Gospel Story Finder

A few days ago, I enjoyed the challenging experience of speaking to a large group of younger teenagers. Thereafter, I received a special letter from a wonderful mother who, with her husband, a bishop, had accompanied their fourteen-year-old son, with some of his friends, to the meeting. These are the last few words of her letter:
“Please accept my thanks. … You spoke seriously to a group of youth who are used to being told how wonderful they are. They are wonderful, but they needed to do some heavy thinking for a change. You helped them do that. Thank you!”
I was pleased that the meeting had encouraged some serious thinking and consideration among at least some of those present. We referred, as we began, to the aimless habit some of us have of channel-hopping or dial-switching as we sit in front of a television set or radio, and suggested that in preparation, I had done a similar kind of searching through my memory and notes. I was seeking to select, out of many observations and experiences and thoughts, a few that might make a difference to those who were seriously listening and might thereafter think about what they had heard. I would like to do the same with you in these few moments this evening.

Sondra Wicks of the Roseburg Ward, Roseburg Oregon Stake, didn’t want to miss her youth standards night, so she told her varsity basketball coach that she wouldn’t be able to play in a very important game scheduled the same evening. To everyone’s surprise, the coach rescheduled the game.
But that’s not all. Sondra has given up many a lunch hour for basketball practices, since she had to miss the early-morning practices that conflicted with her seminary schedule.
Sondra also sings, plays the piano, and plays in the marching and symphonic bands at her school. She gets good grades, as you can tell by her three-year stint on the high honor roll. But, she says, one of her favorite activities is doing work with the sister missionaries. A mission is definitely in her future plans.

One day I watched an interview with Brother Tad R. Callister, who was then the Sunday School General President. As I took notes, I had an impression on how to heal my relationship with my son, John. I was impressed that we should read the entire Book of Mormon together prior to his baptism six months later.
This impression was so clear that I even knew which room we should read in and at what time we should read. I also felt a distinct impression that we should finish our reading on the grounds of the Meridian Idaho Temple.
As we took time to read one-on-one each night, our relationship sweetened. We had more patience for each other, we better understood each other’s perspectives, and we regularly felt the presence of the Holy Ghost.
The night before we finished the book, we read Moroni’s promise that if we ask God with a sincere heart, with real intent and faith in Christ, if the Book of Mormon is true, we will know the truth of it by the power of the Holy Ghost (see Moroni 10:4–5). We felt the confirmation that the Book of Mormon is true, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the kingdom of God upon the earth.
The next day we sat on a bench on the temple grounds. We looked up at the statue of angel Moroni and read again his final testimony. Since that day, John has mentioned on multiple occasions the time we read the Book of Mormon together at the temple. Now every time I attend the temple, I see the bench and reflect on the special moment John and I had when we completed our inspired goal.

Several months ago, after boarding an airplane scheduled to fly to Phoenix, Arizona, the passengers found themselves retained on the ground because of foggy weather. While we were waiting, the door of the airplane opened several times and others joined us, even though it was half an hour or more after the plane should have departed.
A young teenager took the vacant seat beside me. After a short time, he looked toward me and said, “Hey, mister, are you a Mormon?”
I said “Yes” and inquired why he asked.
He reported, “I joined the Church several months ago, but I don’t know whether I believe it anymore.”
We talked about the gospel. I bore my testimony. We discussed many things relating to the Church and to life. Meanwhile, the plane had left Salt Lake and was winging its way south.
This fine young man who wanted to have his testimony reaffirmed and strengthened was willing to do something about it. Cody and I are pen pals now. When I think of him, I recall a wonderful young man, searching for truth, needing a little reassurance, and seeking it on his own. He took responsibility.

I know how real the hooks of mortality can be. One Sunday, as a new convert, I was teaching a priesthood class when an unsettling conversation arose. I struggled to finish my lesson. I took offense and felt that I was the victim. Without saying a word, I headed for the exit with the idea that I would not return to church for a while.
At that very moment, a concerned priesthood holder stood in front of me. He lovingly invited me to focus on Christ and not on the situation we had experienced in class. As I looked back on the experience with him, he shared with me that he heard a voice tell him, “Go after him; he is important to me.”

Bertha came into my life when I was 13 and just beginning junior high school. How well I remember that first day of school. The building was large and sprawling with endless halls and rows and rows of lockers. It seemed like a huge transit mall compared to the security of grade school. Most of the students had come on school buses from small farms and neighborhoods. This was certainly not a big city group, but we were still anxious to be popular and accepted. There were so many of us that we were going to be using the old grade school across the street for additional classrooms. I alternated between excitement and panic at the thought of finding my way around.
I had worked hard all summer babysitting and getting up at 5:00 A.M. to pick strawberries and cherries so I could earn enough money to buy nice school clothes. But even in all my fine new clothes, I felt awkward and uneasy.
My friends and I huddled together, trying to act nonchalant to hide the fear we felt but didn’t dare admit. We stood in awe as the eighth and ninth graders moved confidently through the halls laughing and teasing each other. It was a relief when the bell finally rang and we all headed to the big gym where it was announced that each seventh grader was to be assigned to an eighth grade “big brother or sister” to show them around. Each seventh grader was called, along with the name of his buddy for the day.
When my name was called along with Bertha Brown, I heard several of my friends gasp. I had no idea who Bertha Brown was, but it was obvious that some of them did. As soon as we were excused to go meet our big sisters, I was surrounded by girls telling me to hide quickly before Bertha could find me. It was clear that to be assigned to Bertha was the worst possible fate. I was so confused. Part of me said not to hide—that would be mean. But another part of me wanted to be popular, and that’s the side that won.
So the game began—the hiding, the giggling, and the running from imagined danger. We managed to escape from Bertha for the moment, but not before I caught a glimpse of her. It was true that she was not pretty. She was even a little scary to look at with her wild, dry hair. Her clothes looked like something a grandmother would wear, and her shoes were brown and ugly.
All day the big story was how poor little Sheron had to hide from Bertha. The one time that I really saw Bertha’s face she looked so sad. How could we be so mean to her? I thought. She hadn’t done anything to deserve it. There we were, a whole group of girls, running away from one lonely person. I knew that what we were doing was wrong. I didn’t want to play that awful game. What I really wanted was to talk to Bertha and tell her I was sorry. I knew that she must be embarrassed. But I wasn’t brave enough, so I let everyone else lead me. But oh, I was miserable!
Later that day I forgot about Bertha when I was called to Mrs. Jensen’s office. She had been my very favorite teacher in grade school, and now she was a counselor at the junior high. I could hardly wait to see her. All the way to her office I imagined all kinds of wonderful things. Maybe she wanted me to be her special assistant. Maybe she had something important that she wanted me to do. I almost ran through the halls in my eagerness to see Mrs. Jensen. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
When I walked into her office, I could see tears in her eyes, and my heart nearly broke when she looked straight at me and said, “Of all the girls coming into seventh grade, I assigned Bertha to you because I thought that you were the one girl who would be kind to her!”
All the misery of the day came crashing down on me, and I sobbed as I realized that Mrs. Jensen did have an important assignment for me and I had failed her. I had failed Bertha. But, most of all, I had betrayed myself. The next day everyone else forgot about the game—and Bertha. I never did. I rarely saw her after that day. When I did catch a glimpse of her all alone, I wanted desperately to tell her how sorry I was. But I was too ashamed and too young in my understanding of compassion to know how much it would mean to her.
I never saw Bertha again after junior high, and yet she has been a very important part of my life. Even today I wish that I had found the courage to be her friend. How do you say you are sorry to someone that you have never spoken to and yet hurt so deeply that more than 30 years later you cannot forget?

Now the third story, if I might skip another four years. At age 16 it became necessary for me to make a decision as to what I was going to spend my life doing. I lived within six blocks of Stanford University, and I was influenced by this university. Two of my friends had fathers who taught there. One of them, for instance, was a polio research scientist. He was trying to find, like many others, the way to prevent polio. He didn’t discover it—others did—but he made a contribution. One of the physicists helped direct my thinking. “Do I want to become a physicist? Do I want to become a research bacteriologist? Do I want to become this? Do I want to become that?” This is a common experience to teenagers.
I was active in music but I thought, “I don’t want to become a musician. Who wants to become a musician?” My view of a musician was that he was a drunken dance band bum or else that he was a long-hair who starved in a garret. So I dismissed, for a period, the idea of becoming a professional musician. I determined that very few of them ever made any money. Many of them, I thought, starved half to death, and that aspect didn’t attract me particularly.
During this period in which I investigated a number of other professional areas, and after thought and prayer, I finally came to a decision. I studied it out in my own mind. I finally came to a conviction within my heart—a burning within my bosom—that regardless of my previous views of what a musician was, how much money he would or would not make, or any of these other factors, my conviction was in this direction; this is how I was to make my contribution to the world; this is how I would make my professional life a reality.
That came like many of our decisions come. I studied it out in my mind, trying to perceive what would be the results if I went in any of several different directions, and then I asked the Lord to guide me in receiving a confirmation through his Spirit concerning the correct direction.
When I had made that decision, I told my father and my mother that I had arrived at a decision. They, of course, were cognizant that this churning process was going on. We communicated many times during the process. I still have this little slip of paper in one of my scrapbooks: “Today I know what I want.” My father, who was a businessman, couldn’t carry a tune in the bathtub. He had not much sympathy for music as a career. When I said, “I want to go into music,” he said, “All right, son [these words have come back to me many times], but don’t be a second-rater.”
Now that is a hard challenge. I do not believe that we need necessarily to compete with the great ones of the world. We need to compete with our own best selves. And isn’t that the challenge we all have? Isn’t it hard to be a first-rate John Jones or Mary Smith? It is easy to be a second-rate John Jones or Mary Smith. I find myself qualifying, frequently, for a second-rate Crawford Gates. And I am sorry that I qualify so frequently.
It is hard for us to measure up to our own potential. I find it very difficult to be equal to the Lord’s blessings. Don’t we all have that same problem in our lives—the necessity to creatively measure up to our own potential?
And so those words of my good father have rung in my ears many times since then, and they have spurred me to try to jump one step higher in the creative act of becoming better in any number of different individual achievements.
I went to the College of the Pacific my freshman year. They had a good music school there and it was close by my home. At the beginning of that first year there was a sign out on the bulletin board of the music department, and it said, “Composition Contest,” and I said, “That’s for me!” It had a huge prize for the one who won—twenty-five dollars! That would take you almost through a whole semester of school in those days. But more important than the financial prize was the fact that the winning composition would be played by the Stockton Symphony Orchestra.
So as a young freshman—it was still before my 17th birthday and I looked much younger than that—I started to brag to my colleagues that I was not only going to enter this composition contest, but I was going to win it. I became very unpopular. In fact there was a master’s degree candidate who played cello in the symphony orchestra of the school—he was very old, about 22 or so—who would come by on campus, look at me, pat me on the head, and say, “How is your tune coming, Buster?” He was referring to my masterpiece for symphony orchestra—and he called it a “tune”; that was very insulting to me.
In the course of time the “tune” was finished and submitted to the necessary authorities in the Stockton Symphony Orchestra. The conductor was one of the judges, and soon the word got back that I had won first prize. But there was a note on the front of the score, and the note said, “This composition is written for much too large an orchestra. Please have the student composer reduce it for the size of the Stockton Symphony.” Now that was one detail I had overlooked. I had read in Life magazine that the Boston Symphony had 104 pieces, so I had written for a 104-piece symphony. I didn’t take time to check that the Stockton Symphony Orchestra had only 52 pieces in it. The reduction of a score intended for 104 players down to 52 is a very unpleasant task, so I said, “Well, I hear it in my head this way.” This is the brashness of a freshman mind. I said, “Nuts to the Stockton Symphony Orchestra. I’ll find an orchestra that is big enough to play this tune.”
So I looked around California and found that San Jose State, which was also near my home, had a large symphony orchestra of over 100 pieces in their school, and in my sophomore year I changed from the College of the Pacific to San Jose State on the sole motivation that they had a big enough symphony orchestra to play my piece.
The first day after I had arrived there I went to the office of the director of the symphony orchestra; his name was Adolf Otterstein. I said, “Professor Otterstein, I have a composition I would like to have the college symphony orchestra play.” He took a dim view of a new brash young sophomore, but he was kind and said, “Leave it here; I am busy right now, but come back next week.” So I came back the next week and, sure enough, he had taken a moment or two to glance through it, and he said, “Well, it isn’t too bad.” He asked, “Have you copied the parts?” And I indicated that I had.
When you write a piece for an orchestra, it isn’t like writing a hymn for the hymnbook, where you write the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass so that you can play the result with the right hand and left hand or sing it with a congregation; you have to write the music on a score sheet that may be 18 to 20 inches high and 12 to 15 inches wide, and has many music score lines on it. And you have to write a note or a line for every instrument of the entire orchestra.
Orchestration is, in a sense, the coloring of a musical line, so you have to write that out to complete the reality of the musical thought. Maybe you have three or four or five or six hundred sheets of paper. You can’t gather the orchestra around the package of sheets and expect them to all play or blow at the same time. You obviously have to do something with the score, or someone else has to. If you’re fortunate, you can get someone else to do it or hire someone else to do it; or if you aren’t, you do it yourself.
You get a stack of blank manuscript paper and you label one page “first flute,” and then you copy off every note from the “full score” onto the new blank sheet—every sharp, every accent, every dot. And finally you get through with the whole book for the first flute part and you put it to one side. Then you start again with a new blank set of sheets and do the second flute part, and thereafter you start over again, using the same procedure. Well, by the time you get through a 104-piece orchestra, you wish you were working for a ten-piece combo. It is a very laborious task.
I had spent all summer at a Boy Scout camp as a director. I would tuck my Scouts in every night and then go down to my little tent and light the oil lamp and copy my parts. I had 25 pounds of parts for this piece.
So when Professor Otterstein asked me, “Do you have the parts copied?” I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “We rehearse on Monday nights in the Morris Dailey Auditorium, and next Monday you come with your parts, and after the intermission we will let the orchestra read through it.”
Then he asked me a strange question. He said, “Would you like to conduct it?”
Now, if he had said, “Can you conduct it?” I would have had to answer differently, but he said, “Would you like to conduct it?” Well, who wouldn’t like to conduct a 100-piece orchestra playing his own piece? The fact that I had only conducted “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” in my Sunday School class wasn’t much preparation to conduct a 104-piece symphony orchestra. But he phrased the question the way he did and I answered the way I did, “Of course I’d like to conduct.”
I went home and the whole next week I checked my orchestral parts over trying to see if it really would sound right, and I felt squeamish inside because I had imagined this piece but I had never heard it played. I thought that I had checked everything; I felt that it ought to sound all right.
Although it was actually a Monday, and though the previous day had been a fast Sunday, this was a fast Monday to me—I couldn’t eat at all, I was so excited. I wheeled a wheelbarrow full of parts out to the car—I had borrowed my father’s car—and put them in the rumble seat and then drove down to San Jose.
All day long I fidgeted through my classes. I couldn’t eat my lunch. That night I placed the parts in the seats in the front row of the Morris Dailey Auditorium and waited while the symphony orchestra rehearsed the Beethoven Fourth Symphony or some other obscure work.
Finally Otterstein turned around and said, “Where’s Gates?”
There I was, hidden behind this stack of parts, and I said, “Here I am, sir.”
He said, “Do you have your parts with you?” What a ridiculous question! Here they were.
He said, “Well, pass the things out.”
I went up there during the intermission and I passed the cello parts out this way and the violin parts out that way and the heavy artillery out here—the “garbage can” section in the back, with the timpani, bass drum, cymbals, etc. The parts were all passed out when Professor Otterstein came up after the intermission.
I had written my name very big on all the parts—CRAWFORD GATES—and it was terrible. I should never have done it because the players thought, “Well, who is Crawford Gates?” Otterstein apologized vaguely to the players concerning the experience he was about to subject them to, suggesting it would perhaps have some value for them or for me.
Players don’t like to play from handwritten music manuscript, and my manuscript was horrible. Otterstein said, “This is Crawford Gates. He is from the College of the Pacific!” Well, that would be like saying at BYU, “He is from the University of Utah!”
He then said, “I’m going to let Mr. Gates conduct.” He boosted me up on the podium and gave me the baton, and the coward went out of the auditorium into the safety of the darkness—there was no audience; this was a rehearsal.
I held the baton up very shakily. I remember there was a cello player just like the one at the College of the Pacific. He was down to my right and he was older. He had his finger on the string, on the first note of the cello part. As I held my hand up there, shaking like a leaf for this first note, he said something to this effect: “Just drop the baton, Buster, and we’ll play the notes.” So I dropped the baton, and the cellos and basses came out on the pianissimo and it didn’t sound too bad. (Anyone can write that, cellos and basses in unison; that is not very hard.)
I knew that it was 3/4 time, so I conducted 1—2—3, so the music moved along. A few minutes later the French horns came in. I knew that you were supposed to point to them, so I gave a signal to the French horn section, and they came in much like a cow taking its foot out of the mud—it was a terrible sound.
The conductor at the back of the hall called out, “It isn’t that modern, is it, Gates?”
I said, “No, sir, something is wrong.” I was turning red and purple as I went to the back of the horn section, and everyone was fidgeting. I found that I had left all the sharps off the French horn parts, which I corrected in a moment or two, and then I came back. Well, this experience was excruciating. The orchestra droned and grunted along and the players were saying, or looking like, “Oh how can we bear this terrible stuff?” It was a frightful experience.
Well, something happened. I suppose that if it hadn’t happened at the end of that 40- or 45-minute period, whatever it took to grind through the thing, I would have probably decided that my conviction of a few years earlier had been in the wrong direction. I would have gone back into physics or something else. But what happened in the last moment of that piece was the fact that somehow there was a tune. It had been orchestrated to some degree with natural instinct from the orchestra, and it soared up to a climax and relaxed away from it in a pattern that changed the whole spirit of the orchestra. The feeling changed immediately during the last few minutes of the piece. Instead of saying, or looking, “How can we bear this?” I saw their expressions, as though they were saying, “Not bad! Not bad!”
At the end they started to applaud, and the conductor came running down the aisle, saying, “Well, the first part was pretty terrible but the last part wasn’t so bad!”
I recall all the way home that night I could hear that wonderful big sound of the ending and I forgot the terror of the first part. I remembered that for the last few moments I was raised about a foot off the podium—I conducted sort of instinctively, feeling that “This is why I’m alive! This is my contribution to the world!” I felt that “men are that they might have joy” is no longer just a statement in the Book of Mormon (2 Ne. 2:25), but it is a reality for me right here, right now!
I thought, this is how the Lord must have felt when he said that “it was good” (see Gen. 1:4). What a remarkable understatement the Lord made about his own work. And one reason God exists is because he has joy, and what does he have joy in? In the creative act—in the act of creating a galaxy or in creating a human soul.

When Elder Hans T. Boom was eight years old, his family moved from Amsterdam to the city of Breda, located in the southern part of the Netherlands. His father, a Dutchman who had grown up in Indonesia and was a convert to the Church, felt that his family needed to leave the large city and return to his ancestral roots.
The time Elder Boom spent with his family in that small branch proved to be a training ground of Church service—service he has given his entire life and will continue to give in his new calling as a General Authority Seventy.

The Three Snow Bears, by Jan Brett. In this familiar story, Aloo-ki loses her sled dogs and finds an igloo. When she goes inside she smells something delicious. Soon the igloo’s owners come home—three bears! Who will they find sleeping in the littlest bear’s bed?

“I was trying to prove he was wrong,” said Diahann Piper, remembering the first time she accepted a challenge from a member to attend the small Latter-day Saint branch on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.
“Brother Gerald Cox told me, ‘You just go and ask whatever questions you want. Nobody will force you to join the Church.’”
Diahann attended church expecting the worst, but the worst never happened. “Some of my friends were so against the Church. They told me all kinds of terrible things. When I went I kept waiting to see those things happen, but all I was seeing was love and more love.” Now Diahann is a member of the St. Thomas Branch.
For Diahann, joining the Church has brought some big changes in her life. “I had to change my attitude,” she said, “my style, my friends. I liked to go to the beach on Sundays, and I used bad language a lot. I had to change. Now I follow the prophet.”

Tonight I asked Mom to teach me how to cook from scratch, like she used to before Dad died and she had to go to work. I’m tired of watching her worry about bills, and I know that cooking from scratch would save money and be healthier.
“It would take a lot of your time,” she said. I said I figured it was time for me to pull my share of the load. Mom hugged me tight. “OK,” she laughed. “Lesson one …”

I was born in a small community on the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan. When I was five years old, my father was killed by an attack from an American submarine. As a little boy I became bitter toward Americans. I grew up that way, not really knowing what had happened to cause the war.
When I graduated from junior high school, we were so poor. My mother could not afford to send me to senior high school, so I decided to go to work in order to fund my continued education. There was no work in our small village, but I found a job producing tofu (bean curd) nine hours away from home in Muroran, where my mother was raised.
Every day in Muroran I got up by 4:30 a.m., made tofu until noon, and then delivered it to various stores until 6:00 p.m. After work I washed, changed, ate, and ran to night school. I returned home about 10:30 p.m. and jumped into bed at 11:00 p.m. Because of my exhausting schedule, I soon lost all of my energy and became ill.
I was staying in the tofu shop owner’s home, but I quit my job and asked my uncle to take me in so I could finish my first year of high school. Despite medication, I remained sick. I didn’t know what to do, and I became desperate and felt that I might be dying. I prayed hard, saying, “If there is a God, wilt Thou bless me that I might be able to get well.” Then I prayed something somewhat presumptuous: “If I am cured, I want to repay Thee.”
While I was at my uncle’s home, two foreigners knocked at the door early one evening. They were missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One, Elder Law—the senior companion—had been a farmer in St. Anthony, Idaho, USA; the other, Elder Porter—a new elder—was from Salt Lake City. It was cold, rainy, and nearly dark, and they were ready to go home. But for some reason they persisted in knocking on doors.
When they knocked on my door, I was alone. I answered the door and said, “No, thank you.”
These young men were humble and persistent, but I said again, “No, thank you.” Then I added, “You folks killed my father.” I was still bitter.
Undeterred, the elder from Idaho asked my age. I said, “What does my age matter? Please go.”
He replied, “I want to tell you a story about a boy your age who saw your Heavenly Father and your Savior, Jesus Christ. We want to share that story.” I almost froze at the door.
I said, “I’ll give you 10 minutes.”
Those 10 minutes touched me deeply and changed my life. The story the missionaries shared was so profound and beautiful. I found out that I am a child of God and that I came from Him.
The elders came every day because I was sick. During their discussions with me, the missionaries taught me the beautiful gospel of the Restoration. I found my Savior. The gospel gave me hope and the will to live. A few weeks after the missionaries knocked on my door, I was baptized.

After I was called as the family history consultant for our branch in Ushuaia, Argentina, I came to feel a deep need to search for my ancestors. The task was difficult, and scarcely a day went by that I did not try a new strategy to discover who they were and where they had come from in Italy.
In 2006 I was called to oversee the family history center. I continued to feel frustrated, however, by my failure to find information about my family. My frustration grew after my husband’s search for his ancestors paid off. That year, Ruben identified the names of more than 5,000 of his ancestors who had lived in San Ginesio, Macerata, Italy.
One afternoon in the family history center as Ruben found ancestor after ancestor on microfilm, he joyfully and repeatedly cried out, “Another one!” Feeling discouraged, and with tears in my eyes, I expressed my sadness, adding that I didn’t know what to do to find my family members. Seeing my pain, he suggested that we pray. We did so, pleading for the Holy Ghost to enlighten us so that we could accelerate the work on behalf of my family.
During our prayer, Ruben suddenly remembered a certain website that featured Italian surnames. Immediately after our prayer, we checked it out. Within minutes we had found four people with my maiden name, Gos, in the telephone directory of the small Italian town of Iutizzo, in northern Italy.
Immediately I sent letters to each of them. One wrote back, saying that her husband had the same surname, but he didn’t belong to the family. However, she had known one of my grandfather’s deceased sisters, and she offered to put me in touch with another relative, still living.
A few months later, in December 2006, we received a long-distance telephone call.
“Is this Susana Gos?” a distant male voice asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“This is your cousin from Italy,” he said.
The caller, Giovanni Battista Tubaro, was the son of my grandfather’s sister Maria!
In March 2008, Giovanni and his wife, Miriam, came to visit us in Argentina. We introduced them to the gospel and family history work, and for several days we talked of those who had preceded us. Now each of their names going back to six generations had a face and a history.
Family history has allowed me to contribute to an important part of the Lord’s work. It has also brought me closer to my ancestors—children of our Heavenly Father whom I never would have known of had it not been for a prayer of faith in the family history center.

For some, there will come the temptation to dishonor a personal standard of honesty. In a business law class at the university I attended, I remember that one particular classmate never prepared for the class discussions. I thought to myself, “How is he going to pass the final examination?”
I discovered the answer when he came to the classroom for the final exam on a winter’s day wearing on his bare feet only a pair of sandals. I was surprised and watched him as the class began. All of our books had been placed upon the floor, as per the instruction. He slipped the sandals from his feet; and then, with toes that he had trained and had prepared with glycerin, he skillfully turned the pages of one of the books which he had placed on the floor, thereby viewing the answers to the examination questions.
He received one of the highest grades in that course on business law. But the day of reckoning came. Later, as he prepared to take his comprehensive exam, for the first time the dean of his particular discipline said, “This year I will depart from tradition and will conduct an oral, rather than a written, test.” Our favorite trained-toe expert found that he had his foot in his mouth on that occasion and failed the exam.

The first time Lori Solomon attended a Latter-day Saint ward, she noticed something significant. Not only were the people she met there extremely friendly and kind, but they also had their own copies of the scriptures. During the meetings, they were reading from, talking about, and trying to apply the scriptures to their lives. This impressed Lori because she had never been able to understand the Torah when it was read in Hebrew in her Reform Jewish congregation.
When Lori went to church the second time, a powerful feeling propelled her to the microphone in fast and testimony meeting. Standing before a roomful of strangers, she tried to put into words the feeling that was already growing into a conviction. “I’m home,” she said. Lori was baptized in Chicago, Illinois, in 2001.
But, as Lori soon discovered, knowing the Church is true is not the same as understanding how the Church works. Like most new members, Lori found herself unfamiliar with the procedures, protocol, and specialized vocabulary that long-term members take for granted. For example, she didn’t know that Church members don’t make comments in sacrament meeting. And the first time she heard someone refer to “home, family, and personal enrichment meeting,” she thought she needed to bring her family with her. It takes time to learn these and other unwritten “rules.”

Elder Oaks faced a similar situation in 1984 following his call to the Twelve, as he again left a position and work that he loved as a supreme court justice in the state of Utah. However, this change was different.

In 1970, Elder Oaks reasonably might have thought he would return to his legal career following his service at BYU, which in fact he eventually did. But the call in 1984 was distinctive—a consecrated commitment of his whole soul and entire life to the Lord. The eternal importance and worldwide scope of his new responsibilities truly were overwhelming.

Elder Oaks described his innermost thoughts about this important transition:
“During this period of introspection, contemplating the way I would spend the rest of my life, I asked myself what kind of an apostle I would be. Would I be a lawyer who had been called to be an apostle, or would I be an apostle who used to be a lawyer? I concluded that the answer to this question depended upon whether I would try to shape my calling to my own personal qualifications and experience, or whether I would undertake the painful process of trying to shape myself to my calling.
“Would I try to perform my calling in the world’s ways, or would I try to determine and follow the Lord’s ways?
“I made up my mind that I would try to change myself to fit my calling, that I would try to measure up to the qualifications and spiritual stature of an apostle. That is a challenge for a lifetime.”1

Such ward activities not only built positive relationships among members of the Church but also built positive relationships with everyone in the community.

“I remember one woman, not a member of the Church, who was new to the area,” David says. “She had been reduced to burning wood paneling from her home to keep warm. Once we learned about her plight, we made sure she had enough firewood to get through the winter. She was so thankful she could barely speak.”

Ministering efforts in Fredonia ensured that everyone stayed safe and warm through the winter.

Many lives have been blessed by the success of the Philippines Area’s “I Will Go, I Will Serve: 4600” initiative. Aside from the inspired vision of the Area Presidency, the support of the local priesthood leaders and the efforts of youth leaders, the miraculous success of the campaign was also boosted by the catchy theme song performed by Loredel “Daday” Ducena-Baluyot.
Composing the popular anthem with her husband Justin was a labor of love. After the first Area Presidency fireside premiered on Facebook on May 16, 2021, Daday and Justin felt the spirit and were inspired to write the song. After a few weeks, they presented the song to the Church area production team and offered its use to help sustain the momentum of the campaign. The song was reviewed and approved, and by July they were recording it with some help from Brio Divinagracia on the arrangement and background vocals. The song was officially launched during the follow-up Area Presidency fireside on November 21, 2021.
Aside from the 2021 youth theme song “A Great Work,” Daday’s “I Will Go, I Will Serve,” became popular after being part of youth, YSA, and FSY conferences all over the country. It was also listened to and sung along with the 2022 youth theme song “Trust in the Lord.” Recently, the couple rewrote the song as part of the November 20, 2022 Area Presidency fireside launching a heightened and more comprehensive “Come Unto Christ: I Will Go, I Will Serve” initiative.

To my brethren, the fathers in this Church, I say, I know you wish you were a more perfect father. I know I wish I were. Even so, despite our limitations, let us press on. Let us lay aside the exaggerated notions of individualism and autonomy in today’s culture and think first of the happiness and well-being of others. Surely, despite our inadequacies, our Heavenly Father will magnify us and cause our simple efforts to bear fruit. I am encouraged by a story that appeared in the New Era some years ago. The author recounted the following:
“When I was young, our little family lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor. I slept on the couch in the living room. …
“My dad, a steelworker, left home very early for work each day. Every morning he would … tuck the covers around me and stop for a minute. I would be half-dreaming when I could sense my dad standing beside the couch, looking at me. As I slowly awoke, I became embarrassed to have him there. I tried to pretend I was still asleep. … I became aware that as he stood beside my bed he was praying with all his attention, energy, and focus—for me.
“Each morning my dad prayed for me. He prayed that I would have a good day, that I would be safe, that I would learn and prepare for the future. And since he could not be with me until evening, he prayed for the teachers and my friends that I would be with that day. …
“At first, I didn’t really understand what my dad was doing those mornings when he prayed for me. But as I got older, I came to sense his love and interest in me and everything I was doing. It is one of my favorite memories. It wasn’t until years later, after I was married, had children of my own, and would go into their rooms while they were asleep and pray for them that I understood completely how my father felt about me.”

I was just a young child when my father died of pneumonia. My 14-year-old brother died just a few days later from an unrelated illness. It was the early 1930s, the middle of the Great Depression in the United States. Jobs were scarce and so was money. My mother, a nurse, struggled to provide a living for the five remaining children. It wasn’t an easy life for any of us, and I often wondered how it would all work out.
But one thing happened during those tough times that I remember as well as if it had happened yesterday, something that made me look forward with courage and hope.
About a year after my father’s passing, his cousin came to visit our home. Israel Bennion came, not just on a social call, but as the stake patriarch. Each of us children, scrubbed clean and dressed like we were going to church, waited in turn to have this dignified man place his hands on our heads and give us our patriarchal blessings.
I was only seven, not old enough to understand the significance of all that was going on. (Today, the Church advises you to wait until you’re older to get your patriarchal blessing.) But I felt a great reverence, the same sort of feeling I felt during fast and testimony meetings. I remembered his instructions, although they were brief, that my blessing should be a guide to me, something I could use to chart my course through life.
Although I was young, I was impressed by the statements Brother Bennion made as he gave me my blessing. He told me that the Spirit of the Lord would be with me as I was growing up, that the gospel would be in my heart, that I would love the work of the Lord, and that the Lord would bless me.
He spoke of the future, that I would someday be a judge in Israel, that I would have children, that I would have a strong body and a sound mind.
But most of all, he stirred something in me. He helped me to begin to realize how literally I was a son of God. The Lord knew who I was and what I was doing. If I lived the right way, the Lord would help me.
My patriarchal blessing is only 263 words long. But it has always made a deep impression on me. As I have read and reflected upon it through the years, that impression has never diminished.