Gospel Story Finder

Thirteen-year-old Wid Covey, standing before an audience, volunteered his testimony, “I’m thankful for this Moroni’s Promise program because it helps me understand the scriptures. When I sit down with my dad to read the Book of Mormon he helps me understand about it also. I’m thankful for Michelle Gardner. She calls me every week, and it helps me a lot and she encourages me.”

“We often face things that can shake our faith,” says Patricia Moreira, a member of the Lisbon Portugal Stake who says she has faced such things in the 20 years since she joined the Church alone. “They could be questions from nonmembers, attacks from those opposed to the Church, or even just things we don’t understand.”

“Our foundation is Jesus Christ and His gospel” (see Luke 6:47–48), says Sister Moreira in a conversation on the topic with some of her single adult friends in the stake.

“We need to nurture our faith with daily prayer, daily scripture study, service in our callings, keeping the commandments, doing our best to become better people,” says Sister Moreira, whose mother and sister have joined the Church since she first began building upon the rock. “I believe we need to follow the advice of President Monson to fill our minds with truth, fill our hearts with love, and fill our lives with service.”

One day the senior missionaries, Elder and Sister Haines, came to my house. Elder Haines needed my help. He can read German words but does not understand what some of them mean. He found a story in the Kleiner Liahona (Friend) and read it to me in German. I translated it into English for him so he would know what he was reading. We were a good team!
Even though he doesn’t think so, Elder Haines reads German pretty well. Only once did I have to say to him, “I have no idea what you said.” After my mother helped him with his German pronunciation, I understood him better.
I felt like a real teacher when I translated for Elder Haines. He said he felt sure he could bless the sacrament in German thanks to my help. It made me feel warm and good inside that I could help a missionary.

James walked quietly along the canal bank right behind the tall figure of his father. It was difficult to see through the darkness of the clear June night, but any light would be dangerous.
Elijah and Ellen Gilbert trailed behind Brother Talmage and his son, being careful not to lose sight of them. Although Ellen’s uncertain steps slowed them down, Elijah held tightly to his sister’s hand. He was older and knew the way better.
The water made loud splashing noises as it passed over the old mill wheel, but further down where the four finally stopped the water was much calmer.
James’ father looked slowly in every direction, but there was no one in sight. None of the townspeople in Eddington, England, had seen the eleven-year-old boy leave the village with his father and friends. It was safe to go ahead with the baptism.
Earlier that year, in the spring of 1873, James had become seriously ill. The Talmage family grew concerned about the life of their oldest son. Three years had passed since the time he should have been baptized, and his father thought that perhaps this was the reason for his boy’s sickness. He made a covenant with our Heavenly Father to baptize James as soon as possible if only he could be well again. James recovered and his father was keeping his promise.
The baptism was scheduled at night to avoid any trouble with the villagers.
Mormon beliefs were new and unpopular in the area at that time, and the members of the Church were often treated unfairly.
Brother Talmage stepped into the water and firmly braced his feet so that the current could not upset his balance. Just as he offered a hand to his son, a horrible noise more powerful than a scream broke the calmness of the night. It was a combination of a shriek and a howl and sounded as loud as a thunderclap.
James froze on the bank and Ellen clung to Elijah in fear. Father Talmage was also frightened by the sound and understood his son’s trembling as he stood alone in the dark.
“James, are you too frightened to be baptized tonight?” his father asked. James answered by stepping boldly into the deep canal.
The cold water soaked his thin clothing, but the young boy was unaware of the shivers running down his back. The noise stopped as mysteriously as it began the instant James entered the water. Elijah’s grip loosened on his sister’s hand and they both bowed their heads as Brother Talmage said the sacred words of the baptism. Then his strong arm lowered his son into the water.
Elijah helped James onto the bank as Ellen stepped into the water. She too was baptized a member of the Church and that night made a special promise to our Heavenly Father to keep His commandments.
When they returned home, Brother Talmage told the rest of the family about the strange happening. Surely, he thought, the loud noise reached the house, yet no one heard anything unusual. Questioning the townspeople the next day provided no answers either, for it seemed only the baptismal party shared the experience.
James E. Talmage never understood what caused the strange sound on the night he was baptized. But through his trust in the Lord he had had the courage to be baptized and to obey our Heavenly Father’s commandment. Later in his life he became a great leader and an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In the summer of 1969, my wife, Barbara, and I attended a “sound and light” show in Rome, Italy. We arrived early, and knowing that we would be seated for about two hours, we were standing in front of our chairs. Behind us were four ladies. Two of them were Catholic nuns. We had a delightful conversation with them; they were choice ladies. (In fact, I have never met a Catholic nun who was not a fine person. I wish they were all in the Relief Society somewhere.)

We then talked with the other two women who were of college age. We learned that they were Americans traveling in Europe during summer vacation. We asked them what they were going to be doing when they returned to their homes. One of them, a girl named Cathy, said she would like to go on to graduate school and that she was considering coming to the University of Utah. “If you do come,” I said, “be sure to give us a call and we will have you over to dinner at our home. You could meet the family and then we will show you around the university and Salt Lake City.”

Frankly, I had forgotten about the conversation when in August I was called to the telephone and heard Cathy speaking on the other end of the line. I invited her to our home, she met the family and had dinner with us, and we did what we had agreed to do. We discovered that she had decided she would pursue her graduate studies at the University of Utah.

The next spring we were called to go on a mission to Mexico and lost contact with her, except that each Christmas we would receive a Christmas card. About three years later she wrote on the back of her card, “I thought you would be interested in knowing that I am now teaching dance at Brigham Young University. Last August I was baptized into the Church and that has made all the difference!” Since then she has married in the temple, is rearing and teaching her own family, and has been very active in the Church.

The balloons made their journeys, and much like the parable in the scriptures, some seeds fell on fertile ground. A message written by Laura West in the Salt Lake Cottonwood Height Stake was found by one who desperately needed her encouragement. Laura had written, in part, “Keep your hopes up and rise like the balloon. Always have faith in Christ and Christ will have faith in you.” Her balloon was found only a couple of miles from where it was released. The man who found it wrote to Laura that he was a member of the Church but had fallen away 18 years earlier while he was in his teens. He told of his struggle to be reunited with his wife and children and the decision he made to come back to the Church. He wrote, “I’ve been reading the Book of Mormon and praying since Sunday night (the day after I got your letter). I went to the bishop of my ward that night and told him I knew it was time for me to straighten out my life. … If only you could feel the peace and tranquility that has come to me since I began the reading and prayer. It’s truly like the difference between night and day. To top off my own feelings that I’m on the right track, I picked up your letter. You said you hoped your letter would brighten my day. It not only brightened my day, it was a godsend! I will remember your letter forever.” He signed it “Your friend you’ve never met” and his name.

Several years ago I was speaking with a friend concerning a mutual acquaintance, a man looked upon as highly successful in his vocation. “But what of his activity in the Church?” I asked. To which my friend responded, “He knows in his heart that it is true, but he is afraid of it. He is fearful that if he were to acknowledge his Church membership and live its standards, he would be cut off from the social circle in which he moves.”

I reflected, “The day will come, though possibly not until old age, when in hours of quiet reflection this man will know that he traded his birthright for a mess of pottage (see Gen. 25:34); and there will be remorse and sorrow and tears, for he will come to see that he not only denied the Lord in his own life, but also in effect denied Him before his children, who have grown up without a faith to cling to.”

Elder McKay had little free time. He traveled from Ogden to Salt Lake City for Church meetings after work at least weekly, often nearly missing the train. Sometimes he leaped onto the caboose just in time. He once called to one of the boys in the school who was riding by.
David: Can you give me a ride to the train station?
Boy: Sure, Mr. McKay!

During December 1831 the Prophet and Sidney Rigdon were sent on a mission to proclaim the gospel “unto the world in the regions round about.” From December 4 to the following January 10, they preached to the people of Ohio (D&C 71; see also History of the Church, 1:238–41).

“I have something in my pocket,” Katy told Stan, the school bus driver. She was wearing a new flowered jumpsuit, with extra deep pockets.
“Is it a shiny new quarter?” asked Stan.
“No. I have three quarters, but they’re all at home. I’ll tell you what’s in my pocket on the way home.”
Katy took her seat next to her best friend, Lucy. “I have something in my pocket,” Katy told Lucy.
“Is it candy?” asked Lucy.
“No,” said Katy, “but I brought two cookies in my lunch, so I could share one with you.” Katy and Lucy smiled happily at each other and compared lunches all the way to school.
“I have something in my pocket,” Katy told Mrs. Raker, her teacher.
“Is it a fresh, new pencil?” asked Mrs. Raker.
“No. I have a new pencil, but it’s in my schoolbag.” Katy sat down and put her new pencil in her desk.
At recess, Katy told her classmates, “I have something in my pocket.”
“Is it a ball?”
“Is it a ring?”
“Is it a bug?”
“No, no, no.” Katy smiled mysteriously and reached into her pocket to touch her surprise.
“Is it a hole?”
Everyone laughed. “No,” Katy said, “I don’t have a hole in my pocket.”
“I know—it’s your hand!”
Katy laughed again, because she had just pulled her hand out of her pocket. “No, it’s not my hand.”
“Tell us what’s in your pocket, Katy?”
“I’ll tell you right after school.”
The rest of the day, Katy’s friends wondered what was in her pocket. They peeked at her from behind their books, and giggled at their guesses.
Just before the bell, Lucy raised her hand.
“Yes, Lucy?” said Mrs. Raker.
“May we have a minute to find out what Katy has in her pocket, please?”
“Yes, Lucy. Katy, what do you have in your pocket today?”
“I have a party in my pocket!”
“A party!”
“A party?”
“How can you carry a party in your pocket?”
Katy drew a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “I’m having a birthday party next Saturday, and this invitation is for all of you—Mrs. Raker and Stan-the-bus-driver too. That’s what I was carrying in my pocket.”
The class cheered as Katy tacked her party invitation on the bulletin board. “Hurray! Hurray for Katy’s pocket!”

I had a young missionary come in to visit with me as he returned from the Argentine. I knew his people back in Washington, and he had been kept over to help train some of the other missionaries, until he had been away from home for three years. And I said, “Craig, do you feel like it was a waste of time to be in the mission field, that you ought to have been home getting your education and getting ready to settle down?” He said, “Now listen, bishop, if the Brethren want to make me happy, just let them load me on the plane in the morning and let them send me back to the Argentine.” You can’t put that kind of feeling in the hearts of young people with money. The Lord who creates the feelings of the human breast is the only one who can put that kind of faith into the hearts of his people.

I will share with you an experience I had before I was a General Authority which affected me profoundly. I sat in an airplane next to a man who so strongly expressed his disbelief in God that I bore my testimony to him. “You are wrong, I said, “there is a God. I know He lives!”
He protested, “You don’t know. Nobody knows that! You can’t know it!” When I would not agree with him, the man, who was an attorney, asked perhaps the ultimate question on the subject of testimony. “All right,” he said in a sneering, condescending way, “you say you know. Tell me how you know.”
I felt perhaps, that I had borne my testimony to him unwisely and was at a loss as to what to do. Then something came into my mind. I said to the man, “Let me ask if you know what salt tastes like.”
“Of course I do,” was his reply.
“When did you taste salt last?”
“When I just had dinner here on the airplane.”
“You just think you know what salt tastes like,” I said.
He insisted, “I know what salt tastes like as well as I know anything.”
“If I gave you a cup of salt and a cup of sugar and let you taste them both, could you tell the salt from the sugar?”
“Now you are getting silly,” was his reply. “Of course I could tell the difference. I know what salt tastes like. It is an everyday experience.”
“Then,” I said, “assuming that I have never tasted salt, explain to me just what it tastes like.”
After some thought, he said, “Well, I suppose you could say that it is not sweet and it is not sour.”
“You’ve told me what it isn’t, not what it is.” After several attempts, of course, he could not do it. He could not explain, in words alone, so ordinary an experience as tasting salt. I bore testimony to him once again and said, “I know there is a God. You ridiculed that testimony and said that if I did know, I would be able to tell you exactly how I know. My friend, spiritually speaking, I have tasted salt. I am no more able to tell you in words how this knowledge has come to me than you are able to tell me what salt tastes like. But I say to you again, there is a God! He does live! And just because you don’t know, don’t try to tell me that I don’t know, for I do!”
Since that day, I have never been embarrassed or ashamed that I could not explain in words alone everything I know spiritually. The Apostle Paul said it this way:

I helped my friend who uses a wheelchair move around the schoolyard. I felt that I helped like Jesus would because He always served others.
Paula L., age 8, Chihuahua, Mexico

I am happy to declare that the light has dawned. I received the assignment to dedicate four small meetinghouses in Nigeria. I had seen them under construction—simple, functional, but beautiful—gleaming white against the brilliant greens of the tropical rain forest. The local Saints had helped when they could, and the sisters deserve special mention for carrying water on their heads for two or three miles to the building sites.

In each new chapel, as we took our places on the stand, we paused to shake hands with the local chiefs who had been invited to attend and to occupy the front seats. They were dignified in their robes, each carrying a chief’s cane. The head chief at each chapel graciously accepted the invitation to address the congregation. Of course, they used different words, but they expressed the same powerful sentiments: “You are the light of this community. You have brought us the true gospel. Thank you for coming.” Did not the Savior exhort us, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16)? Oh, that we might all be a light to our respective communities!

One summer I took my son and his friends through some canyons in southern Utah. On the last day of our trip, we hiked through Muddy Creek, a narrow, water-carved sandstone canyon. Muddy Creek has the greatest mud on earth! It was simply wonderful!
Skating and sliding along the creek bank was sheer delight to those boys. Though they did not dwell on the majesty of the setting, I think their reactions revealed something just the same. I watched the boys sliding wildly across the mud, saw their fascination with the sound it made as they pulled their feet out of it, and watched the exhilaration of their races over it. Occasionally in life we get the feeling that we are being watched; there is a certain silence that causes us to look around. That day I felt that silence and sheepishly looked to see if anyone was watching. No one was there, but Someone was watching. I could feel his delight in our delight.

The Young men of the Sunderland Ward, Sunderland England Stake, held a fund-raiser to provide subscriptions to the New Era for the inactive young men of the ward.

They auctioned off their Young Men president to do gardening, decorating, shopping, and car washing. Chiltern MacNaught, a priest, used his talent of ballroom dancing to hold a sponsored dance. Now every active and inactive Aaronic priesthood holder in the ward enjoys a monthly issue of the New Era.

On 24 November 2016, as Sister Kasimbe returned home after an honourable missionary service, her mission president gave her $50 for eventualities during her trip home. She travelled safely and there were no eventualities. Upon her return home, she handed the $50 to her stake president, who in turn gave it back to the mission president. She later learnt from her stake president that her mission president said that she was one of the very few missionaries who returned such funds. Sister Kasimbe knew that she was returning home, where such money would go a long way, since her mother was striving to afford the necessities of life. Sister Kasimbe knew too that this was not her money. She was determined to be totally honest with great integrity even if that meant sleeping on an empty stomach. She tells her own experience: “When I arrived at home, life was difficult. My mother sacrificed her earnings for my welcoming home party. After two days at home, we were struggling to have meals on the table, so I prayed for a miracle. Soon after my prayer, I felt to look in my tithing envelope in which I found $10, which was a great miracle for my family”.

I guess everybody at some time longs to feel important and to do something that will be remembered by the people of the world—something that will change the course of history and become legendary because of its momentous impact on society. At least that’s the way I felt when I was a teenager.
Of course, I could dream of being rich and famous, or of making a major scientific discovery, or of being the first woman on the moon or in the White House, but somehow I knew those things were not within the realms of probability. At least not for me.
I was not exactly what you might call an outstanding person. I don’t really remember standing out in anything, except maybe the rain. I was a great follower, but never a leader. I knew I’d never be class valedictorian or win any contests or talent shows, and I was too uncoordinated in sports to excel. It’s not that I didn’t try or didn’t care. I was just shy and lacked self-confidence. So how could a person like me possibly make a difference?
I asked my mother what she thought. She said getting through the school year without getting any C’s on my report card would certainly make a difference when it came time for me to go to college. I knew she was right, but that wasn’t the kind of thing I had in mind. I thought of rewriting the school constitution or taking a petition around for people to sign, but I couldn’t think of what to change in the constitution or what to petition for.
When I finally started to run out of ideas and hope, I turned to the Lord. I asked him to help me find something that wouldn’t take any special talents or qualifications, but would help me feel I was making a worthwhile contribution. Nothing earth-shattering just something suited to my capabilities.
It wasn’t long afterwards that I got this genius idea. It was so right for me that I knew it had to be inspired—I never would have thought of it myself. The idea was that I should get to know people’s names—everyone that I came in contact with on a regular basis—and greet them by name whenever I saw them.
I started with my own neighborhood and learned the names of everyone—even the children and pets. Then I went on to memorize the names of all my ward members. When I had successfully completed that, I started on my high school.
It was a big school in a large city and it took me quite a while, but I did it. I didn’t pay any attention to racial or clique boundaries. At first I felt a little strange saying hello and calling people by name that I didn’t even know, and I embarrassed myself quite a few times by accidentally calling people by the wrong name, but I got better at it as time went on.
It became a game to see how many new names I could learn in a day. Once in a while I got some puzzled looks and some questions like, “Are you trying to win an election or something?” But for the most part, everyone acted like they really appreciated it.
Did it make a difference? I think so. Once Brother Barton, the oldest man in the ward said to me, “Young lady, I think you are the only young person in this ward who knows my name. It sure is nice when you speak to me and remember who I am.” Then one day at school I found an anonymous note stuck into my locker that said, “Thanks for saying hi to me today. I’m new at school and I didn’t think anyone even knew my name. Thanks for making me feel welcome.” I even got to like some of the people I’d previously thought were unfriendly or snobbish. When I started being nice to them and calling them by name, they were usually very nice in return.
The greatest difference it made, though, was in me. My whole attitude changed. I didn’t feel average or ordinary anymore. I felt that I was a special person who was doing something worthwhile because I was helping others. I could see them light up inside whenever I said their name and greeted them with a smile. It may have made only a small difference to them, but with the Lord’s help, it made a big difference to me.

“Prioritizing seminary is easier said than done. But as you pray and think about why spiritual learning is important, the decision won’t be as hard. It helped me get to know my Savior, draw closer to Him, and grow with Him.”
Dzuliah, 19

While serving as the elders quorum president of his married student ward, Ron became acquainted with Jon Huntsman Sr., the ward’s high council adviser. Jon was immediately impressed with the way Ron ran the quorum.
“He had incredible leadership and organizational skills,” recalls Elder Huntsman, who served as an Area Seventy from 1996 to 2011. “I thought it unusual that a young man who was still in college could run a quorum in such a way.”
For several months, Jon watched Ron turn ideas into action as he completed priesthood duties. When a senior marketing position opened at Jon’s company—which would become Huntsman Chemical Corporation—he concluded that Ron had the skills he wanted and offered him the job. The position started the following week in Ohio, USA.
“I told Melanie, ‘I’m not going to drop out of school and move,’” Ron recalls. “I’ve worked my whole life to graduate from college, and I’m finally close to my goal.”
Melanie reminded Ron that finding a good job was why he was in school.
“What are you worried about?” she asked. “I know how to pack and move. I’ve been doing it my whole life. I’ll let you call your mother every night. Let’s go.”
Jon’s confidence in Ron proved well placed. Under Jon’s mentorship, Ron advanced quickly in the growing company, becoming its president and chief operating officer in 1986. He traveled extensively for the company—both domestically and internationally. Despite his busy schedule, Ron tried to be home on weekends. And when he traveled, he would occasionally take family members with him.