This entry is more of a personal nature than is common here. Here I’ll reveal more about my history, the trials that I have had, and the way that I have come to see God’s hand in my life. I’ve learned something very important in my life – Often when you are going through the hardest trials the Lord is preparing you for your greatest blessings. All our sorrow and our pains, our worst trials and harshest tribulations, have purpose and produce miracles. My whole life has been a testament to this truth.
When I was twelve years old the trailer my mother, my siblings, and I were living in burned to the ground. This was a few years after she left my father and had became the sole breadwinner in our family. I still remember her waking me up in the middle of the night, smoking filling my room, yelling at me to go get my young sister while she woke up some guests we had staying with us that night. I remember running down the narrow hall, both walls aflame, grabbing my sister (all of four years old herself,) and leaping out the backdoor. (There was no back porch. Not even steps.) We circled around the trailer as the fire engulfed it. Soon my mother followed with our guests. We were an hour away from the nearest firehouse. By the time they arrived, perhaps even by the time they were contacted (cellphones were not yet a common thing,) the best they could do was prevent the trailer fire from turning into a larger forest fire. Everything else, including everything we did and had ever owned, was lost.
Living in rural Missouri, miles below the poverty like, we already had very little. More than once during those years the only Christmas we had was a Welfare Christmas, with toys marked, “Boy, Aged 7” and “Girl, Aged 3.” Now even what little we had was gone. I wasn’t even left with the shoes on my feet and the shirt on my back as the saying goes because in the panic of the night I hadn’t grabbed my shoes! We escaped with our lives and that seemed miracle enough at the time, though now I cannot imagine how the terror of being unable to provide for her children must have weighed on my mother. It is a dreadful thing as a parent to be cats fully on the charity of others for to fill the bellies of your children with bread. Yet, even then the Lord was at work.
I finished the last few weeks of that school year wearing clothes given to us by the Salvation Army and we stayed with a friend of my mother’s while she planned with my maternal grandmother to moves us to California where my mother’s siblings also lived. My grandmother bought us plane tickets and at the end of the school year we left everything I had known and moved to what might as well have been an entirely different world.
As traumatic as the fire had been, the move was worse. Imagine being a young boy, barely more than a child, who grew up in a small Southern town of barely 800 people being thrust into a metropolis of over a million people. At the time where I was just starting to figure who I was everything I ever knew or understood was taken from me and I was thrown into a place unlike anything I had experienced. There were so many different languages, cultures, and peoples all living in a single seemingly unending city! My middle school have over 900 students in it and my high school had almost 3,000! And I, because of my heavy Southern accent and dialect, could barely be understood, as if English were my second language! It was all bewildering beyond measure.
It was also disheartening. I lived in an entirely new place with entirely new people with nearly entirely different ways. I didn’t have any friends, didn’t know anyone, didn’t know how to meet anyone, or even how to get anywhere. If you can imagine a child bashing his blocks repeatedly into their box as he tries to shove a round peg into a triangular hole you can get some idea of how I felt at this time. I felt almost like a refugee. Still, it was all scary and I was scared. I couldn’t understand why God would do this to myself and my family. Little did I understand then the purposes of God. Children are resilient if anything and, as my middle school years crept by I finally began to make a few friends, mostly outcasts like myself, and to find my footing in this brave new world of gods and monsters so very different than my own.
I was fourteen when my life changed forever.
One day a friend of mine, Michael*, asked me if I would like to meet with the missionaries with him. He and I had talked about God and our religious beliefs a few times before. I had told him about how I had read the Bible once when I had been grounded to my room for a week with nothing else to do and how it had been a powerful experience that left me convinced God was real. He wasn’t sure himself, but he had been meeting with the sisters to find out for himself. I was interested and decided to go – crucially without telling my mother.
The sister missionaries were wonderful, both as women and as messengers of Christ. They taught me the First Discussion and I immediately wanted to learn more. I began to go to church in jeans and a t-shirt, reeking of cigarette smoke. After the second or third discussion the sister missionaries told me they had to speak to my mother and get her explicit permission to continue to teach me. To this day I don’t actually know what happened in that meeting. I set it up, but wasn’t there. Whether because my mother didn’t want me there or because I was embarrassed I no longer remember clearly. It may have been both. And by the time I was truly curious enough to know what had happened in that meeting between the sisters and my mother it was too late. My mother had died and taken the information with her to the grave. In any case the end result was that I could continue meeting with the sisters, so I did.
For the next six months I vacillated like the Israelites trying to halt between two opinions, between faith or fear. I knew I should be baptized and I wanted to be. But I was afraid of what my family and few friends would think. I was afraid of what the world would think. It was during this time that I, at 15, was made homeless for the second time in my life. The place we were renting from evicted us because the owner wanted to remodel and we couldn’t find another place in the same area. My mother and siblings ended up renting a room in another town (about 3 hours away by bus, light rail, and bike) while I moved in with Michael. He lived with his LDS grandmother and her youngest daughter (18) and his grandmother let me move in and sleep on her couch. Still, there was an upside. Now I could go to seminary in the morning, something I had actually desperately wanted to do, because Michael lived within walking distance of the church.
I lived with them for a few months before moving into another member’s home where I could have a small room of my own. This was with the Kallins. They were also wonderful to me. It was living here that I finally decided to be baptized. I can’t tell you exactly why and there wasn’t really one reason. But I finally stopped being afraid, or rather I stopped letting my fears dictate my decisions. I told the sisters my decision, they were excited, and we promptly began planning my baptism. But I still didn’t tell my mother. In fact, I never told my mother. I was still scared of what she would say. She only found out days before my baptism when the brother who made by baptismal invitations dropped them off at the place she and my sister was staying. He got there before I could after school. Otherwise, she probably wouldn’t have found out until after I was baptized. Nevertheless, now she knew. And this is when my mother told me that she, my grandmother, and my uncles and aunts were all inactive members of the church.
I was thunderstruck.
When my mother was still a young child, my grandmother had taken her and her siblings and left my grandfather. He was a vicious alcoholic and was cruel in a way that only career military men seem able to be when he was drunk. The same day she left him the elders knocked on his door. He had to clear the beer cans off the couch so they would have a place to sit down. I can’t imagine what the elders must have thought seeing him for the first time, but he listened.
He quit smoking. He quit drinking. And my grandmother went back to him. He and the entire family was baptized and later sealed in the Mesa, Arizona temple. I wish I knew more about this time and what his conversion experience was like but he died young of a brain tumor. He had been exposed to Agent Orange while flying missions during the Vietnam War and it killed him like it did so many others. After his death the family scattered. My grandmother and uncles and aunts eventually all ended up in California while my mother moved to Missouri where she married my father (another alcoholic) and had me in the late 80s. All of them became inactive.
I was reeling.
She told me that she had kept all this a secret because she wanted me to be baptized because I wanted to be baptized and not because I might have felt pressured into it by her expectations or turned away from it by her own personal failings. She was, as it turns out, happy that I had made the decision to join the church. So, I got baptized. And it was the most important choice of my life.
My life didn’t become immediately better after I was baptized. I was still homeless. After my baptism I moved in with the Wahlstroms because they had a larger room for me to sleep in. These people, like Michael’s family and the Kallins before them, were wonderful to me. It was here that I took the new member discussions. It was here that I lived until my mother was able to finally find a place for all of us and I was able to move back in with my family. All in all, I had been homeless for over a year. But every good thing in my life, everything and everyone that has has had a lasting positive impact in my life, has come to me because of my membership in the church and because of my obedience to the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The examples of this are too numerous to list, so I’ll provide just one. I met my wife in a Young Single Adult Ward. We didn’t have a whirlwind courtship as some do. Instead we knew each other and were friends for over five years before we ever dated. I was first her home teacher and then her friend and she was mine long before we were romantic partners and long before we were married. But would I have met her without the church? Would I have been in the exact time and place necessary for us to meet and get to know one another, to grow so close to each other and love each other, in any other circumstance? I think not. It was the church that brought us together in the same place, the Gospel that gave us the foundation of shared values, ideals, hopes, and joys that we built upon. Without the church, without the Gospel, our marriage and our family would not exist. My greatest joy would not exist.
And to think, all of it wouldn’t have happened if that trailer in Missouri hadn’t had faulty electrical wiring and hadn’t burned to the ground. If not for that night of terror and the ensuing years of hardships, I would not have been exactly where I needed to be and been exactly who I needed to be in order to hear the Restored Gospel and to be baptized. I would not have gotten to baptize my sister. My grandmother wouldn’t have come back to church. My mother didn’t immediately come back to church. She was too ashamed of her failings. But in time she did return to the Restored Gospel and lived it as best as she could. Recently, I was able to be sealed to her and my father in the temple. I would not have went to BYU-I where I was actually able to afford to go to school and major in what I wanted my career to be. I wouldn’t have met my wife. I wouldn’t have my precious children. I would not have lived in LDS families and seen how functional families based on love and service actually work. I would never have seen what good fathers are actually like or learned how to even try to be a good father myself. I would not have been able to be sealed to my family. I would not be here writing this today. As my Mission President once told me, “Elder, you are proof that the Lord does not forget His lost sheep.”
I can testify to that. My entire life is proof of that and a witness to it. If you are suffering, if you face some trial small or great, remember that God has not forgotten you. As He told Isaiah, he has carved us into the palms of His hands and we are constantly before him. (Isaiah 49:13-16) Though the darkness gathers and the storms rage, He has not and never will ever abandon you. Even now He is turning your every trial to your ultimate good and for your own salvation. It is not in spite of our trials that He will bless us, it is that in our trials He is blessings us. It is that our trials will become our greatest blessings if we stay true to Him. As we keep the faith we will see His marvelous works in our lives.
*All names herein have been altered to protect the anonymity of the people involved.