Sacrament Meeting Talks Worth Rereading

When my father was a teenager, he purchased an old convertible and decided to fix it up one summer. Since he was mechanically inclined, he replaced the entire engine in a workspace out behind his family's house in Springville, Utah. But after replacing the engine and hooking everything up, it still wouldn't start. He spent days troubleshooting, trying to figure out what was wrong. One day, his father, my grandfather, came out to chat with my dad as he headed out to work. He asked my father what seemed to be the problem, and my dad said something like, ”I’ve narrowed it down to some problem in the electrical system, but I'm just hitting my head against the wall." And then my grandfather said, “Have you prayed about it?" Now, my father was a teenager at the time, and of course this just seemed like a rather silly question to him. Like it probably would to me. Why would Heavenly Father want to reveal where the problem was in this old convertible? My grandpa asked...

So there I was on my knees, praying, in a dingy bathroom in a small house, in the sweltering heat of central Brazil. I had arrived on my mission several months before and things were... not going well. The branch of the church in the small, isolated town in which I was serving was in shambles – the recent branch president had been excommunicated and a missionary had been called to take his place. To make matters worse, the missionaries with whom I worked and lived were not working with the dedication that I thought that they should. But the worst of it was that I felt completely useless. All of the other missionaries could not speak English and my inability to speak or understand Portuguese meant that, despite by best intentions, I spent my days as an automaton, following my companion around and wishing that somehow I could make a difference. Around this time that we received a death threat (from the former branch president), and I had to look up the word death threat in a Portuguese-E...