the wilderness.

“After jogging along several hundred miles the monotony was broken by our cattle stampeding. It seemed the longer we went and the harder the cattle worked, the easier they got frightened. The one that terrified me the most was at night. We had had one or two before so the cattle were prepared for one at any moment. I think it was on account of the Indians, or it might have been the large herds of buffalo that we saw daily, that our company was counseled to corral their animals every night. At night the cattle were turned out to feed, they were watched and herded, then brought into the corral. It was made with wagons formed in a large circle with the wheels touching each other with one opening to drive them in, then log chains put across the opening, so they were perfectly secure.
“We were in buffalo country. We had heard what a terrible thing their stampedes were, that not long before a large herd had started on their mad run and that when those in front came to a high bluff of the Platte River, they dashed in and made a bridge for the last ones who trampled to death and drowned their companions.
“One night about two o’clock the whole camp was peacefully sleeping when all at once there came an awful sound of tramping and bellowing, the ground shook, our wagon trembled and rocked. It flashed through my mind in a moment that a herd of buffalo was stampeding and that we would all be trampled to death. So I covered my head and prepared to die. Mother soon called out to Phebe and myself as there was no sound from our little bedroom (the front end of the wagon). I gave a smothered answer from under the bed clothes that I was alive.
“All at once there was a change. It was our own cattle broken out of the corral. Something had frightened them and then they started on their wild, mad run. They had run around and around inside and then broken through the log chains. Nothing could stay them. They scattered over the country for miles and miles. It took our men days and days to gather them back again, and a sorry looking lot they were, those that were left, for some died from exhaustion and others were killed. One pair of the captain’s cows ran up a very steep hill, fell backwards and broke their necks—one pair less to pull his wagon and one pair less to milk (oh the delicious milk—what a luxury on the plains).
“In that stampede there were two or three men hurt, one quite badly. He was a gold digger going to California who had overtaken us and was traveling with our company a while. The California emigrants traveled much faster than the Mormon emigrants. In trying to stop the cattle he was knocked down and trampled on. His groans were hideous. I did not see him again until one day the next winter, when he called on us. During all the time he was there he was down on his knees. He could stand up but could not sit down. I never heard from him again after he left for the gold mines. Old cattlemen say that tame, domestic horned cattle are the most crazy and wildest of all animals in a stampede. It is very singular, but they seem to start all at once, just as if a bolt had struck every one at the same instant.”

The excitement in the air was nearly tangible as Asian youth from the greater Seattle area gathered at the Seattle North Stake Center for the city’s first LDS Asian youth conference. Youth from the Bellevue 9th Ward, Seattle Branch, Auburn Branch, Everett Branch, Seattle Stake, Rainier Valley Branch, and Tacoma 13th Ward were in attendance.
Gasps were heard as new arrivals looked around the crowded chapel packed with exuberant young people, and the comment was heard, “I never knew there were so many of us in the Church—so many.”
Conference workshops were geared to the needs of youth in cultural and spiritual transition. An evening program and a dance followed dinner.
The day had the feeling of a family reunion, with lots of love and hugs for people who had been strangers only a few hours earlier. Quite a few investigators were attending with the missionaries assigned to work with Asians in the area.
Everyone asked, “Can we do it again?” The answer was a resounding yes.

Life has not always been easy for the family, however. The day after Elder Bragg was sustained as a bishop in the ward where he grew up, his mother was tragically killed during a car hijacking. Her funeral was the first one he presided over as a bishop. “The Relief Society was there for our family every day,” he recalls.

July 30, 1837: Outrunning other baptismal candidates to the River Ribble, George D. Watt became the first convert baptized in Great Britain. Elder Heber C. Kimball baptized him.

During my sophomore year in high school, we were studying the Book of Mormon in seminary. After we read Moroni 10:3–5 [Moro. 10:3–5], our seminary teacher challenged us to pray about the things we were studying. I really enjoyed learning about the Book of Mormon, so I took him up on his challenge.
That night I read Moroni’s promise again and got down on my knees to ask my Heavenly Father if this book was really true. I liked the stories, but I just wasn’t sure if it was true or not.
First I got in tune with the Spirit and started my prayer. At one point in the prayer, I asked Heavenly Father if the Book of Mormon was really true. All at once I experienced a strong, loving feeling in my bedroom, and I got warm all over. The next thing that happened really shocked me. It felt like someone wrapped their arms around me and gave me a big hug.
I am now a missionary on the Navajo Indian Reservation in the New Mexico Albuquerque Mission. I wouldn’t be out here if it wasn’t for the answer I received that night. Now I know the things I prayed about are true. And now I want to share that knowledge with others.

It seems like all my life I’d been worrying about Danny, trying to keep him straight. Sometimes he just doesn’t understand things too well.

Once when we were shopping, Dan picked up a record that was left lying in the road outside the store. He started toward the car.

“Danny,” I said, “you take that record back inside the store.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not ours.”

“So what? It’s nobody’s when it’s out in the middle of the road.”

“Dan, somebody might have dropped it. Maybe they’ll come back for it.”

“Fat chance. If somebody just bought it, it would have been in a sack. Some car has probably run over it anyway.”

“Daniel O’Brien Hertz, you either take that record into the store, or give it to me and I will. It’s not ours.”

Finally, Dan let me take the record back in the store.

When I came out, he said, “Sometimes, Mauri, you don’t have the sense of a flea.”

Youth who persevere despite the odds, serve missions, and then return and set goals for further education and temple marriage are a great support to the Lord’s work. Marcelo Gonzáles set a goal to serve a mission, then returned and married in the temple. He was called as a bishop at age 24 and as a stake president at age 26, and today he is a counselor in the Argentina Salta Mission presidency.

Hang on to the reality that you are not alone in your situation. As a teenager, I felt that my family and our problems were unique. When my best friend spent time at my house, I worried that she would notice what I wanted to hide. Not until we were adults did I discover that her family had problems very similar to mine.

At his Blue and Gold Banquet for Cub Scouts, David, a Bear Scout, learned a valuable lesson. He was happy when he won a table centerpiece from the banquet, complete with a gold star that had a number one written on it. But another boy at the banquet took David’s star when he lost his own. The other boy’s father made him give it back. “I was really mad at first,” David says. But then he realized, “It wasn’t worth fighting over.” David set an example by giving the other Cub Scout the star since he wanted it so badly.

Ivanna’s family moved when she was 13 to a home near a Latter-day Saint chapel. As she and her mother walked past it, her mother remembered the goodness the Church had brought into her life. She encouraged Ivanna to go to church. “My mother knew that in the Church they would teach me only good things in comparison to the world,” Ivanna says. She began attending church and activities and meeting with the missionaries, and when the missionaries asked her if she would be baptized, she agreed.

When I was about four years old, my family and I spent Easter with relatives in Ephraim, a small town in Utah. We went for a picnic there, and it was then that I saw a cactus for the first time. I ran back to my family, and my uncle was the first person I saw. “I’ve just seen something I’ve never seen before,” I told him. I described what it looked like. “What is it?”
“It’s a cactus,” he said. “You know what cactuses are for, don’t you?”
“No, what are they for?” I asked.
“They’re for sitting on.”
I ran back to the cactus I had seen, and I sat on it. The rest of the afternoon was spent with my mother picking out the painful prickles from the cactus. I learned then that when someone tells you something, you have to pay attention to whether he’s serious or just having fun!

When you grow up on a farm, you learn that everyone has a job. As a 10-year-old, my job was taking care of our chickens.
At first the baby chicks were cuddly little balls of yellow fuzz. But then they grew into chickens. Whenever I fed them, they’d peck at my ankles. It really hurt!
My father was serving as stake president. During that time, Elder L. Tom Perry came as the visiting General Authority. He and his family visited our home, and we loved listening to his inspiring words.
But the magic of the moment was broken when my mother asked, “Bonnie, have you fed the chickens yet?”
I had completely forgotten about those chickens and didn’t want to leave. But Elder Perry brightened up and asked, “Does someone need to feed chickens? Lee and I can help you!”
I couldn’t believe it! An Apostle would actually help me feed chickens!
I grabbed my flashlight, and Elder Perry, his son, and I started walking. I knew the way, so when we came to a ditch, I knew I had to jump. But Elder Perry didn’t know it was there, so he stumbled into the ditch and got his shoe wet. I was horrified.
He was very kind, and we kept going. Soon we reached the coop, and the three of us fed the chickens.
On the way back home, Elder Perry asked if he could hold the flashlight.
“Bonnie,” he said, “now I can see where I’m going too. Walking with your light, I couldn’t see very well, so I fell. In a way, this light is like our testimonies of Heavenly Father. Each one of us needs our own testimony.”
What a perfect lesson from a wise and loving Apostle! It is one I will never forget.

During a visit to Vermont before his death at eighty-two, John Deere saw some of the farm tools that he’d made there as a young man. They were still in use and highly prized. He was deeply touched, for above all things, John was proud of being a good blacksmith.