Gospel Story Finder

“Scouter Hunk,” said the country’s president, “I want to pin this medal on you in appreciation for your courage and leadership skills. Bravely you rescued 400 tourists when their boat swamped. Your Eagle Scout project has revitalized your town, along with the entire country. And single-handedly you reformed 200 delinquent children by getting them involved in Scouting.
“Dexter,” called out Scoutmaster Simmons at the Scout meeting. “When can you help us collect food for the homeless?”
Dexter looked up. “I dunno,” he replied.

Before Wade Holmstead passed away I had the opportunity of being his Primary president. All his life he had serious health problems, but he also had an insight and understanding that few eleven-year-olds have.
When I interviewed Wade for Primary graduation, he was well prepared and anxious to become a deacon and a Scout. Then we spoke of missionary work and his future plans. Some of his neighbors were inactive and the children did not attend Primary. I asked Wade if he would be a missionary and try to get these children to attend Primary. He agreed.
The next week, Primary was about to begin when Wade and these children entered the chapel. I was stunned! What a miracle. Later I asked him, “How did you ever get the children to come to Primary?”
Wade looked at me with wonder and answered quietly, “It wasn’t hard at all, Sister Haynie. I just reminded them. All they needed was to be reminded.”

“Talking about suicide in appropriate ways actually helps to prevent it rather than encourage it,” taught Sister Aburto. Her father died by suicide. For many years, she avoided talking about his death with her family. However, she has since learned the value in speaking about it honestly and plainly. “I have now openly discussed my father’s death with my children and witnessed the healing that the Savior can give on both sides of the veil.”

A father sent his son on a long, dangerous, and difficult journey. The son was worried and asked, “Father, how can I be sure to arrive safely?”
The father smiled and told his son, “Do not worry. I have provided a way for you to receive all the help you will need.”
“How will I be able to get the help when I need it?” asked the boy.
His father replied, “It is simple: love and trust me more than anything else.”
“But how can I show you that I love and trust you more than anything else?” asked the son.
The father put a loving hand on his son’s shoulder and said, “I will know if you love and trust me more than anything else by the choices you make when I am not with you.”
The boy inquired, “But how will you know what choices I make when we are not together?”
“Oh, I will know,” replied his good father. Then he added, “Now go; it is time to begin your journey.”
After walking for two days, the boy ran out of food and water. Without money, feeling tired and weak, he saw a stand where a vendor was selling bread, fried yam, roasted plantain, and sachet water. Hungry and thirsty, the boy grabbed a sachet of water and a loaf of bread and ran off. As he ran, he remembered that his father had taught him that he would know whether the boy loved and trusted his father more than anything by the choices he would make on the journey. He knew that his father was an honest man and would never steal.
So the boy returned to the stand and returned the water sachet and bread to the vendor. The vendor smiled and told the boy that the boy’s father was a friend of his and had asked him to watch and see what the boy would do when he walked by the vendor’s stand. The vendor said, “This was a test of your character. If you had simply taken the sachet water and bread and not returned, then you would not have received any help from me and would instead have learned to be a thief.
The vendor continued, “However, because you chose to be honest like your father taught you, you are showing that you really do love and trust him more than anything else—even when you are very hungry and thirsty. You are learning to be a good and noble man like your father.” The vendor took the boy by the hand and said, “If you will work for it, I will give you the food and water you need.”
The boy continued the journey. He faced many temptations and difficulties on the journey. But he remembered the lesson he learned in returning the sachet water and bread. He tried to show by his day-to-day decisions that he truly loved his father more than anything or anyone else. By doing this, he found people all along the journey who his father had put on the path he traveled in order to teach, help, and encourage him. When he safely arrived at his destination, he had become a strong, honest man of great trust and noble character—just like his father.
Of the Israelites who did not live the law of the tithe, the Lord said: “Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings.
“Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation” (Malachi 3:8–9). If the boy in the above story had not returned the things he stole, he would have been cursed to live the ways of the world and become a thief. By showing through his choice that he loved and trusted his father more than anything, he made it possible to receive the help his father had promised him throughout the journey.

Vitaly: During those three days, I realized I had found someone special. I was disappointed when the conference ended and Katya and I had to part. Luckily, though, there was a young single adult conference the next month. I immediately started looking forward to it.
That conference was as great as I had hoped. Katya and I spent a lot of time really getting to know each other. As the event ended, we exchanged phone numbers and went back to our respective cities.
During the following weeks we kept in touch mostly by phone calls and text messages. (I think in less than a month I learned to text on my cell phone faster than most people can type on a laptop!)
Katya lived in Yekaterinburg, which is 11 hours away by train from where I lived in Omsk, Siberia. Nevertheless, we both desperately wanted to see each other again. We started to make regular trips on the weekends. I would go to see her one weekend, and a few weeks later, she would come visit me. When I visited Katya, I stayed with mutual friends in her town, and when she visited me, she stayed with mutual friends who lived in my town. We often spent time with these friends from church during our visits.
Katya: Eleven hours may seem like a long commute, but for Russia, that’s really just a short walk! Because of the distance, our dates were not as frequent as we would have liked. We could get together only once every few weeks and spend two or three days together before one of us returned home. Often, it felt like we needed a lot more time than that, and parting was always difficult. But because we had to make such an effort to see each other, we appreciated every minute we spent together. As our relationship progressed, we began to look forward to a time when we would not have to say good-bye.

But Miguel also does much service on his own. When someone in his family is sick, the first thing Miguel does is pray to Heavenly Father to bless him or her. Then he does all he can to help. When his sister Melissa (14) was very ill, he carried things back and forth for her. When his father was sick and was given a priesthood blessing, Miguel listened carefully. Then he leaned his head against his father’s shoulder, gave him a hug, and said, “Papi, you are going to get better.”

“The greatest hardship I passed through on our journey was the day before we got to Laramie. The cattle were tired and footsore and the traveling was very hard so Father told us that morning we must all walk. No riding that day. I shall never forget that memorable walk, sand ankle deep to men and women and much deeper to the cattle and wagons. When we camped that night, we had traveled ten miles. I thought it was a thousand and wished many times that day that I was where people didn’t get tired.”

Freedom
All right team, our goal is freedom. Now let’s get in there and win freedom. We all know what the plays are: congressmen, forwards; judicial branch, guards; legislative branch, center. Now pass that love, dribble that kindness, but most of all make every shot at freedom count. When the game is over, if we win, we’ll really want to hang on to our victory to help our fans live peacefully. The team’s captain is the executive branch. After the game is over we can thank our coach, Heavenly Father. The trophy we will get will be the greatest and most treasured honor that the United States will receive. We will dedicate this game to the freedom fighters of America.
Jim Powner, Age 12Indianapolis, Indiana

One of the missionaries who served with me had a difficult time getting along with companions. I was required to transfer them frequently because they could not take it. Finally, I asked one of my finest missionaries to become his companion, urging him to do all he could to help his fellow missionary love his work. As I approached a conference in the city where they were laboring, I feared he, like his predecessors, would ask for a transfer. To my surprise, when I asked how he was getting along with his companion, he responded: “We are doing great! We discovered we had something in common. Neither of us has been to Africa!”

Another difficulty was synchronization of music and action. The entr’acte, for example, was an interpretive dance, and the dancers were required to perform to music they could not hear. Brother McKay solved the problem by casting one hearing dancer, who was responsible to keep the others in time with the beat. Once again, this was accomplished by means of hidden signals undetectable to the audience. Scott Duge (Red Delicious) and Birdie Herrick (Mother Apple) were kept on cue by Karen, a hearing interpreter for the deaf who took the role of Yellow Delicious. In other sections, actors and dancers maintained correct timing by memorizing counts and order of appearance.

When I had been on my mission in Germany about a year, I was assigned to work with a brand new missionary named Elder Keeler, who had just arrived fresh from converting, so he thought, all the flight attendants on the plane from New York to Frankfurt. Within a few days of his arrival, I was called to a meeting in another city and had to leave him to work in our city with another inexperienced missionary, whose companion went with me. I returned late that night.
The next morning I asked him how his day had gone. He broke into an enthusiastic smile and said he had found a family who would surely join the Church. In our mission, it was rare to see anyone join the Church, let alone a whole family. I asked for more details, but in his excitement he had forgotten to write down either the name or the address. All he could remember was that the family lived on the top floor of a big apartment house. “Oh, that’s great,” I thought to myself as I contemplated all those flights of stairs.
He also explained that he knew so little German that he had exchanged but a few words with the woman who answered the door. But he did think she wanted us to come back—and he wanted to go find her and have me talk to her that very minute.
I explained that the people who don’t slam the door in our faces do not necessarily intend to join the Church. But off we went to find her, mostly to humor him. He couldn’t remember the right street, either, so we picked a likely spot and began climbing up and down those endless polished staircases.
After a frustrating hour, I decided I had to level with him. Based on my many months of experience, I said, it was simply not worth our time to try any longer to find her. I had developed a tolerance for the realities of missionary work and simply knew more than he did about it. His eyes filled with tears and his lower lip began to tremble. “Elder Hafen,” he said, “I came on my mission to find the honest in heart. The Spirit told me that that woman will someday be a member of the Church.” So I decided to teach him a lesson. I raced him up one staircase after another until he was ready to drop, and so was I. “Elder Keeler,” I asked, “had enough?” “No,” he said. “We’ve got to find her.” I began to smolder. I decided to work him until he begged to stop—then maybe he would get the message.
Finally, at the top of a long flight of stairs, we found the apartment. She came to the door. He thrashed my ribs with his elbow and whispered loudly, “That’s her, Elder. That’s the one. Talk to her!”
So I did.
Not long ago, my wife and I were with this woman’s family in the Frankfurt Germany Temple, where the father, now a temple sealer, performed the marriage for their youngest child and her husband. It was a sacred moment for all of us. Earlier he had been a bishop, and the mother was a Relief Society president. Three of their four children have served missions. All four have married in the temple. They are raising righteous families and contributing their strength to the wards where they live. Their lives reflect the fruits that grow from 40 years of living the gospel.
That experience is a lesson I can never forget about the limitations of skepticism and the tolerance for ambiguity that comes with learning and experience. I hope that I will never be so aware of “reality” that I am unresponsive to the whisperings of heaven.

Jonathan Day, 16, of the Los Gatos (California) First Ward, was studying in the Los Gatos city library. It was almost time for his father to pick him up. Suddenly, the bookcases started to sway. Books fell from the shelves, barely missing Jonathan’s head. Earthquake!
Jonathan knew what to do, just what every California school child is drilled to do in case of an earthquake—“duck and cover.”
When Jonathan arrived home, his family found a fissure (a large crack in the ground) running under their house. The bookcases, fastened to the walls, had not tipped over, and his mom’s plate collection, attached with earthquake-proof hangers, was still on the wall. However, their 72-hour kit was another problem.
“Our kit was trapped in the garage,” said Jonathan, “so we couldn’t get to it for 72 hours.”

A priesthood leader was impressed by the “gospel glow” he saw in a sister he was interviewing. When he asked her what the secret of her success was, with moist eyes she replied simply, “Repentance.”
She explained she had married young—and pregnant. Sorrow for her sin was followed by confession to the Lord and to priesthood authorities and commitment to be obedient to the Lord’s commandments.
“It was hard, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone,” she explained. “But Heavenly Father blessed us to make something good out of something bad. The more we struggled to be faithful, the stronger Heavenly Father made us. And the stronger Heavenly Father made us, the easier it was to be faithful.” This woman, her husband, and their baby eventually entered the temple and were sealed as an eternal family.
This sister and her husband found forgiveness and peace in the Healer’s touch. “Now it just amazes me to think of how happy we are as a family,” she said. “The Lord could have given up on us. But he accepted our repentance, and … helped us make something wonderful out of our lives” (quoted in Joseph Walker, “Singing the Song of Redeeming Love,” Ensign, March 1993, 60).

Their hand of fellowship and brotherhood is extended to a special member of their quorum. Nick Schwan was recently baptized. He is mentally challenged and attends the special education classes at their high school. Both at school and at church, he’s one of them. They treat him with kindness and listen to what he has to say. “At first,” says Joe Carson, “we didn’t think Nick really knew what was going on around him, but after a while we realized that he picked up on things and he doesn’t really forget anything. He’s just a normal guy. He’s just a little …” Joe is at a loss for words. He knows how the quorum feels about Nick, and the feeling is good and supportive.

My message centers on the importance in each of our lives of righteous friendships. In my youth, an inspired patriarch laid his hands on my head and by revelation opened to me an understanding of my potential—for who I really am—and gave a direction for my life, just like a patriarch has done for many of you. I was told that I would not lack for friends and associates, that their friendship would be a special blessing to me both temporally as well as spiritually. I was counseled to select for my closest friends those who were righteous and had a desire to keep the commandments of God.

That passage from my patriarchal blessing has been like a comfort blanket to me throughout my life. At times, especially while living away from home, those words have given me a peace and strength—my friends were standing by, although separated by many miles. And at such times I learned one of life’s most important lessons, that no matter how long I was away, no matter how great the distance, whenever my friends and I met again, it was as if nothing had changed. We picked up our lives where we left off, and it was as if time had stood still.

Game Plan Desperate, the principal appointed the student manager to coach the season’s last football game. Beano was smart, but he didn’t know the opposing team very well, or how to handle the media. He also had to get the respect of the team members—and the starting quarterback quit rather than follow Beano’s directions. Full of plays and strategies, on a scale of 1 to 10, this book rates an 11!Thomas J. Dygard10 years and up

In many areas, the offerings are collected each month by the boys who are deacons as they visit each member’s home generally quite early on the Sabbath day. I recall that the boys in the congregation over which I presided had assembled one morning, sleepy-eyed, a bit disheveled, and mildly complaining about arising so early to fulfill their assignment. Not a word of reproof was spoken, but during the following week, we escorted the boys to Welfare Square for a guided tour. They saw firsthand a lame person operating the telephone switchboard, an older man stocking shelves, women arranging clothing to be distributed—even a blind person placing labels on cans. Here were individuals earning their sustenance through their contributed labors. A penetrating silence came over the boys as they witnessed how their efforts each month helped to collect the sacred fast offering funds which aided the needy and provided employment for those who otherwise would be idle.

From that hallowed day forward, there was no urging required by our deacons. On fast Sunday mornings they were present at 7:00, dressed in their Sunday best, anxious to do their duty as holders of the Aaronic Priesthood. No longer were they simply distributing and collecting envelopes. They were helping to provide food for the hungry and shelter for the homeless—all after the way of the Lord. Their smiles were more frequent, their pace more eager, their very souls more subdued. Perhaps now they were marching to the beat of a different drummer; perhaps now they better understood the classic passage, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matt. 25:40.)

My grandparents run an orphanage in Guatemala. My family was going to visit them, so I put a service project together for my birthday. We fixed up dolls to give to the children. I also bought them cars, bubbles, and lollipops with my birthday money. When we handed out the toys, I felt peace and happiness. I knew God was proud of me. I can’t wait to serve others again!
Katie S., age 11, Connecticut, USA

Brother Mark Cutler is a retired surgeon from Clayton, California. He and his wife, Bonnie, serve in Vietnam. Brother Cutler is a consultant and instructor for local physicians. Sister Cutler teaches English and medical terminology to the hospital doctors and staff.

One Saturday, all of our family, except Dad, hurried into the car to attend the wedding of a friend who is not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because we were in such a hurry, I had forgotten to take the directions to the church where the wedding would be held. By the time I realized this, we were very far from home, and it was almost time for the wedding.
The first thing we tried to do was phone Dad. But there was no answer. Next, we drove around the area to try to find the church, but there were so many that it seemed impossible to find the right one in time.
Michael said, “Why don’t we ask Heavenly Father to help us?”
I was a bit embarrassed because I had not thought of praying. I asked him to pray, and he asked Heavenly Father to help us find the church where the wedding was.
In just a few moments, we found it—in time, too. We were very happy that Michael reminded us that Heavenly Father answers prayers and that no prayer is too small for Him to hear. He showed us his great faith in the power of prayer.