Gospel Story Finder

This Mutual activity in the Torcy Ward, Paris France East Stake, was a total knockout. Of course there was no fighting or actual injury involved. The youth were only simulating injuries so they could learn about different first-aid techniques.

Ruby didn’t like to put on her socks. She didn’t like to put on her shoes. She liked Mom to do it for her. But Mom couldn’t today. Mom was taking care of Ruby’s baby brother, Ezra.
It was Sunday. It was time for church. Ruby cried about putting on her socks. She cried about putting on her shoes. Her family was late for church.
On Monday night, it was time for family home evening. The family sang a song. Mom said a prayer. Ruby’s big brother, Danny, gave the lesson.
Danny read a story from the Bible. The story was about Noah. God asked Noah to build a ship. Other people made fun of Noah. But Noah did what God asked.
“When we choose the right, we feel happy,” Danny said. “When we choose the right, it makes Heavenly Father and Jesus happy too.”
Ruby thought about that. She didn’t feel happy when she cried about her socks and shoes. Maybe she could make a better choice.
The next day, Mom needed to go to the store. “Ruby, please put your socks and shoes on,” Mom said. “I’ll get Ezra dressed.”
Ruby started to cry. She didn’t want to put on her socks. Or her shoes. Then she remembered the story from family night. She could choose the right!
Ruby put on her socks and shoes. She brushed her hair. She put on her coat. “I’m ready,” she said.
Mom smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re getting so grown up.”
Mom’s smile made Ruby happy.

My father, who was an artist, helped me understand this concept when I was a boy. He drew me a picture of a knight in armor and labeled the critical elements of “the whole armor of God” as described in the scriptures (see Ephesians 6:11–17; D&C 27:15–18). That picture hung in my bedroom and became a reminder of what we need to do to remain true and faithful to gospel principles.

Suddenly it dawned on me. What about a mission. Oh sure, I always told my friends and family that I would go. I even told my employer I was planning on a mission. But all of that seemed unimportant now. All I could see was personal satisfaction, and I didn’t care what kind of spiritual development I’d surely miss. The voice of the prophet still echoed in my mind, “Every young man is to fulfill a mission.” But the thought always came back, “In two years’ time, look how far you could be as a paramedic.”
I didn’t know what to do! I knew deep down in my heart that a mission was the right thing, but I was so terribly blinded by worldly greed. The decision to go or not to go was constantly on my mind. I thought about it from the time I got up until the time I went to bed at night. Because we worked 24-hour shifts, I had lots of time to think.
One night right after I had gone to bed, I was awakened by the ring of the telephone. The highway patrol was calling for an ambulance to respond to a car-truck accident on the freeway, and soon I was at the scene of a two-car accident. A small car had run into the back of a semitrailer loaded with wooden fence posts. The badly mangled car had two occupants—a young couple that had recently been married. The husband, who was driving, had been killed instantly. His wife was critically injured. We worked desperately to save the slowly fading life of that beautiful nineteen-year-old woman. I thought to myself, How could something so terrible happen to this fine couple and totally destroy their future plans and happiness?
We rushed her to the hospital, where a team of highly trained doctors and nurses were waiting. Soon a helicopter arrived to transport her to a hospital in Salt Lake City, where she could receive special treatment for a severe head injury.
After I calmed down from the shock of such a terrible accident, I remembered talking to the highway patrolman who would be responsible for notifying the next of kin. I’ll never forget the solemn look on his face, and the glaze of tears in his eyes as he drove away. I thought to myself, What a horrible assignment! What if they were my parents being notified? Then another thought came to my mind: What will be the look on my face when I give an accounting to the Savior of the time I spent here in mortality?
The night air was chilled with a late frost. As I gazed up into the night, I noticed how clear and calm the sky looked. Tears ran freely down my cheeks, and I found myself pleading with the Lord for that young woman’s life. At that moment, when my heart actually seemed to swell painfully with love and compassion, I finally began to understand. Doctors and nurses and paramedics were wonderful, but they could only treat the body. They couldn’t heal the deeper wounds, the ones that would keep us from going home to our Father. Only one Physician could do that, and I was denying myself the chance to be his helper. I made a decision. I would do all I could to further the work of the Master Healer. I would serve a mission!

The Young Women of the Cedar Rapids Iowa Stake responded to the challenge presented by the stake Young Women leaders to read the Book of Mormon before they went to girls’ camp. The 63 girls who met the challenge were presented with a small vase, and those who attended camp signed a banner that said, “I Have Read the Book of Mormon.” The banner was sent to President Benson.

During camp, the girls and leaders were challenged to take home a Book of Mormon to give to a nonmember. The girls also added their comments to letters being written on long strips of paper that were sent to the full-time missionaries serving from their stake.

Besides learning more camping skills, the girls found that many testimonies were strengthened and new friendships made.

Robyn Rodgers entered a competition through school –‘The Queen’s College Translation Exchange’. This involved translating a piece of text from French into English. She and her school (Northfield Academy) were delighted to be awarded the ‘Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators’. Robyn won the prize for Scotland. This was also a boost for the school as it has been at the bottom of the league tables for academic performance.
Robyn has always enjoyed learning languages and feels she has an affinity for translation. During the competition, whilst she was struggling, she remembered the youth theme last year – ‘I can do all things through Christ’. This gave her the inspiration to complete it.

For some, the suffering is extraordinary.
Stillman Pond was a member of the Second Quorum of Seventy in Nauvoo. He was an early convert to the Church, having come from Hubbardston, Massachusetts. Like others, he and his wife, Maria, and their children were harassed and driven out of Nauvoo. In September 1846, they became part of the great western migration. The early winter that year brought extreme hardships, including malaria, cholera, and consumption. The family was visited by all three of these diseases.
Maria contracted consumption, and all of the children were stricken with malaria. Three of the children died while moving through the early snows. Stillman buried them on the plains. Maria’s condition worsened because of the grief, pain, and the fever of malaria. She could no longer walk. Weakened and sickly, she gave birth to twins. They were named Joseph and Hyrum, and both died within a few days.
The Stillman Pond family arrived at Winter Quarters and, like many other families, they suffered bitterly while living in a tent. The death of the five children coming across the plains to Winter Quarters was but a beginning.
The journal of Horace K. and Helen Mar Whitney verifies the following regarding four more of the children of Stillman Pond who perished:
“On Wednesday, the 2nd of December 1846, Laura Jane Pond, age 14 years, … died of chills and fever.” Two days later on “Friday, the 4th of December 1846, Harriet M. Pond, age 11 years, … died with chills.” Three days later, “Monday, the 7th of December, 1846, Abigail A. Pond, age 18 years, … died with chills.” Just five weeks later, “Friday, the 15th of January, 1847, Lyman Pond, age 6 years, … died with chills and fever. Four months later, on the 17th of May, 1847, his wife Maria Davis Pond also died. Crossing the plains, Stillman Pond lost nine children and a wife. He became an outstanding colonizer in Utah, and became the senior president of the thirty-fifth Quorum of Seventy. (See Leon Y. and H. Ray Pond, comps., “Stillman Pond, a Biographical Sketch,” in Sterling Forsyth Histories, typescript, Church Historical Dept. Archives, pp. 4–5.)
Having lost these nine children and his wife in crossing the plains, Stillman Pond did not lose his faith. He did not quit. He went forward. He paid a price, as have many others before and since, to become acquainted with God.

Even if the Lord has inspired people to preserve these records over the centuries, if the devil can persuade us to procrastinate and not get the temple work done, he will succeed in frustrating the Lord’s work. The story is told that Satan called a council of his agents and asked how they would combat the forces of righteousness. One said, “I’ll go and tell them it isn’t true.” Satan said, “No, that wouldn’t do.” The second said, “I’ll tell them it’s only half true.” “No,” Satan said, “that’s not enough.” The third said, “I’ll go and tell them it’s all true, but there is no need to hurry.” “Go,” Satan said. “That will get them every time.” Lucifer cannot win. We must do the Lord’s work for our ancestors or the earth would be “wasted at his coming.” (JS—H 1:39.) It seems that the destiny of this earth depends on whether or not we get this temple work done.

When we lived in Winslow, Arizona, in the 1930s, my father had a business, Carmack Engineering. It was an automobile and machine shop business. When I was about eight years old, he had me come down and sweep out his shop and clean it. This created a bond between a very hardworking father and myself, similar to that relationship enjoyed by farm boys and their fathers.

The time I heard about an LDS police chief who was honored as the outstanding police officer in California, who said, “All I know about organization is what I’ve learned in the Church. I’ve organized my police force just like my stake. I have a high council and bishoprics organized all over the city. I don’t call them by that name, but they are there just the same.”

Sitting in the front room of his parents’ home, Shawn doesn’t seem extraordinarily tall while slouching in a comfortable chair. But as soon as he stands up, the room’s normal eight-foot ceilings shrink. The doorways cause problems when Shawn forgets to duck. He and Justin sometimes get roughhousing together as brothers will do, “When I get chasing him around, once in a while I’ll forget,” says Shawn. “Then, wham! I’m flat on the floor. It knocks me silly.”

During the past summer months, I watched a neighbor of mine construct a small storage building. He is an engineer and had drawn his own plans for the structure. As we occasionally talked about his project, I became aware of the deep sense of satisfaction that he was deriving from the work. The planning and construction of this building, which was being accomplished in the occasional free hours he found in a busy schedule, was a creative expression for my friend. He enjoyed explaining the little embellishments that he had worked into his plan. As these materialized in the actual construction, I noted the pleasure and fulfillment that he was experiencing. The effort was adding an important dimension to his life, enlarging and enhancing his creative capacities and his enthusiasm for living.
Creativity reaches beyond the realms of music, literature, and the arts. As my neighbor demonstrated in the planning and construction of his storage building, creative expression takes many forms. We can value and appreciate all of them.

I gained my own testimony when I was about 12 or 13. I knew I needed to find out for myself if the Church was true. I started thinking about how Joseph Smith had been close to my age when he prayed in the grove. I had just been reading in the Book of Mormon where Moroni tells us to pray to receive a witness of the truth (see Moro. 10:3–5), so I did. I really prayed. And I felt the witness that Moroni promises each of us. From then on I knew I had my own testimony.

A son thanks his mother after the Holy Ghost guides her to exchange his smartphone for a flip phone.

During the summer, I did odd jobs to earn money. That summer I was working as a service station attendant. A man who worked there was a member of the Church, and he invited me to attend MIA (Mutual). At first I hesitated, but he persisted, and I finally gave in. The warmth and friendliness of the members and missionaries impressed me, but again the music influenced me most. Their hymns sounded different from any I had ever heard.

When Elder L. Whitney Clayton, a new member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, was a student at the University of Utah and contemplating a full-time mission, an important factor in his decision to serve was the example set by returned missionaries on campus. “It wasn’t so much what they said, although several said things that were helpful,” he recalls. “It was the way they carried themselves, the way they acted. There was something about them that was different from all of the other young men I knew. And it was obvious that the key to it was a mission.”

Sometimes our guide, like a mariner, works closely with us, teaching us what we need to know so we can successfully navigate life. In many cases the mariner accomplishes this by setting the example for us to follow. Such was the case with Patricia Horiuchi’s father, Frank.

After meeting the missionaries, Frank began regularly inviting them over for dinner. Soon he started taking the lessons. But no one else in his family wanted anything to do with the Church. “When we saw the missionaries coming,” Patricia says, “we would all run away—me and my younger brothers and sisters.”

Then Frank was baptized in July 2007 by the mission president, Nelson Bleak. It was a defining moment for Patricia and her siblings.

“I saw my father starting to change,” she says. “I knew that if the gospel could touch my father’s heart, it could touch mine and change my life. So I decided to study with the sister missionaries, and they challenged me to study the Book of Mormon and the Bible. My brother and I had had a fight before that, and I had never forgiven him. Then I read in the scriptures that if you forgive others, God will forgive you.” (See 3 Nephi 13:14–15.)

Patricia realized she had to forgive her brother in order to begin changing her life, be clean, and have peace. So she did.

“After I threw away my bad attitudes and changed to a new person who kept the commandments, I was so excited. I knew I had to get baptized so I could be in the true Church,” she says. “The Church put me on the right track. It separated me from bad influences. It taught me to respect my parents, to stay in school, and to keep on the right track.”

As a young person I also learned that it was easier to follow the Savior if I had a good attitude. My father set the example for me. From as early as I can remember, I knew that my father trusted me and had confidence in me. He was a road builder and timberman. I started to run large construction equipment for him when I was a teenager. Once I happened to turn one of his trucks upside down. When my father saw it, instead of scolding me, he said, “Jack, since you’ve got it upside down, you might as well get it greased.” He used a little humor to put me at ease and then, over time, taught me how to keep better control of the equipment. What could have been a bad experience turned into a good one because he loved me and wanted to teach me.

But overcoming their own problems with deafness was only the beginning. Virl and Tom realized the extensiveness of the deafness problem while serving missions for the Church in Canada. It was then that they became aware of the small amount of medical research being done, including research in the areas of psychological adjustment, speech therapy, and education.
“Tom and I decided that from that time forward we would do whatever we could to help others in the ‘silent world’ of the deaf,” said Virl.
They were instrumental in starting a program for the deaf in western Canada. This later led to a deaf mission in California.

Jesus said, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (Rev. 3:20.) Although this expression is figurative, I know that Jesus will keep the spiritual meaning of the promise. He will communicate with us, and we can come to know him as if he had dined with us. A personal experience may tell you how this can happen.

About a year ago, I was driving home from an extended backpacking trip with my 11-year-old son. As we traveled along in silent thought, he startled me with a question I was not quite prepared for: “Dad, how do you think it would be if I went on a mission for the Church to Canada?” His older brother and I had both been on LDS missions to Canada, and so this was not what startled me. Instead, I was wondering how God could know my little son well enough among all the millions of children on earth to fashion a special mission just for him. As I pondered this notion while driving along the road, something warm and wonderful, wonderful beyond description, passed through me. I know it was the Spirit of God. The still, small voice had whispered to me: “I know you and your son better than you know yourselves. I love you with a great love.”

This is only one of the many ways that I have come, through the Spirit, to know of the reality of God. He is near us and wants us to know him. The trouble is that we are too far from him. But if we will draw near to him in faith and repentance, he will draw near to us. His Spirit will teach us of him. I do not think there is another way—not through science or any other way except as he has appointed.