Being active on Twitter, or X as is it now called, I get frustrated with the character limit. I often wish to post a testimony that goes beyond the limit. The LDX community, as the Latter-day Saints there have come to be called, is often targeted by:
Anti-Mormons (non-members or sectarian Christians who attack the Church and its beliefs,
Atheists (who attack all religion generally),
ExMos (disaffected, embittered, or former members who left the Church), and
ProgMos (progressive, politically left-leaning members who advocate for social issues like LGBTQ rights, ordaining women, etc.)
Many of them think they can defeat our faith with “rationalist” arguments, “historical” evidence, “scriptural” arguments, ridicule, or debate. None of these people realize what keeps us in the Church despite all their “evidence” against it. This series of articles seeks to share some of my own personal experiences that anchor my conviction that Joseph Smith was a Prophet, the Book of Mormon is true, and that the Church of Jesus Christ was restored. There may be several of these articles. These appear in no special order.
Testimony #1: From France to Congo
One of the reasons I believe the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be God’s true Church is because my connection to it resulted in some supernatural or miraculous experiences. Here is one of them.
As a young missionary in France, in the 1980s, my Canadian companion and I taught a graduate student named Andre from Brazzaville, Congo. Over the course of several months, we visited with him and taught him the gospel. His conversion occurred when a man dressed in white came and spoke to him in a dream. After his baptism, he began sending boxes filled with copies of the Book of Mormon home. We wrote to his family about his conversion.
At the time, the Church did not have a presence in Congo. There were no branches or stakes and no missionaries working in that nation. Andre’s mother and brother were very interested in the message of the Restoration. His uncle, the family patriarch, tried to dissuade them with many slanderous claims about the Church. This caused them deep concern, and they feared for Andre until something happened. While praying about their concerns, Andre’s deceased grandmother appeared to his mother and brother. The message she gave them was to believe and to assist Andre with what the Lord was calling him to do. It would “help bring Zion to their people." It would not be until 1991 that the Church would begin working in the Republic of Congo.
I marvel as I reflect on that incident many years later. I was just a young twenty-something missionary, preaching the gospel in France. I had no power to summon angels or spirits to cross over the veil and appear to mortals, on another continent thousands of miles away, in a country where the Church had no presence at the time.
The Church is so much bigger than we think, because it is working on both sides of the veil. It’s my testimony that this is God’s work and we are privileged to take part in it.
Testimony #2 - A Prayer Answered in Anchorage
In the 1990s, the Air Force transferred me to Anchorage, Alaska. In the ward we moved into, I was called to be the Elders’ Quorum President. The Bishop called me up with an assignment for the quorum one day. It was a big project, one that would last a few weeks, possibly. And there was a sad story associated with it.
Tammy (name changed) had been an active member of the Church. She married a non-member who was the love of her life. She drifted away from the Church, but they lived happily together. She became a mother of two childre, a boy and a girl. Her happiness was interrupted when her husband died tragically and suddenly. To cope with the loss, she tried coming back to Church, but she continued to sink into a bad place emotionally and mentally. After a psychotic breakdown, she had to be institutionalized for psychiatric treatment at the time and her kids were taken away from her. When she came out of the hospital, she was still very unsure of her ability to raise her children. She consulted with her bishop and asked what she should do. He suggested, if she felt she could not provide for their comfort or security, that it might be best to allow them to be adopted. She followed this advice and worked with the state to give up her rights and have them adopted.
As you would expect, this was extremely difficult on her. When she finally go through with all the therapy, she had a huge chip on her shoulder toward the Church. She didn’t come back for years. She lived alone with her bitterness, struggling to pay for her home. Finally, when she was out of financial resources, she swallowed her pride and called up the Church. This was my bishop who took her call.
Counseling together, they devised a plan. She could get food and money for utilities, but the Bishop wanted to help her become independent. He also want to be able to reach out to her and help her spiritually heal. Tammy had a homestead property. In Alaska, residents could get free homestead land and keep it if they met certain conditions. One of those was to build a cabin or structure on it. She and her husband had a large wooden shed built in the back yard of their home. They had planned to haul it out to their wilderness homestead, but his death ended those plans.
The plan Tammy and the Bishop came up with was to build out and insulate the cabin so she could live in it, while renting out her house to tenants to bring in income. My job was to use the cash the Bishop provided (around $2000) and Elders’ Quorum expertise to do the work.
Right off, we ran into problems. Anyone who had any skills didn’t want anything to do with the project. All the construction guys said it wouldn’t meet code and they washed their hands of it. Instead, all the rest of us chipped in to work. It was like Nephi building the ship. We did it piece by piece, getting inspiration as we went. Tammy decided she wanted to heat the little shed (now we’d call it a tiny house) with a wood stove. Of course, any wood stove we could find was way too big or too expensive. We were getting close to our maximum budget and she and I discussed it. I told her that she needed to go and pray about it, that the Lord would provide. I said we had done all we could and now it was up to him to provide. She just had to go ask.
She went off to pray about it and came back an hour or so later all happy and excited to show me something. . She said she had prayed and got the impression to look ina stack of old newspapers. (She was kind of a hoarder, really.) There was a classfied ad for a tiny little wood stove that would be a perfect fit. She had called up the guy who listed it months ago and found that he still had it. We made arrangements to take her over and pick it up. She looked at me with some “wonder” in her eyes. “There’s really something to this, isn’t there?” “Yes,” I answered. “He heard you.”
This seems like a small thing, but for Tammy, it was huge. She had actually prayed to God and he answered her win an astonishing immediacy. She had a need and he filled it. It was the first step back from a long estrangement. It was the beginning of healing. The ending was a long way off. We did finish the shed. It was nice, comfly, and she was able to rent out her house and hold on to her home. I ended up moving away when housing on the Air Force base became available. We lost track of each other and thus, I don’t know the end of the story. I do know there is a real God in heaven and that he hears our prayers. You can’t convince me otherwise.