Gospel Story Finder

At a conference on religious persecution and forced migration held at Windsor Castle in England in September, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said there is much to learn from the experience of early LDS pioneers that could help modern-day refugees rise above their circumstances. “Whenever possible, we should facilitate and perpetuate the unique identities of refugees and highlight stories from their past,” he said.

Following the publication of the Book of Mormon in March 1830, Joseph Smith and his clerks began work on what is now known as the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, a prophetic revision of the King James Version.19 By Joseph’s account, using the Nephite interpreters for this translation project was not an option because he no longer had them.
Joseph’s history explains that “by the wisdom of God, [the plates and interpreters] remained safe in my hands, until I had accomplished by them what was required at my hand. When, according to arrangements, the messenger called for them, I delivered them up to him; and he has them in his charge until this day” (Joseph Smith—History 1:60).
As President Brigham Young (1801–77) explained it, “Joseph put the U[rim and] T[hummim] back with the plates when he [h]ad done translating.”20

When I was a child, I loved building houses in the sandbox. I have the same fun now, except now my ideas turn into real buildings. I love seeing something from my imagination become real.

In February 1853, to the pioneer congregation huddled in shawls and wraps against the chill, Brigham Young recalled, “I scarcely ever say much about revelations, or visions, but suffice it to say, five years ago last July I was here, and saw in the Spirit the Temple. … I have not inquired what kind of a Temple we should build. Why? Because it was represented before me. I have never looked upon that ground, but the vision of it was there. I see it as plainly as if it was in reality before me.”

According to Wilford Woodruff, President Young’s address was “a most thrilling speech of about thirty minutes” that was “heard distinctly in all parts of the vast assembly.” It is clear that Brigham Young could hardly contain his joy as he began: “We have assembled on one of the most solemn, interesting, joyful, and glorious occasions, that ever has, or will transpire among the children of men, while the earth continues in its present organization, and is occupied for its present purposes; and I congratulate my brethren and sisters that it is our unspeakable privilege to stand here, this day, and minister before the Lord, on an occasion which has caused the tongues and pens of prophets to speak and write for many scores of centuries.”

Then Heber C. Kimball, First Counselor in the First Presidency, struck the frozen ground “with a pick … and President Young took out the first turf.” He closed the meeting with a triumphant blessing of the Saints, to which all assembled responded, “Amen!” The congregation then “rushed to the hole to get a chance to throw a little dirt out.” Some “one hundred and fifty laborers, I should judge continued the work,” wrote Lorenzo Brown, another participant in the events.

Reader 3: Brother Lopez, down the street, lives by himself—alone!
He’s an older man at church who doesn’t want a phone.
I found out he likes toy trains. Guess what? I have a bunch!
Dad and I now visit him with trains and tracks and lunch.

Not long ago I had the opportunity to return with Sister Wirthlin to the place where I began my mission. My assignment was to organize the Salzburg Austria Stake. In a way it was a coming home for me. I remembered the days that I walked those cobblestone streets and wondered if there ever would be enough members to form a small ward. And here I was, years later, organizing a stake. My heart filled to overflowing as I looked over that congregation of faithful members and as I remembered the time I spent there.
As I look back on it now, I wonder if those times of trial and loneliness weren’t instrumental in strengthening my character and heightening my desire to succeed. Those times of seeming failure may have been some of the most instrumental of my life, because they prepared me for greater things to come.
While there, I traveled with my wife to Oberndorf. We walked the same road my companion and I had walked so many years before. And there, before the majestic mountains and pristine beauty of that small Bavarian village, I related to her once again of the silent night when I described to my companion the woman I would marry.

David looked proudly at his project. He had worked very hard to make it perfect for Mommy. He had even stayed in at recess to finish it instead of play dodgeball with the rest of his first-grade class.
He had started out with a large sheet of plain white paper. Then he had carefully cut out bright yellow flowers, curly red flowers, and big orange flowers with long petals. Next, he had carefully glued them one by one onto his paper. With green crayons of two different shades, he had drawn tall stems and wavy leaves on all the flowers. In the very center of the largest yellow flower, he carefully spelled out “I love you.”
“What a beautiful garden, David,” said his teacher. “Your mother will be very pleased.”
“Thank you,” David answered politely. “I made it big so it would be special.”
After school, he went to the back of the room to get his jacket. He set his lunch box and the picture on the floor while he put on his jacket. When he reached down to pick up his picture, he heard an awful tearing sound. His foot had been on the edge of the paper, and a big piece tore completely off. Sadly, David threw the piece away. The rest was still big enough to be special, but not as big as he had wanted it to be.
He started walking home, holding Mommy’s picture carefully in one hand and his lunch box in the other. As he passed Mrs. Johnson’s house, the picture caught on a branch of her rosebush. One whole corner was ripped into shreds. He tore it off and threw it into a nearby dumpster. He hoped Mommy would like what was left of her picture, even though it wasn’t very big anymore.
A sudden gust of wind tore the paper from his grasp at the corner of his block. He chased it down the sidewalk and finally caught up with it, but not before it had landed partway in a puddle. Nearly everything that was left of Mommy’s garden picture was soggy.
As David entered his own yard, he tossed the damaged part into the big trash can near the gate, saving only the yellow flower that said “I love you.” He trudged into the house. “I have something for you, Mommy,” he called.
“What is it, honey?” she asked, coming to give him a big welcome-home hug.
“It’s a flower. It was a whole garden, and it was special because it was big, but this is all there is left.” He held the yellow flower out to her.
“Why, David, this is perfect!” exclaimed Mommy, taking the flower and giving him another big hug. “And it’s just the right size!”
She went over to the table, picked up her purse, and took out her new wallet. “Look,” she said. “It fits into the last empty window in my wallet. I can take my special flower with me everywhere I go, and it will remind me of the special boy who made it for me!”
David grinned a big, happy, “I love you” grin.

Motoi has one of the world’s cutest smiles. He smiled earlier than anyone else in the family, and he’s smiled often ever since. Although he is a little cautious, he’s always willing to follow his big brothers’ examples and grow stronger. It was hard for him to learn to swim because he didn’t like putting his face into the water. He worked on the task a whole summer until he could swim just fine.

Sister Rinne received her first missionary assignments after she moved to Jyväskylä, where she served twice as a district missionary. “In those days there were so many baptisms in Jyväskylä you could hear the roar of the water,” she recalls. “The Lord just sent us the people who were ready to hear the gospel.”
One of Anna-Liisa Rinne’s companions as a district missionary was Sister Kerttu Harinen, who has many good memories of that time. “Sister Rinne was my first companion in missionary work. I myself was still a little timid. I grew at her side and received courage enough to serve as a district missionary for many years afterwards. Our first investigator was baptized before we had been companions one month. We had asked that we could practice our missionary discussions with a family whose father did not belong to the Church. So it happened that as the result of our ‘practice’ the father of the family was baptized.”

“I’m not going,” I whined. “I don’t have a thing to wear!” The weekly Sunday ritual had begun.
At that moment, my brother rolled his eyes and said, “You have more clothes than anyone I know. You just never wear them.”
“Stay out of this!” I snapped, looking to my mom for support. “Mom, are you listening to me?”
She just looked at me, and I knew what was coming next. I placed my hands on one of the chairs, preparing myself for the long, boring lecture. But I was wrong. Mom just sat there looking at me.
The silence was about to drive me crazy when she finally spoke. “Julie, there comes a time when you have to decide just why it is you’re going to church. Is it a fashion show, or is it a time to worship the Lord?” When she finished, she stood up and left the room.
What was she trying to do to me, I wondered. No arguing? No lecture? All I wanted was a new dress. Ugh, I felt so guilty.
I walked to my bedroom to try to find something to wear. I opened the closet doors, fixing my eyes on my dresses. I picked up each one, finding an excuse not to wear it.
“I never expected her to run right out and buy me a dress,” I mumbled. “But I only have two dresses that I really like; the rest are ugly.” I was trying to make myself feel better, but it wasn’t working. I felt so selfish and guilty. I began to think of all the people who weren’t as fortunate as I was. I was about ready to cry. How could I be so selfish?
After putting on a dress, I knelt beside my bed to tell the Lord how sorry I was. Then I went to tell my mom the same thing. But when I went upstairs, no one was there. They had already gone to church. Although I could walk over by myself, I couldn’t believe they had actually left me.
I hadn’t been serious about missing church. But when I realized my family had gone without me, I felt even worse as my mom’s words rang in my ears, “There comes a time when you have to decide …”
Mom was right. Every week at church I only cared about what others thought of me, not what the Lord thought. That’s when a familiar scripture came to my mind.
“For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7).
It was at that moment I decided my Sunday best had nothing to do with my wardrobe. My Sunday best was about the attitude in my heart.

“Doctor Evans, we’re ready for you to begin.”
Justin looked down at the man on the operating table. There was a line drawn on the man’s stomach. Justin was wearing a surgical robe and a mask. There were rubber gloves on his hands. Nurses and others in green surgical gowns were all waiting for him to begin the operation.
There was, however, one tiny problem—Justin was 15 years old and didn’t know anything about surgery.
“So what do I do, just cut on the dotted line?” he joked.
Nobody laughed. “Doctor, we need to begin right away,” the woman next to him said.
“Doctor Sanchez is right,” a man said. “We need to begin right away.”
“Let’s see, I guess we need some kind of a knife or something.”
A nurse shoved a scalpel in his hand. Justin looked down at the stomach. He cleared his throat. “Give me a hint here, should I slice this guy deep or shallow?”
“Are you all right?” the woman they called Doctor Sanchez asked.
“Is this guy going to bleed a lot if I cut him open? I really can’t stand the sight of blood.”
“Would you like me to take over?” Doctor Sanchez said.
“Yes, please.”
The woman traded places, took up the scalpel, and cut along the line on the man’s stomach.
“Oh, gross,” Justin said a few minutes later upon seeing for the first time the exposed inside of the man. But after a while he got used to it.
After the operation as he removed the surgical gloves and gowns, Doctor Sanchez came over to him. “You and your practical jokes,” she said. “For a moment there it sounded like you didn’t know anything about what was going on.”
Justin smiled. “Yeah, right.”
A nurse came in the room. “Dr. Evans, your wife called.”
“I have a wife?” he blurted out.
Everyone in the room smiled.
“She left a number for you to call. She said it was important.”
He went to a phone and dialed the number. A woman answered.
“This is Justin.”
“Listen, I need to ask you something. Did you send in the house payment last month?”
“Do we own a house?”
“The bank called to say they haven’t got our payment yet.”
“I know I’m married to you, but could you tell me your name once again. I guess I’ve forgotten it. You know how I am with names.”
“Justin, this is no time for games. The deadline for Howard to enter the race for city commission is Thursday. He needs to know what you did with the petitions you handled for him.
“What color hair do you have? And when did we meet each other?”
There was a long pause, and then she said, “All right, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m 15 years old, and I’m not a doctor, and I’m not married, and I don’t have any idea who you are or who Howard is or what petitions you’re talking about. Basically that’s it.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“How will I recognize you?”
“I’ll come to your office.”
“I have an office then, right?” he asked. Saying good-bye, he hung up and walked the halls until he found a door with his name on it. He stepped inside and sat behind the desk and tried to figure out what was going on.
A few minutes later someone knocked on the door. He opened the door and let her in. It was a woman.
“Are you my wife?” he asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“How nice to meet you. What’s your name?”
“Lori.”
“Lori, can you help me? I seem to be having a bad day. I don’t belong here. You know what I think? I think this whole thing is a dream.”
“You mean, here, right now, even me?”
“Yes, that’s what I think.”
“Why don’t you wake up then, if it’s just a dream?”
“I don’t know how to make myself wake up.”
“Pinch yourself.”
He pinched himself. Nothing happened.
“It must not be a dream then,” she said.
“But maybe I only dreamed I pinched myself, and it really is a dream.”
“If it is a dream, it’ll end soon, and you can get on with your life.”
“Maybe so. While you’re here, can I ask a few questions before this ends? On the phone you kept talking about mortgage payments and some kind of a petition for Howard.” He paused. “I guess the main thing I want to know is if being grown up is any fun at all?”
“Most of the time it is. Especially if you prepare for it when you’re young.”
“How do you prepare for it?”
“You make goals of what you want out of life. Then you work to achieve those goals.”
“Sounds boring.”
“Not really. Do you know what you always tell me?”
“To have pizza for supper more often?”
“Yeah, that too, but also you say, ‘If you can dream it, if you can plan it, if you can work hard for it, you can achieve it.’”
He smiled. “I say that? Sounds good.” He looked at her more closely. “Where did we get married?”
“In the temple.”
“That’s good, isn’t it? I’m glad we did.”
“The reason it happened is that when we were both young, even though we didn’t know each other, we both decided to plan for a temple marriage.”
“When you’re 15, like I am now, it’s kind of hard to think about planning for something that’s years away.”
“The tallest buildings have the deepest foundations.”
“Do I say that too sometimes?”
“No, I do,” she said with a smile.
“You’re smart, aren’t you? And attractive.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s been nice to meet you. Thanks for talking to me. Do we have kids?”
“Yes. Two with one on the way.”
“You’re pregnant now? It doesn’t show.”
“It will,” she put her hand on his shoulder. “Do you want me to drive you home?”
“No, I think I’ll just hang around here until I wake up from my dream, and then I’ll be 15 for real, and I’ll go on with my life.”
“Don’t forget to prepare for the future. It’s kind of important to me because I’m in your future. I’ll be doing some preparing too.”
“Should we kiss or something?” he said as she got ready to leave.
And then he woke up.
Doctor Sanchez was standing in the doorway. “Doctor Evans, we’re ready for you to begin the operation now.”
He stood up and looked around his office. “I must have dozed off. I had the strangest dream.”
“You’ve been working very hard lately. Oh, your wife called. She said Howard needs the petitions.”
“I’ll call him after the operation.”
Minutes later he stared down at the exposed stomach of a man on the operating table.
“Let’s see now. I just cut along the dotted line, right?”
Once again, nobody laughed.

Following his enlistment, he enrolled in Brigham Young University, where he reconnected with Kalleen Kirk, a young woman he had become acquainted with while stationed in Germany. Steven and Kalleen eventually married in the Salt Lake Temple on August 8, 1980. They are the parents of four children.

My bishop and I sat in his small, organized office. He peered at me through his glasses. “A patriarchal blessing is like a blessing from Heavenly Father. And as you go through life, little by little, more of your blessing will make sense.”
I got up from the small wooden chair and shook the bishop’s hand. He then gave me a patriarchal blessing recommend. I thanked him and left the office.
Lately I had been pondering some questions. Does Heavenly Father really love me? Does he really know who I am? Does he know me individually and love me for who I am, not just because I’m one of his daughters?
I would try to come up with as many answers as I possibly could. “God loves you because you’re his daughter,” my teachers would tell our class during Young Women lessons.
“You should feel special because you’re a child of God,” my Primary teachers had told me.
I knew those things were true. I knew he loved me. I knew I was a child of God. But would Heavenly Father be able to point me out among all of his children? Did he love me for my qualities, my personality?
I rode to the church house with my mother and walked briskly to that small office where the patriarch was waiting. He was an elderly man with a smile and soft, kind eyes.
He gave us a quick review of what a patriarchal blessing is and how sacred it is. He then put his hands on my head and began talking for my Heavenly Father.
I listened closely to every word he said. I felt the Spirit so strongly at times I couldn’t help crying. I received the answer my heart had wanted to hear: “I assure you that your Heavenly Father knows you well and loves you.” The patriarch also mentioned several things only my Heavenly Father knew. I felt a complete feeling of love and caring.
I know now that my Heavenly Father loves me and knows me, just as he does each of you. He loves you for who you are.

I was taking the sacrament one day when I suddenly felt the Lord’s love rest upon me, comforting and wonderful. I didn’t know why it came to me right then, but I thought it was the greatest feeling in the world. It was complete joy and love.
As I sat there, I started to think of how undeserving I was of His love, and I wondered why I was so blessed. I hadn’t done everything right, but still I was forgiven, time after time. I was blessed beyond measure, and I wondered how I could deserve such treatment.
In my life, I have been taught about Christ. He is perfect and deserved everything. Instead, he received the bitter cup. He went below all things and suffered so much. He did not deserve it, but He accepted it. He suffered so I, who felt so undeserving, could receive countless blessings, and so I could return to live with God. I receive so many blessings through and because of Christ. His love is so strong He was willing to suffer for me and for everyone. I am grateful for Him and his sacrifice.

Dick Whittington This English orphan became rich—thanks to a cat!—and was elected mayor of London three times. While no one knows for sure about his childhood, Dick Whittington was a real person, and the legend of his life is beloved in Great Britain.Kathleen Lines7–10 years

There was a hailstorm in Monterrey, Mexico, last night, and this morning the unpaved roads are rivers of mud. Sister Miriam Sosa and Sister Laura Alcala bundle up in sweaters and coats. (It’s not always sunny here!) The sturdy shoes they’re wearing have seen muddy streets before.
You’d think these two had known each other their whole lives. They’re certainly best friends now. Both have a bright excitement in their eyes and a spirit of enthusiasm as they speak. Both are third-generation Latter-day Saints. Both have fathers who have been stake presidents and brothers who are currently serving missions.
Most important, both are filled with the spirit of missionary work. Although some may say it is hard to give fifteen discussions here in a week, they’ve given over sixty-five a week more than once.
“Consecration is the only way,” says Sister Sosa. Her humility is genuine. “We have put absolutely all our confidence in the Lord.”
“And we truly love the people we’re teaching,” adds Sister Alcala. “We want to share what we have with everybody.”
During Sister Sosa’s eight months in the field, she has had fifty-five baptisms. Most are complete families and are preparing for the temple. They’ll have ten more baptisms this weekend.
As they slip and slide through the muddy streets this morning, they joke about getting stuck or falling down. But they’ll do neither; their pace is quick and sure. They knock on the door of a tiny house: the parents aren’t home, but the grandpa and three granddaughters are. A single bulb lights the room. The toothless grandpa, blind in one eye and complaining of a sore arm, has a lot to say—but he listens, too. The oldest granddaughter holds the youngest on her lap; she and the middle sister listen attentively, read scriptures, and answer questions correctly. At the end, one of the girls offers a prayer and the missionaries leave, promising to return when the parents are home.
More mud. Now they cross a field, singing “I Am a Child of God.” At their next stop, they teach another discussion. Afterward, the mother says she felt good during the lesson. “That’s the Spirit of God bearing witness to your heart that these things are true,” says Sister Alcala. The family promises to come to Church on Sunday.
Back out in the street, the sister missionaries squeal their delight. As they round another muddy corner, Sister Sosa exclaims, “This is such a beautiful place to work!”

Everybody knows that pine trees come from plain old nuts. And when the Munns family decided to grow pine trees to pay for their missions, some people thought the Munnses were just that—nuts.
To begin with, April and Ranier Munns of Longwood, Florida, have 13 children. That’s pretty unusual by many people’s standards. Then there was the matter of the big pine tree nursery they started in their backyard. That’s not exactly conventional, either. But then, the Munnses have never been that concerned about what’s conventional.
What April and Ranier were concerned about was the fact that theirs was a family with great potential for missionary service. They also knew that they could end up with three or four sons on a mission at one time. So during one family meeting, they discussed the possibility of setting up a tree nursery in the three-and-a-half-acre vacant pasture behind the house. It seemed an ideal solution, since they had three or four years to earn the needed money.
Once they decided on a project, things just started to happen. From a nursery in Sanford that was going out of business they bought, for 50 cents apiece, about 400 slash pines planted in one-gallon buckets. The trees were small, only 12–18 inches tall, but the Munnses knew that with hard work and care, the potential was there.
Then the family purchased about 5,000 bare root seedlings from the Florida Department of Forestry and bought used three-gallon buckets to plant them in. “We had a family night and got the assembly line started,” Leah says.
“One person put dirt in the bucket,” Jacob continues, “one person used the planter Grandad made for us to make a hole in the dirt, and another put the seedling in and passed it to the next person who added more dirt and watered the tree.” Then the responsibilities of weeding, fertilizing, and watering the seedlings were assigned and divided among the family members. “All of us worked,” Daniel recalls.
Ryan remembers, “My friends thought it was a little bit bizarre that we worked so hard to go on a mission instead of applying the money to college or using it for a car. We’d work in the trees in the mornings and get green stains on our hands that we couldn’t get out before class. I remember somebody asking me if I had a disease because of the green stuff on my hands.”
Eventually they had 6,000 slash pines and 700 oak trees. Jacob reports, “Raising the trees was not easy. Dad would wake us up before school to work an hour before we got ready for classes. And in the afternoons and Saturdays, when the rest of my friends were bowling, fishing, camping or going to movies, parties, and football games, we were picking weeds.”
Daniel says, “Our friends called our house ‘The Plantation,’ and those who came to stay overnight or for weekends knew we had to get up early on Saturday mornings. But they didn’t mind. Most of them didn’t have chores at their own homes, so they had fun riding the tractor around the nursery, hauling dirt, and filling buckets. They’d move trees and work along with us.
“Rain or shine, we’d always be down there. We liked working in the rain best because then you didn’t perspire and the weeds were easier to pull. Sometimes when we picked the weeds out of the pots, we’d find surprises. Like huge piles of ants—we’d be working fast and not even looking at our hands and wouldn’t realize until the ants started biting that we were in a fire ant bed. We occasionally found snakes and spiders. Once we caught a six-foot albino rat snake.”
An opportunity arose for them to sell the trees when they were three to four feet high for seven or eight dollars apiece. But the family decided to continue with the nursery as the boys were not yet old enough for missions. It was at this time that all 6,000 trees were transplanted into 15-gallon containers. That meant handling each tree, one by one, getting the dirt for them, and changing the sprinkler system. In the following two years, the trees grew from four feet tall to between eight and twelve feet tall.
Despite the hard work, the family recalls the Mission Pines Nursery as a positive experience, and they laugh as they recall the difficult times.
Collin tells how “one morning Dad said we all had to get up because 75 percent of the trees were on the ground. Some of the rain and winds from Hurricane Andrew had come through during the night. Luckily, slash pines just bend with the wind.”
But there was as much fun as work. Sometimes they’d take a break from the heat by jumping into the pool or by spraying each other with the hose. And there was still time for high school sports, Scouting, and the boys’ favorite activity of all—fishing. In fact, it was during this time that Collin caught a 250-pound blue marlin.
Finally, the spring arrived when the family contacted potential buyers. Many trees went to Atlanta, Georgia, in preparation for the 1996 Summer Olympics and to the Miami area for reconstruction after Hurricane Andrew. Others were sold to Disneyworld or to the state of Florida. Ranier says, “We had prayed about the trees and taken good care of them. The largest landscaping nursery in Florida, which never bought from other nurseries, came down and looked at our trees. It was the first time they bought directly from another nursery and put their labels on them.”
The Lord answered their prayers. The Munnses were able to sell, not only the trees, but the mats, the old three-gallon buckets, the stakes, and the bamboo. The only thing left in the pasture was the large patch of brown grass where the trees used to stand.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and Chris Tollstrup was glad to be going to Church with his family—Dad, Mom, Annie, Ryan, and Nicholas. They all just fit on one of the side benches in the chapel. During sacrament meeting, and especially when the bread and water were being passed by the deacons, Chris tried to think about the Savior, as his parents had taught him.
Afterward he went to his Primary class and was greeted by his teacher and friends. The teacher began the lesson by holding up several drawings and asking the class what they thought Jesus Christ would do if He saw each of the situations pictured.
One was a picture of a little girl who had fallen down and skinned her knee. There were also pictures of a boy finding a wallet with a lot of money in it, a beach covered with garbage, a girl eating all alone in the lunch room at school, a child lost in a shopping mall, and a mother who was overwhelmed by all the housework she had to do. It wasn’t too hard to decide that in each case Christ would have been helpful, loving, honest, and kind.
Monday is garbage day in Chris’s neighborhood, and the truck that comes to pick up and empty the garbage cans always seems to drop some trash along the side of the road as it goes from house to house. On the Monday after the lesson about following the Savior’s example, Chris’s Primary teacher was driving home after work. She noticed Chris halfway up the street, lugging a garbage bag that was almost full and nearly as big as he was. She slowed down and watched for a minute. He was picking up the paper and other trash the truck had dropped that day and putting it in the bag. She rolled down the window of her car and asked, “Chris, what are you doing?”
“Do you remember the picture of the beach we looked at in Primary class yesterday?” he asked. “Well, I’m trying to do what Jesus Christ might do if He saw our street today.”

In today’s world, making Sunday a holy day will surely set us apart—giving us chances to share the gospel in a natural way as others notice the difference in our weekly routine. The Davies family experienced this while living on the island of Grenada with their young daughter, Adrielle. “None of Adrielle’s friends are members of the Church, and while many of them believe in God, Sunday to them is simply another day of the weekend,” explained Sister McKenzie Lawyer Davies, Adrielle’s mother.

A few months ago, Adrielle was invited to a birthday party at a movie theater on Sunday. Her family decided to drop off a gift instead of going to the movie and party. “Because we simply stopped by to wish them well, we were able to share our beliefs about the Sabbath with them in a friendly and open way,” Sister Lawyer Davies said. “It made me happy that my little girl was already sharing the gospel.”

In these times of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have learned new ways to remember Him. Our regular meetings and classes now occur in our homes, sometimes via technology. Our ministering one-to-one has become one-call-one. Our study of our Savior in the scriptures happens in our home, with the Come, Follow Me curriculum. Our partaking of the sacrament is predominantly in our homes or the homes of others in small group gatherings. We have not missed a step along the covenant path but have learned new ways to do the will of our Savior and Redeemer, because we remember Him always.