These are the questions that I asked myself as a teenager. I was fairly diligent and non-rebellious as far as teenagers go. I worked hard to please my parents, Church leaders, high school teachers. I practiced the piano, I memorized scriptures, I studied for tests in history and chemistry and calculus. I wasn’t just going through the motions to please others, either. I loved learning about the world; I wanted to learn to know God.

And yet at that time, I felt that there was tension between the two major tracks of learning in my life (learning how to interpret the world as an educated person, and learning how to become a mature member of the Church). For instance, my biology textbook talked about the theory of evolution as the widely accepted view of how human life came to be. But when I questioned my Sunday School teacher on evolution, he gave me a dismissive look and said, “Melissa, do you really think that we came from monkeys?”

Now, this Sunday School teacher was—like all Mormons at the local level—doing his job as a volunteer. Actually, he was a conscript. A local bishop appointed him to the job. This Sunday School teacher wasn’t a scientist, either. So I didn’t see him as the final authority on whether the claims of Mormonism could harmonize with the claims of science.

However, it troubled me that contradictions seemed to exist among “the things that I knew” as an educated member of the Church. It also troubled me that others also sought to draw attention to contradictions within my faith. I was aware that some of my Christian friends had anti-Mormon lessons at their church youth groups. Clearly, what they had learned led them to feel contempt and derision for my deeply held beliefs. One of them told my brother that, as a Mormon, he was “living a lie.”

Therefore, to my high school self, the questions “Is the Church true? Are its teachings correct?” were not only very important, but also rather terrifying because it seemed that the validity of so many other things also hinged on these questions. I knew that I would have to figure this out, but at the same time I didn’t want to. I was afraid of what I perceived to be a zero-sum contest between my religious truth and “everybody else’s truth.” What if the Church lost? And then what could I believe, and who would I be?

“There are a lot of stories in the world, but Mormonism is the story that I want to be true. To the extent that it is not, I will make it true.”

For help I turned to my “crazy Uncle Charles,” as he called himself: my dad’s little brother, a Stanford-and-Harvard-educated professor of Japanese literature at Tufts University. [Uncle Charles is also featured on the Mormon Scholars Testify website, and I commend to you his essay, which is much more eloquent and articulate than mine.] I told him about my intellectual doubts about Mormonism’s claims. In the sort of long, belabored emails that high school students with Big Questions are wont to write, I laid out all of my doubts: What about evolution? What about blacks and the priesthood? What about polygamy? What about Joseph Smith saying that there were five-foot-high Quakers living on the moon [or something like that]?

Uncle Charles replied that when he was an undergraduate, he, too, had had doubts. He had gone to another Latter-day Saint professor for help. This professor had told him that there were a lot of stories in the world, but the Mormon story was the one that he wanted to be true. Uncle Charles concluded his message with the statement, “There are a lot of stories in the world, but the Mormon story is the one I want to be true. To the extent that it is not, I will make it true.”

At the time, I read this as a sort of well-meaning self-deception, kind of like what happens with the Santa Claus story. Santa Claus doesn’t really exist, but for kids who believe in Santa Claus, he does. Wow! He flies around the sky in a sleigh drawn by reindeer! He fits down the chimney and magically leaves presents with tags signed in parents’ handwriting! That’s great and magical for, say, five year-olds, but for everyone else (and for those five year-olds whose parents have let them in on one of life’s harsh realities) it’s just another tender falsehood. To say something like, “to the extent that it is not, I will make it true” sounded foolish and also a little arrogant. You can’t make a religion “true” in the same way that you can pull off the Santa Claus act. There had to be “a right answer” that was definitely and completely right.

At the same time, I didn’t really know that there was a right or a wrong answer. As a sophomore at Harvard College, I took a moral reasoning class that pitted the world’s great moral philosophers against each other on the question of whether a belief in God was necessary for the formation of moral laws. Everything I read sounded about right to me, even when the syllabus set philosophers up to directly contradict each other. I read A and agreed with A. Then I read B and agreed with B.

In the midst of my ambivalence, I was ultimately comforted by Uncle Charles’s endorsement, incomplete as it seemed to me at the time. Maybe there were some things about religion that weren’t clear to me at the moment, but Uncle Charles was a pretty smart person. I still knew for a fact that the key to what I loved most about my wonderful extended family was the common faith that we all shared in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as interpreted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I knew for a fact that I had felt the Spirit’s powerful witness—not all the time, but enough times to make a difference. Maybe I would figure things out someday.

I testify that this message is true. Will you follow Jesus Christ and be baptized into His church?

I turned in my mission papers and was called to Taiwan. I had just finished my junior year as an East Asian Studies major with a specialization in Chinese literature and I hit the ground running in terms of language. At the Missionary Training Center (MTC), where new missionaries go to acquire languages, doctrine, and psychological resilience, my teachers dispatched me to study Chinese with Elder McMullin, a missionary with thick, owlish glasses and a generally nerdy demeanor, who had previously been an exchange student in China. For the sake of propriety, our teachers kept the classroom doors ajar and had us move our desks into the well-trafficked hallway. We memorized discussions and waited impatiently for the opportunity to leave the MTC for Taiwan. I must admit that my eagerness to leave arose partially from narcissistic self-assurance: I already speak and read Chinese! I already know the Confucian classics as well as the Bible and the Book of Mormon! Taiwan needs me! The Lord needs me! Here I am, send Me!

I got to Taiwan, was assigned a trainer, and found that I had a good deal to learn. In the first place, my knowledge of Chinese religious and philosophical traditions was not the secret conversionary weapon that I’d imagined it would be, but actually a hindrance. I would try to talk to people about the Dao (the Way), or about the bodhisattva’s ultimate sacrifice, and draw connections to the conclusion that whoever it was to whom I was speaking should join my church. However, I soon found that while comparative philosophy was interesting, it didn’t demand that anyone change anything about their lives—myself included. My companion and I invited many people to accept Jesus Christ and be baptized, and some accepted, but I didn’t feel a sense of certainty about the presence of the Holy Spirit in my work as a missionary. I worked hard, studied hard, prayed hard. But in many ways, despite my “successes” as a missionary in terms of logging hours and baptizing converts, during the first part of my mission I was actually missing the point.

Create in me a clean heart, O Lord; and renew a right spirit within me. (Psalms 51:10)

After a while, my many failures and shortcomings as a missionary and as a person became more apparent to me. I’m not quite sure how this happened or how long it took, but I do recall one event from this period of self-reflection. It was the day I picked up a new companion from the train station in Tainan. She was a new missionary who had only been out for six weeks. On the bike ride home from the train station—suitcases strapped to our back racks with bike tire inner tubes, motorcycles and giant trucks rumbling past in clouds of black exhaust—I found out that she hated riding a bike in a skirt, disliked Chinese food, was struggling with Chinese, and didn’t like doing missionary work. My response was something like, “Tough. We’re missionaries, we work hard, and we love it. So just get over it.” Shortly thereafter, as we left the apartment and paused at the door to pray, I looked up and saw my companion with tears streaming down her face, weeping. I thought to myself: How can someone who is supposed to be representing Jesus Christ be the kind of person who fails to take care of someone who needs extra love and support?

I decided that of all things, being a better disciple of Christ, and not the statistics showing “how hard I worked,” should be the measure of my success as a missionary. As I rode my bike from appointment to appointment, I repeated in my head a scripture from Psalms: Create in me a clean heart, O Lord; and renew a right spirit within me.

I had the good fortune to spend the last nine months of my mission in the western district of the city of Tainan. The members of the Church there were so dedicated and generous. I came to know the families and individuals in the ward well enough to understand how to serve them better. I loved them for their diverse gifts and personalities and for their desire to follow Christ.

I also became well acquainted with Tainan’s neighborhoods and cultural institutions, including its religious institutions. My companion and I went every week to a nursing home run by a Catholic nunnery and helped the nuns do the laundry. We hung damp sheets and adult-sized cloth diapers to dry. Sometimes we helped to iron the priests’ collared shirts. The nun with whom we worked most often told me how she had been called to serve God when she was a young woman about my age who was engaged to be married. She was an American woman, cheerful and hardworking as she labored in this part of God’s vineyard. I felt certain that God appreciated and accepted her sacrifices. I was also beginning to feel certain that God appreciated and accepted the sacrifices that I was making as a missionary. I experienced the good fruits of the Spirit in the happiness I felt, in the joy and love that welled up spontaneously in me like a miracle, like a superpower, like a fountain of living water.

When I returned from my mission and resumed my undergraduate studies, I found that I had become a better student. I was less easily swayed by first this and then that forceful argument. I was able to think critically and exercise judgment. I was more invested in the work of studying and less easily distracted. I decided to apply for a Ph.D. in Chinese history and was accepted to the program at Harvard.

Church history has some sticky spots, and the Church sure is a patriarchal, conservative institution, but I really love my husband.

I deferred Ph.D. studies for one year because I ended up engaged to Elder McMullin, the nerdy, skinny elder who had been my Chinese study partner in the MTC. During our engagement, I participated in a summer research seminar at the Smith Institute for Church History at BYU. It was the first time I had ever studied Mormon history in-depth.

Over the course of the summer, as I delved through history books and primary sources, I was alternatively inspired, impressed, intrigued, and shocked. I began to see that the early Saints had been flawed human beings like all of us. I learned that early leaders such as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had made missteps in the course of their leadership. I learned that Church culture, organization, policies, and even doctrines have been subject to shifts over time. I learned more about the Church’s nineteenth century practice of plural marriage, which is a very difficult subject for nearly all Mormon women, no matter how orthodox. Finally, I confronted the reality that in terms of its formal doctrinal and administrative structure, the Church—past and present—is a patriarchal and very conservative organization. This reality is not a challenge for many members of the Church, and it is not a significant challenge for me now. However, it was a challenge for me at the time, as I prepared for marriage in the temple and anticipated having to submit to the various aspects of the temple liturgy that reinforced this patriarchal order.

At the same time, I was in love with my fiancé Joseph, the former Elder McMullin. He was intelligent, whimsical, even-tempered, and generous. We had many shared interests, including our shared experience as missionaries in the Taiwan Kaohsiung Mission and our interest in China and the Chinese language. He was supportive of my plans for pursuing a doctorate and later a professional career while also raising a family. He was deeply committed to following Christ, serving in the Church, and fulfilling the responsibilities of a husband and a father. He was in love with me. Intellectual concerns about patriarchal liturgies notwithstanding, I couldn’t think of anything more wonderful than being married to Joseph for time and all eternity. I was sure that our marriage would be a partnership of equals. Furthermore, I knew that so much of what I valued about who he was, including why he valued who I was, was directly linked to his upbringing as a Latter-day Saint.

So, on my wedding day, I thought: Patriarchy, smatriarchy. We’ve been married for eight years now—we’ve had three kids along the way—and it’s been wonderful. I don’t mean for this to devolve into a hubbi-mony: “I know my husband is true.” What I’m trying to say is that the formal structures of a religion can be very different from the everyday practice of that religion. Focusing on the formal structures alone yields an incomplete picture.

There are a lot of stories in the world, and they all have sticky spots.

When I went back to Harvard for the Ph.D., I studied the history of Christianity in China and was based in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. During seven years of taking classes, preparing general examinations, conducting field research, and writing my dissertation, I studied the history of religious movements from the great world religious traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam. I examined numerous historical accounts showing how these religious traditions have also had leaders who made missteps in the course of their leadership, that these religious traditions have also been subject to shifts and swings over time, and that—generally speaking—these religious traditions in their various global and historical manifestations have tended to be quite patriarchal and very conservative.

In the context of the world’s religious traditions, I didn’t see anything particularly problematic about Mormonism. If there is any reason why Mormonism seems more vulnerable to intellectual criticism than other major world religions, it is because Mormon history begins relatively recently. The miracle of a virgin getting pregnant is no more believable than the miracle of a fourteen-year-old boy seeing God and Jesus Christ in a vision. The “problem” with the Mormon miracles is simply that they haven’t been shored up by thousands of years of religious tradition. But that problem lies in the eyes of beholders who are willing to withhold scrutiny from “old” but not “new” religious claims, not in the miracles themselves.

Learning about how religious texts are created, translated, and disseminated from place to place and from culture to culture also helped me to appreciate the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. I’ve read many accounts of people who have left the Church for lack of archaeological evidence of the Book of Mormon in the Americas, “therefore the Book of Mormon is not an accurate historical record, therefore Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet, therefore the religion that he founded is all bogus.” Or I’ve heard of people who say they left the Church because they researched this or that prophecy made by Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants and found that it never came to pass, “therefore Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet, therefore the religion that he founded is all bogus.”

There was a time in my life when I would have thought about religion in this same uncompromisingly syllogistic way, as if a religious system is a string of cheap Christmas tree lights. If one light gets broken, the whole string is out. This was what was in my mind when, as a high school student, I asked my Uncle Charles: Is the Church true? Are its claims correct? In my mind, one incorrect claim, such as Joseph Smith’s alleged statement that the moon was inhabited by people dressed like Quakers, could set off the whole chain reaction that ended with my faith being bogus. To me at the time, Uncle Charles’s response, “To the extent that [the Church is] not [true], I will make it true,” was small comfort. If something is bogus, how can you do anything to make it true?

But I now have a different perspective on this issue of religious claims. From a scholarly perspective, most religious claims are by nature miraculous and indefensible from an empirical point of view. When good primary sources exist, religious founders all turn out to be real people, not perfect beings. Religious texts and systems of doctrine are all problematic in their own way, from the Bible to the Mahayana Buddhist sutras to the Koran. Maybe this is what Uncle Charles meant when he alluded to ways in which the Church might not be “true” according to my line of thinking at the time. Maybe when he said, “I will make it true,” he was simply speaking of the initiative required to nurture and exercise faith. “It’s not a spectator sport,” he said on a subsequent occasion, referring to religious life as a Mormon. I, too, have learned about the work of faith: that it is neverending, sometimes arduous, and that it has great value. It is work worth doing.

Instead of a string of Christmas tree lights, perhaps a better metaphor for how I see The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a building. To last, a building must have a good foundation. If it has a solid foundation, it can be built taller and larger, retrofitted and remodeled as use dictates. But if it has a shoddy foundation, it will be impossible for the building to endure, no matter how determined the builders. It will simply fall apart or sink into the soil. To me, the foundation of the Church was laid by the prophet Joseph Smith, his interpretation of the Bible and the Christian tradition, his revelation of humankind’s closeness to God, and the new scriptures that he brought forth, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. No matter how ungainly or flawed it may appear to some, the foundation of Mormonism continues to withstand the stresses of expansion and change.

There are a lot of stories in the world, and some of them are very similar to the Mormon story.

I wrote my dissertation on the history of the True Jesus Church, a Chinese Christian church with a founding story that Mormons find familiar: A man considered himself a Christian and read the Bible, but looked at the numerous Christian denominations and wasn’t sure that any of them represented the church that Jesus had founded. One day he had a vision in which Jesus spoke to him and commanded him to restore Christ’s true church. So in Beijing in 1917, Wei Enbo founded the one true church: the True Jesus Church. Same story, different punchline.

During my research, I became personally acquainted with many members of the True Jesus Church who were moral, intelligent, and in many cases impossibly kind to me, the “Gentile” researcher. I was certain that they were truly striving to follow Christ. I heard their testimonies of God’s love and care. Just as one hears in LDS General Conference or church publications, in the course of my research on religious experience in the True Jesus Church I heard and read many stories of miraculous healings, divine intervention, guidance given in answer to prayer. I was certain that church members were not lying when they recounted miraculous or life-changing manifestations of God’s power in their interviews. Why should they be? These were people of faith, and they saw the Holy Spirit at work in their lives.

The resemblance of the True Jesus Church to the church to which I belonged, along with the respect that I felt for the True Jesus Church members’ faith, provoked much reflection. If the Mormon story is not entirely novel, I thought, what is it that makes it different? What makes it matter? What makes it true?

Religions are more than just stories. So is truth.

One thing that I have learned as a scholar of religion is that religions are more than just “stories”. That is, a religion is much more than simply the scriptures, recorded teachings of religious leaders, institutional policies, and popular narratives that explain the state of the world and humankind’s place in it. Religion includes what people do, what people eat, when they pray and what material objects they use to pray, how they decorate their houses and how they build sacred places. Religion is how people feel, what they see in visions that no one else can see, how they make friends and what they do to make amends to those whom they have offended. Religion is people’s lived experiences, which are impossible to represent with a single list of doctrines or a single narrative. To understand religion, a scholar must encounter it on its own terms and according to the understanding of its believers, although understanding of course is not limited to this alone. This view is the state of the field in religious studies.

Telling stories is important, but I don’t think that any story that we try to tell about God can be complete as a “truth” in itself. To me, the way truths can be manifest in lived experience is a more valid measure of what is true, real, or from God. Who cares whether something is “true” by any abstract measure, including intellectual or theological argument, if it cannot be realized in our daily work, our bodies, or, most importantly, our relationships with our fellow beings? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that what people did was more important than what people said, and that people could be known by their fruits. I think that the ultimate responsibility for whether someone grows into the measure of a true disciple of Christ lies with that individual herself, not her religion. However, religions teach us what is possible, what is expected, what we can become. They set parameters and create the conditions for our growth.

This is why I think that Mormonism is the most amazing religious system that I have ever encountered, professionally or personally. As I have matured as a scholar and have gained a deeper knowledge of religions and religious believers, especially global Christian movements, I’ve gained a much deeper appreciation for Mormonism as a religious system based on powerful and compelling ideas and organized in a unique and compelling way that helps people in real life, that evolves over time, and that will endure. More importantly, however, my years of experience as a member of the Church have developed my testimony that the Church is an inspired organization where people can learn about Christ not only through prayer and study of the scriptures, but through continuous opportunities to yield, to serve, and to express gratitude. I know for a fact that the Church and its members are not perfect. As a people and as an institution, we’ve come a long way and we still have a long way to go. As a group, Mormons are probably no better than other people, be they Jews or Buddhists or atheists, who are committed to doing what is right even though it is hard, including loving one’s fellow beings as one’s self. I have good friends who belong to other faiths or who have left the faith traditions within which they were raised; they are moral, kind, wonderful people, and, because of them, the world is a better place. I can’t speak for them. What I can do is speak from my own experience. I testify that the Church is a divinely inspired organization, that Joseph Smith was a prophet who received divine revelation, and that the ordinances we receive and the covenants that we make within the Church have divine authority. I value the Church and I am so grateful to be a Latter-day Saint.

O then, is this not real? (Alma 32:35)

As I’ve continued to learn and grow as a person, as a member of the Church, and as a parent, I’ve been blessed with many wonderful opportunities to feel the active presence of the Spirit: the powerful, transforming awareness that God exists and is mindful of us. I have been inspired by the patterns and the commandments set forth in our scriptures, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. On countless occasions I have witnessed the Spirit working in people’s lives: giving them words of power and blessing, expanding their capability to be humble and generous, transforming enemies into friends. I am grateful that my life as a Latter-day Saint has helped me to develop a relationship with God and has defined the scope of this relationship in such marvelously limitless ways. I am grateful for the discipline that we learn as Latter-day Saints: for the laws of the fast, of the Sabbath, of the Word of Wisdom, and of tithing. I know that today, as in days of old, prophets still exhort in the name of God for people to repent and to become better.

There are still many things that I don’t completely understand about how the world works or doesn’t work and what God wants us to do about it. There are still many things that I don’t completely understand about how the Church works, or about the way that Mormons did or thought about things decades or centuries ago.

And yet my life experiences and education as a scholar have led me to treasure the blessings in my life: the fruits of the restored gospel in a world where such fruit has great value. As the prophet Alma says in his sermon about a seed that is planted, that grows, and that bears good fruit, “O then, is this not real?”

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Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye earned her Ph.D. in Chinese history from Harvard University in 2011. While researching and writing her dissertation, “Miraculous Mundane: The True Jesus Church and Chinese Christianity in the Twentieth Century,” she lived in Xiamen, China, and was an affiliate of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences from 2009-2010. Her dissertation research project was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Languages and Area Studies Dissertation Fellowship and by the Religious Research Association’s Constant R. Jacquet Research Award. Melissa taught in the history departments of Loyola Marymount University and California State University, Los Angeles, from 2006-2008. In 2003 she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian Studies from Harvard College, delivering the Harvard Oration at the Class Day graduation exercises.

Melissa currently serves as co-director of the Mormon Chapter of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy. Her journalistic work and creative writing have been published in The Far Eastern Economic Review, the NPR show Here and Now, and various literary journals and blogs. She is the mother of three children. She and her family live in Hong Kong, where she is engaged in additional research in the archives of Hong Kong Baptist University to prepare her dissertation manuscript for publication in book form. melissa.inouye@gmail.com.

Posted January 2012

I grew up mainly in Maryland. My mother was a Christian Scientist and my dad an inactive Presbyterian, so my brother and I were brought up in the Christian Science faith. No two faiths in Christianity could be more different than Christian Science and that of the LDS Church. As an undergraduate student at Utah State University, I had serious questions about the faith of my youth, even though I had seen healing and other positive results of that faith. Unable to resolve the conflicts and questions about the basic principles of that religion, I had my name removed from the rolls of that church. That loss of faith left me very unsettled religiously.

As a college senior, I met Ann, a thoughtful, attractive, young woman student. Two years later we were married and moved to the state of Wisconsin for my graduate studies. Ann was a life-long and active member of the LDS Church. Ann’s parents were disappointed that she married a nonmember. She had faith that I would join the Church. Ann, knowing that I was deeply involved in scientific research, began to gently introduce me to evidences for the Book of Mormon. These were mainly articles in FARMS and books such as Lehi in the Desert. I read them willingly, and would say, “Hmmmmm. That’s interesting.” But nothing changed outwardly. That process went on for many years.

After graduating with my doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, I still had uneasiness about faith, having once lost my own. We lived in Thailand, where 95 percent of the population is Buddhist. My friends and colleagues there were Buddhists, and they had faith that if they followed the teachings of their religion, they would reach Nirvana, and, while on earth, Buddhism did give them a sense of peace and contentment and a good moral code to live by. After Thailand, we moved to Colombia, the most Roman Catholic country in Latin America. Most of my friends and colleagues there were Catholic, and had faith that if they followed the teachings of their church, they would be released from Purgatory and would go to Heaven. And their Catholic faith did result in healings and other blessings. And so, I was exposed to very different faiths, but all with apparent positive results and blessings.

I developed an early appreciation for the LDS Church and had no resistance to Ann’s activity nor to raising our two daughters in the Church, which helped them navigate through childhood and adolescence. Ann continued to pass along evidences of the Book of Mormon to me. But I remained doubtful about faith as a basis for belief and commitment, having lost mine and seen some very different faiths in operation among my friends. I had not experienced that spontaneous, overwhelming feeling that the Book and the Church were true. Several years earlier, a friend of mine, who had not been particularly religious, knew the Church was true when he saw two missionaries approaching his house, and when they came in the door, he was ready to receive the lesions and be baptized before they even taught him. Our foster son, a Catholic from Colombia, just knew that the Church was true when it was first explained to him. I expected to experience similar feelings, but they never came.

Ann continued to pass along articles on evidence for the Book of Mormon and discuss them with me. Little by little, I began to see that the Book of Mormon might be true. Finally, she passed along an article on word print analysis of the Book of Mormon that provided strong evidence of multiple authorship of the Book. That meant that Joseph Smith, Jr. wasn’t a genius who just made it up. With that, I decided that I needed to discuss this with a friend of mine. He was a distinguished biological scientist who had been an active Church member all his life. He agreed to meet with me, and brought along two missionaries. I had had missionary lessons before, but they did not connect with me. The missionaries were unable to make one of the appointments with me, but my friend came. I mentioned that I had not experienced those feelings that my friend and foster son had received that convinced them that the Church was true. He said something important—there are many ways to achieve a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel and the Church. I should not expect to have the same experiences that others, like my friend and foster son, have had. An intellectual path can also lead to faith and a testimony. The key point is that all paths end up at the same point, with a conviction that the Book of Mormon and the Church are true. One could be both a good biological scientist and an active LDS member.

I think that there is a useful lesson for missionaries coming out of my experience. I had received missionary lessons before. Forty years before, a couple of sister missionaries met with me. I asked them to set aside their flannel boards and routine approach and just tell me about the Church, what they believed in and why they believed it. They handled the challenge well and we had begun to make progress when they were transferred to another area. The two elders who replaced them just couldn’t handle discussions done that way and we didn’t make any progress. Forty-three years later, my scientist friend was able to provide an explanation that cleared away my doubts about faith and the many ways to achieve it, and I was baptized nine years ago. The lesson for missionaries is this: My impression is that, forty years ago, the missionaries were not as well trained as those coming out of the MTC today. Although better trained today, it is still necessary to adapt the message to the investigator’s background, interests, and values. A single approach does not fit all, so missionaries must become perceptive enough to know what will connect with investigators and what will not.

There are two other messages for all of us coming from my conversion story. First, Ann’s steadfast commitment to the Church and dedication to her callings were a constant, good example for me, and showed me that she truly believed in the Church and its teachings and acted on that. People within our families and outside them will judge the validity of the Church by our own actions and examples. Like it or not, we are all daily missionaries, and our actions will speak louder than any words we say. Second, from the beginning of our marriage, Ann prayed constantly that I would come to the conclusion that the Church was true and join. And I finally did, but it took a long time. The message is that prayers are answered, but not necessarily as quickly as we would like. True, she would have preferred that my conversion would have come in forty-three months rather than forty-three years, but it came in the Lord’s time, not hers. We are grateful that her prayers were answered when they were.

I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

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Tom Yuill is an emeritus professor of Pathobiological Sciences and of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, now living with his wife, Ann, in Mapleton, Utah, since his retirement eight years ago. He was on the UW faculty for thirty-three years as a teacher and researcher, and during that time also served as Associate Dean for Research in the School of Veterinary Medicine for ten years and, for another ten years, as Professor and Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

Posted January 2012

I came to realize that I share Bro. Madsen’s view. My witness of the truth of the prophet’s role in the restoration came first. It is the foundation of my faith. Joseph Smith’s life and thought, and, more importantly, the Lord’s revelations through him, have been my window to the Savior.

Therefore, as Peter taught, I have a reason for the hope that is in me when he said, “. . . sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”³ As a youthful missionary, I remember violating part of Peter’s declaration by always wanting to intellectually defend the church and the doctrines of the restoration from its detractors by proof texting, using the Bible. During those efforts to defend the church and my faith, I did not always do it in a spirit of meekness and fear. In addition, many times I did not first sanctify the Lord God in my heart before entering into gospel discussions with those who were antagonistic toward the restoration. At the time, I felt the Bible would at least be a good starting point and common ground among other Christian faiths. However, after life’s experiences and a long teaching career I have “learned for myself” that the Bible is at times the battleground, not the common ground among denominations. During those early missionary days, I was not inviting my investigators into their own sacred grove. Joseph Smith spoke of his religious quest for truth in this profound way: “the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”⁴ Religious truth ultimately comes by personal revelation augmented by rational argument. Austin Farrer said, “Though argument does not create conviction, lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.”⁵

For me, developing a firm testimony and faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ is primarily a spiritual endeavor. As I read the scriptures, study languages, or study modern scholars, I constantly see rational evidences or reasons to believe in the restoration through the instrumentality of Joseph Smith. In my mind, for example, Joseph did not simply write the Book of Mormon in approximately sixty-five working days. He did not know or understand Hebrew chiastic structure as we find throughout the work. He did not manufacture the names of Mahijah and Mahujah in the Pearl of Great Price associated with the Book of Enoch as found much later with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.⁶ However, my ultimate witness of the gospel and the restoration comes from the spiritual confirmation of the Holy Ghost. Jacob teaches, “the spirit speaketh of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be.”⁷

Similarly, experiences with the spiritual realm were the source of Jacob’s faith during his encounter with Sherem the anti-Christ. Jacob said he could not be shaken from the faith because of “the many revelations and the many things which I had seen concerning these things for I truly had seen angels, and they had ministered unto me. And also, I had heard the voice of the Lord speaking unto me in very word, from time to time; wherefore, I could not be shaken.”⁸ Recently, as I was reading the Book of Mormon, it appeared to me that the book treats the word “mysteries” very consistently, albeit with a little different meaning than the New Testament word musterion.⁹ The Book of Mormon references to “mystery” or “mysteries of God” are always associated with the notion that certain gospel principles can only be learned by revelation. For instance, the sacred record teaches, “for he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost.”¹⁰

While discussing these matters recently, a brilliant professor friend of mine reminded me that, when emphasizing this spiritual approach to gaining gospel knowledge, I should not in anyway disparage the life of the mind. Man himself is “an intelligence,” or, in other words, light and truth. Hugh Nibley suggests that the LDS temple experience is a model for learning the gospel. “Why do we call the temple a school? The initiatory ordinances make that clear . . . bring your brain with you and prepare to stay awake, to be alert and pay attention; also come often for frequent reviews repeating the lessons to refresh our memory, for you cannot leave without an examination—you have to show you have earned some things.”¹¹

The Lord expects us to “bring our brain and intellect” to the temple and to life’s journey. The theme of pursuing knowledge through study and faith is clear in the Doctrine and Covenants and the teachings of Joseph Smith:

D&C 4:6 “Remember faith, virtue, knowledge”
D&C 42:61 “If thou shalt ask, thou shalt receive revelation upon revelation, knowledge upon knowledge”
D&C 93:24 “And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come”
D&C 93:36 “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and Truth”
D&C 130:18,19 “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life . . . he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.”
D&C 131:6 “It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance”
Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 217 “A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge”
Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 287-88 “In knowledge there is power. God has more power than all other beings, because he has greater knowledge; and hence he knows how to subject all other beings to Him. He has power over all.”

Therefore, there is no doubt the Lord wants us to advance in knowledge and truth. We should, as Peter says, be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us, spiritually as well as rationally. We need to seek learning by study as well as by faith.¹² Elder Hugh B. Brown taught, “I’m impressed with the testimony of the man, who can stand and say he knows the gospel is true, but what I would like to ask is, ‘But, sir, do you know the gospel?’ I say it is one thing to know the gospel is true and another to know what the gospel is. Mere testimony may be gained with but perfunctory knowledge of the Church and its teachings, as evidenced by the hundreds now coming into the Church with but bare acquaintanceship. But to retain testimony and to be of service in building up the Lord’s kingdom requires serious study of the gospel and a knowing of what it is.”¹³

So in order to retain testimony and to be of greater service to the kingdom we should seriously study the gospel and truth wherever we can find it. I honestly believe that Mormonism has the answers, at least as well as we can have them in this life, to mortality’s basic questions regarding God and the life beyond. However, the problem at times is that we as Latter-day Saints do not fully understand the questions. One cannot appreciate the answers until you know the history behind the question being asked. This is what higher learning has done for me. When I attended the University of Missouri, I studied with students of different faiths, including Judaism and all forms of Christianity. This helped me to truly appreciate other approaches to biblical hermeneutics. As stated above, this was a totally different experience than I had in my youthful missionary days. I came away with a much better tolerance for differing interpretations of the scriptures according to one’s theological biases. In the process, I deepened my own faith and the LDS approach to religious quandaries and interpretation of the Bible. Education will always dissipate arrogance and misunderstanding, and create mutual tolerance. As Joseph Smith once said, “truth is Mormonism.”¹⁴ Truth is what we always seek for from wherever the source may be.

In our personal quests for truth through faith and study, we should remember that doubt at times serves its purpose. As Terryl Givens explains, “It would seem that among those who vigorously pursue the life of the mind in particular, who are committed to the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and rational inquiry, faith is as often a casualty as it is a product. The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true, and to have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing them to be true. I am convinced that there must be grounds for doubt as well as belief in order to render the choice more truly a choice—and, therefore, the more deliberate and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.”¹⁵

I testify that faith and religion is a matter of the heart. Faith is a choice. It is not always to have a perfect knowledge of things. I, along with many others, hope for things which are not always physically seen but are true because of the revelations of the Holy Ghost to our souls. I trust that anyone who becomes a student of the scriptures of the restoration will begin to “see God’s own handwriting in the sacred volume, and he who reads it oftenest will like it best. . . and once discovered will bring an obedience to its heavenly precepts.”¹⁶

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Notes:
¹ C.S. Lewis 1947.
² Truman G. Madsen (Jan. 29, 2005) at BYU-Idaho’s Religious Lecture Series commemorating the life of Joseph Smith.
³ 1 Peter 3:15.
⁴ Joseph Smith History 1:12.
⁵ Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist,” in Light on C.S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 26.
⁶ See Moses 6:40 and Moses 7:2.
⁷ Jacob 4:13.
⁸ Jacob 7:5.
⁹ “Secret, secret rite, secret teaching, mystery associated with strange customs and ceremonies.” A Greek- English Lexicon of the New Testament, by Arndt and Gingrich, page 530. In the 1828 Webster’s dictionary the definition of the word mystery is “A profound secret; something wholly unknown or something kept cautiously concealed, . . . In religion, any thing in the character or attributes of god, or in the economy of divine providence, which is not revealed to man . . . beyond human comprehension until explained.”
¹⁰ 1 Nephi 10:19; see also Alma 12:1- 11.
¹¹ Hugh Nibley, “Abraham’s Creation Drama,” in The Temple in Time and Eternity, edited by Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, page 16.
¹² D&C 88:118; 109:7, 14.
¹³ Personal correspondence, dated 28 January 1969, as quoted by Robert J. Matthews, “Using the Scriptures” (Brigham Young University 14 July 1981).
¹⁴ Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, page 139.
¹⁵ Terryl L. Givens, “‘Lightning Out of Heaven’: Joseph Smith and the Forging of Community,” BYU Speeches of the Year (29 November 2005).
¹⁶ Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, page 58

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John L. Fowles received his BS and MA degrees from Brigham Young University and a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia in Social Foundations of Education, with an emphasis in Religious Studies. He has taught in the LDS Church Educational System for thirty-five years—previously in Scottsdale, Arizona; Provo, Utah; and Columbia, Missouri where he directed the LDS Institute)—and is currently an instructor at the Logan LDS Institute of Religion adjacent to Utah State University.

He is the author of “Zenos’ Prophetic Allegory of Israel,” in A Symposium on the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, CES, 1986); “The Decline of the Nephites: Rejection of the Covenant and Word of God,” in The Book of Mormon: Helaman through 3 Nephi 8, According to Thy Word, edited by Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1992), 81-92; “The Jewish Lectionary and Book of Mormon Prophecy,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3 (Fall 1994): 118–122; “Missouri and the Redemption of Zion: A Setting for Conflict,” in Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: Missouri, edited by Arnold K. Garr and Clark V. Johnson (Provo: Department of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University, 1994), 155-171; “John’s Prophetic Vision of God and the Lamb,” SBSS 1998, 74– 82; and, with Newell K. Kitchen, “Finding the Haun’s Mill Face Wheel,” Mormon Historical Studies (Fall 2003).

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dr. Fowles has served in elder’s quorum and high priest group leadership, on a high council, as a bishop, and as a counselor in two stake presidencies. He currently serves as a Gospel Doctrine teacher in his ward.

Posted December 2011

My conviction that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christ’s restored Church is centered in Joseph Smith and his calling and work as a prophet. A friend characterized my feelings for Joseph when he said, “I love Joseph because of the many thousands I meet who love and believe in Jesus Christ because of him.” Joseph Smith centered his life and teachings in Jesus Christ. He re-introduced Christ to the world. Revelations dictated by Joseph focused on Christ and His redemption of mankind. The words of this canonized Book of Mormon scripture, translated by Joseph, stood at the center of his life: “We talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.” (2 Nephi 25:26)

In 1838, Joseph felt compelled to compose his equivalent of a press release. In it, he clarified what he considered to be the foundation of the church. He said, “The fundamental principles of our religion are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.” (History of the Church, Vol. 3, p. 30)

In revelations given to Joseph Smith, Christ bore witness of Himself and His mission of atonement and redemption dozens of times. The Savior reinforced, expanded, and clarified earlier teachings and introduced new principles and insights into His redemptive mission, declaring it to be “glad tidings.” In one revelation, Joseph recorded, “This is the gospel, the glad tidings. . . . That he came into the world, even Jesus, to be crucified for the world, and to bear the sins of the world, and to sanctify the world, and to cleanse it from all unrighteousness; That through him all might be saved.” (Doctrine and Covenants 76:40-42) Joseph recorded the key aspects of the Savior’s mission and His willingness to take upon Himself the sins of the world. He documented the Savior’s suffering and agony. He documented well over 100 descriptive names and titles that Christ used for Himself that identify aspects of His divine mission.

Joseph Smith endured a lifetime of persecution. Apparently, like ancient prophets, it was part of his calling. In an early revelation, Joseph was told, “Be patient in afflictions, for thou shalt have many.” (Doctrine and Covenants 24:8) Toward the end of his life Joseph exclaimed, “The envy and wrath of man have been my common lot all the days of my life. . . . deep water is what I am wont to swim in. It all has become a second nature to me; and I feel, like Paul, to glory in tribulation.” (Doctrine and Covenants 127:2) However, also like ancient prophets, Joseph apparently had received this divine assurance, which he declared, “They never will have power to kill me till my work is accomplished.” (History of the Church, Vol. 6, p. 58)

My conviction has also been strengthened by research that clearly shows me that Joseph knew and willingly accepted his life of intense persecution. Like the ancients, Joseph was willing to endure all and even offer up his life in the pattern of his Master. His life became one of never-ending persecution, affliction, false accusations, and imprisonments. He was falsely arrested over twenty times. He was severely beaten, tarred, feathered, mocked, and derided. In one instance, he was jailed for months, during the cold of winter, in primitive and inhumane conditions with only prison bars for windows. A son died as an indirect result of one attack. Mobs chased and forced him, with his wife and children, out of four states into Illinois where they martyred him. He could have easily stopped all of this had he been willing to recant what he knew to be true. But, he could not! He said:

How very strange it was that an obscure boy, of a little over fourteen years of age… should be thought a character of sufficient importance to attract the attention of the great ones of the most popular sects of the day, and in a manner to create in them a spirit of the most bitter persecution and reviling…. I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was hated and persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? I have actually seen a vision; and who am I that I can withstand God, or why does the world think to make me deny what I have actually seen? For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it; at least I knew that by so doing I would offend God, and come under condemnation. (Joseph Smith History 1:23-25)

In one instance, after a severe mob beating which almost cost Joseph his life, his commitment and relationship with the Savior became evident. He said:

I will try to be contented with my lot knowing that God is my friend. In him I shall find comfort. I have given my life into his hands. I am prepared to go at his Call. I desire to be with Christ. I Count not my life dear to me only to do his Will. (Dean C. Jessee, Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, p. 238)

One of his close associates disclosed private conversations wherein Joseph confirmed that he understood his fate, “He often said to me…’I shall die for it . . . It is the work of God and he has revealed . . . it.’” (Brigham Young Discourse, Oct. 8, 1866, Church Archives)

Joseph Smith lived under the constant scrutiny of harsh critics who did not believe in his divine calling. Many judged him unfairly and looked for faults they could expose. Joseph conceded, “Although I do wrong, I do not the wrongs that I am charged with doing.” (History of the Church, Vol. 5, p. 140) He addressed his own faults and said, “I never told you I was perfect; but there is no error in the revelations which I have taught.” (History of the Church, Vol. 6, p. 366) On one occasion, in addressing statements of critics, he blurted out in frustration, “I have it from God, and get over it if you can.” (History of the Church, Vol. 6, p. 475) Perhaps those who want to understand Joseph would benefit most by focusing on what he gave the world as a prophet. A great example of this is the Book of Mormon. Speaking from the perspective of a mature author with an advanced college degree, I could not even begin to attempt to compose what the young, uneducated Joseph did—and he did it without the capabilities of a computer. I know of no other author, as well, who could have accomplished such an undertaking. A recognized authority put the translating effort in this perspective:

One of the most amazing facts about the Book of Mormon is that it took Joseph Smith only about sixty-five working days to translate a book that, in the current edition, is 531 pages long…. That works out to be an average of eight pages per day. At such a pace, only about a week could have been taken to translate all of 1 Nephi; a day and a half for King Benjamin’s speech. Considering the complexity, consistency, clarity, artistry, accuracy, density, and profundity of the Book of Mormon, the Prophet Joseph’s translation is a phenomenal feat. (John W. Welch, “I Have a Question,” Ensign, Jan. 1988, 46)

Joseph became a conduit through whom the equivalent of over 1200 pages of holy scripture were given, which have become an inspiration and beacon and have been treasured by millions who love Christ and have drawn nearer to Him through these pages of scripture.

My testimony is strengthened through my research of Joseph Smith’s contemporaries who were present during visions of Deity and direct revelation from the heavens. I have researched over twenty men who signed published statements certifying that they were witnesses to the divinity of his revelations. Over twenty-five saw visions of Deity with him. Others heard the voice of God. Some left detailed descriptions of the personage of God and Jesus Christ. Hundreds, with Joseph, saw and heard angels. These many additional witnesses bear irrefutable testimony of the divine work the Lord began through Joseph Smith

It is my conviction, based upon research, prayer and a lifetime of experiences, that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God and did restore Christ’s church once again on the earth. God and His son, Jesus Christ, did in reality appear in vision and instruct Joseph Smith many times, beginning in 1820 near Palmyra, New York. President Gordon B. Hinckley stated the importance of this divine beginning simply:

Our whole strength rests on the validity of that vision. It either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not, then this work is a fraud. If it did, then it is the most important and wonderful work under the heaven. . . . This must be our great and singular message to the world. We do not offer it with boasting. We testify in humility but with gravity and absolute sincerity. We invite all, the whole earth, to listen to this account and take measure of its truth. (President Gordon B. Hinckley, “The Marvelous Foundation of Our Faith,” Ensign, Nov. 2002, 78)

I love Joseph Smith. I love him because he endured trials and persecutions and was faithful to his calling. He even gave his life for it. I love Joseph Smith because of the Book of Mormon and other divine scripture he revealed to the world. The Lord speaks to me through their pages. I love Joseph Smith because he received and dispensed the keys to temple building and ordinances, assurances, and covenants. I feel God’s Spirit there. I love Joseph Smith because of the peace, joy, happiness and love that come into my life radiating through the Gospel he restored.

I am amazed at all Joseph accomplished in his short thirty-nine years of life, which were cut short by assassins’ bullets. After many years of research, it is my conclusion that Joseph Smith is who he claimed to be—a prophet of God. I believe that he felt his central mission was to testify of Christ. I firmly believe that he would want us to place our focus and belief on Jesus Christ because of him. Yes, I love Joseph Smith. Because of him, my quest has become one of striving to draw nearer and become more like my Lord, Savior, and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

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Karl Ricks Anderson is affectionately known as “Mr. Kirtland” throughout the Church because of his love for, and his research and well documented writings on, the 1830s period in Ohio Church history. Originally a native of Ogden, Utah, Karl has lived for over forty years in the Kirtland area. He is a noted authority on Kirtland history and has played a primary role in its restoration. The Mormon Historic Sites Foundation honored Karl in 2006 by awarding him their second annual Junius F. Wells Award in recognition of his leadership and lifelong contributions to the preservation of Historic Kirtland. The first annual award was given to President Gordon B. Hinckley.

Utilizing his expertise on the Kirtland area, he is a popular author and entertaining speaker. He wrote the book Joseph Smith’s Kirtland: Eyewitness Accounts. He co-authored the book Teachings and Commentaries on the Doctrine and Covenants. He also co-authored Church Sites in Ohio, which is a guidebook to seventy-eight LDS historic sites. Karl is in the process of publishing a new book highlighting the visions and voice of the Savior from Kirtland. He has also authored articles in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History, and the Historical Atlas of Mormonism.

Karl has taught seminary and institute with the Church Educational System for over thirty years and is presently serving as coordinator and institute director for Northern Ohio. He received both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in business from the University of Utah and has more than twenty-five years of experience working in business.

Brother Anderson has spent much of his time giving church and community service. He served as president of the Cleveland Ohio Stake, as Regional Representative, and as Area Family History Advisor to the North America North East Area. He is currently serving as patriarch in the Kirtland Ohio Stake. Karl served as a full-time missionary in the Swiss-Austrian Mission from 1957 to 1960. He has been on the board of directors for the Greater Cleveland Council of the Boy Scouts of America for thirty-four years, and serves as an officer and board member of the Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith Family Foundation. He also played a central role in restoring the Smith Family Cemetery, by the Homestead in Nauvoo, Illinois.

He is married to Joyce Hirschi, and they are the parents of seven children and the grandparents of twenty-eight grandchildren.

Posted December 2011

I was born in 1939 and am the fifth son of T. Edgar and Hermana Forsberg Lyon. My twin brother, Joseph Lynn Lyon, now a well-known medical doctor and researcher at the University of Utah, and I were raised in the rural outskirts southeast of Salt Lake City. My earliest memories of spiritual instruction come not from our home, but from attendance at the old East Mill Creek ward house (now torn down and replaced with a much more modern, utilitarian edifice). The small chapel was begun in 1848, and there I gleaned, from it, as well as from the members, a certain pioneer spirit, a heritage that went back in time, much beyond my own short life. My own lineage also proffered a similar link—my parents taught us that one great-grandfather, a Scottish convert in 1844, was the first Mormon to publish a book of poetry. He (John Lyon) later became a patriarch in Salt Lake City. Another great-grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a skeptical Swede, who immigrated to Utah without yet converting, because he wanted to see what Mormons were really like before he sought baptism. He found positive confirmation to his doubts, and joined the Church in Utah just in time to attend the 1893 dedication of the Salk Lake Temple. He too was called to serve as a patriarch in the early 1900s. My grandfather Lyon, born in 1864, was a prominent printer and businessman and served as bishop for many years in the upscale “Avenues” section of Salt Lake City, and was intimate with many general authorities of the Church, including neighbors and friends Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant. My mother’s father, born in Sweden, served a mission in his native country, and was later called to return there with his family to preside over the mission. His wife, as a young woman, had also chosen to serve a full-time mission, and was among the first sister missionaries of the LDS Church. My father was called to serve a mission in the Netherlands, in 1923, and just ten years later accepted the call to put his education on hold (he was studying for a Ph.D.in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago) and serve for four years as mission president in the same country where he had previously preached. I also knew that both he and Mom were “famous”: She served on the Primary General Board of the Church and wrote manuals for the same Primary classes I was in, and Dad taught at the LDS Institute of Religion at the University of Utah. He also wrote manuals for the Church, had spoken in General Conference, and was well-known for his deep knowledge of Church history.

So I knew that I came from “pioneer stock” and basked in the recognition granted to my parents. Yet none of this gave me a conviction of the truth of their beliefs. Like most LDS boys, I had to “find” my own assurance. I attended Church meetings quite faithfully, listened to my teachers, performed my personal prayers, and only occasionally opened the scriptures. Despite the push by Sunday School, seminary, and Aaronic Priesthood teachers, and a firm desire to know if what they and my parents taught and believed was true, the scriptures proved too difficult or too uninteresting for my tastes. However, during the summer of 1955, a fine friend, Clark Tanner, and I took advantage of his father’s generosity in buying a jeep and “outfitting” us to prospect for uranium in the deserts of southern Utah. We took an evening class on prospecting and launched ourselves into the desert, establishing a base camp way beyond any road, on the tamarisk-lined banks of Last Chance Creek (now part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument). Clark liked to sleep during the only cool hours on the summer desert, often until 9:00 a.m. I always awoke when it got light (5:45 or 6:00) so I had many hours by myself. I only had one book—the Book of Mormon, which my mother had surreptitiously placed into my duffel bag. I read and read, and thought and thought, about what I was reading, and occasionally prayed. In two weeks I had completed the entire book. I slipped off my cot in the shade of the bushes, and prayed, telling the Lord that I had (finally) finished this book that my teachers and parents had been talking about for so long. “Lord, I’ve done my part, now give me the testimony.” Nothing. No response, no voice, no feeling. Could this all be true, or was I part of a very big hoax perpetuated by parents and teachers? I felt deceived. I had finally finished the book and expected an immediate confirmation. Nothing. Since I only had one book to read, and plenty of time, I began again, and just six or seven days later, while reading in Alma, chapter 40, I experienced what I had never expected—not a voice nor a vision, but the strongest and surest internal sensation, connecting my mind and my heart, thoughts and feelings, and I understood that “This book was written by ancient prophets in the Americas, not Joseph Smith.” I even looked around through the bushes, trying to see if someone was there who might have uttered that phrase. No one, nothing. Then my mind started racing, thoughts and feelings came so fast that I didn’t even have time to digest them – “Joseph Smith indeed got the plates from an angel, the Book of Mormon came from ancient prophets, your parents have been telling you the truth, David O. McKay is truly a prophet for the Lord, the Church is true, you are on the right path, this is God’s church . . .” and many other rapid-fire, confirming thoughts. They did not come from me, nor did I understand their source. I now know that this was what we call a manifestation of the Spirit, but at the time my young mind was unprepared for the profound spiritual experience. During that event-filled summer I completed the book three times, each time more sure than the previous reading. We found a little uranium, but never became fabulously rich, as our fantasies had imagined. But I found a much richer, more lasting jewel—the beginnings of a firm testimony of Jesus Christ and His gospel on earth.

That singular experience has been a foundation of my strength and surety in the gospel. But it is not singular – it has been re-confirmed hundreds of times. And despite these assurances, I still made a few dumb choices, and have often had minor doubts and concerns, but I have not turned from Christ nor His gospel because it is revealed truth.

I completed high school at Olympus High in Salt Lake City, and immediately served six months of active duty in the U.S. Army (and seven and a half years in the Army Reserve), and then attended the University of Utah. Like my father and four brothers, I interrupted my college studies by accepting a mission call, to Argentina (from 1959-1961), where I fell in love with the culture, food, people, and language. Upon returning from Argentina my adorable and long-waiting fiancé, Cheryl Larsen, and I were married in the Salt Lake Temple. She graduated in Elementary Education that year (1962) and taught in the public schools. I graduated from the University of Utah (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude) with a major in Spanish literature. I received an excellent NDEA fellowship to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where I studied Latin American literature with some of the most eminent professors in the country, graduating with a Ph.D. degree in four years, in 1967. I accepted an offer to teach at the University of Oklahoma that year and the next. This was an era when college jobs were increasing and when I was offered a position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, we accepted—it was rated as the top graduate school in the country, and I simply wanted to teach at the best university that would accept me.

Cheryl and I had set out a plan to try to return to Utah within ten years of leaving for graduate studies, with the intention of being near our parents, and allowing our children to know their grandparents. We had intended to return to the Language Department at the University of Utah, but instead accepted a fine offer at Brigham Young University (BYU), a school I had not previously considered. We came to Provo, Utah, in the fall off 1972; this has been ‘my’ university since that time. I teach courses in Latin American literature and culture, as well as classes in the Honors Program and the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. I have published a few books, numerous articles and reviews, mainly dealing with Latin American literature and history. I have served in too-many administrative positions at BYU and received too-many fleeting teaching and research awards.

My academic career at BYU has been interrupted three times (1996-1999; 2002-2004; 2007-2010, a total of eight years) to accept mission calls from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: to serve as mission president in Osorno, Chile, and as missionary training center president and temple president in Santiago, Chile. These calls have greatly limited and reduced my academic productivity but dramatically increased personal friendships, spiritual progress, human understanding, and love of all things Latin American and Chilean.

MY TESTIMONY

No written or spoken testimony is ever complete. Either there is not enough time (as in oral expression during our testimony meetings), or else the written page (here) simply does not capture the sincerity of voice or depth of feeling. When expressing my most intimate feelings I abhor trite expressions that I or others have used to the point of near-memorization. Further, it is difficult to express full testimony because it is a mystical mix of my deepest feelings with sure knowledge, obtained by other-than-rational experience. Despite these difficulties, I shall try to write what I truly feel and know.

I am sure that there is a God who created my spiritual identity, from some pre-existing, eternal form that we call ‘intelligence.’ I know that this God exists in a physical space and that He somehow recognizes me as His offspring, and, in some way that I don’t fully understand, hears my prayers and responds to them in the best possible ways for me. I know He is concerned about me, and desires my happiness. I know that God knows me; my task is to try to know him better. Without understanding the details, I know that “all things are done in the wisdom of Him who knoweth all things.” That scripture, from II Nephi, has been a guiding scripture for my life—there is a God who knows and understands all, and the best thing I can do is accept and submit to His wisdom.

I know that I existed before coming to this earth and that I will exist after this life. I am sure that there is a spirit world and that it is close to us—my parents and grandparents are there now and I am sure that they are trying to bless and help me and all their offspring. I know that when I depart this life I will go to that spirit world and will continue working and serving, in activities similar to what I am doing on the earth now. I will die, but I will live again. I am sure that there is a future resurrection and that my aging body will someday be resurrected and restored to a much more perfect form. I know that my soul (body and spirit) will exist forever, in eternal lives (yes, plural), in ways that I do not even begin to understand now.

I have read and prayed and felt enough to know that Christ was a real being, very much like his Father, and that He created this earth for our chance to work, learn, and try to follow Him. I know that Christ was/is what He said He was—the Son of God. I very much believe what the scriptures teach—He died for all of humankind, somehow taking upon himself the sins and pains of the entire world. And His literal resurrection will give me, and all humankind, the joy of our own resurrection. I am sure that Christ must be a very happy person because He has given so much of Himself in service to others, to us.

I have an unshakable assurance that the Book of Mormon was written by ancient prophets, and certainly not written by Joseph Smith (or anyone else in the nineteenth century). I have already detailed my dramatic experience of this personal spiritual knowledge while prospecting on the Utah desert, in 1955; But since that first undeniable experience I have read the Book of Mormon many (thirty, forty, or more) times and my testimony only grows more sure each time I read and study it. This conviction helps me know that Joseph Smith told the truth—he indeed communed with God and Jesus Christ in 1820, and on many subsequent occasions. And he received other celestial visitors who, under Christ’s directions, brought spiritual gifts and powers to earth; we continue to hold those spiritual powers in these days. I have been blessed to receive many of these powers in the various Church callings that have come to us.

And I do know that in these days (the early twenty-first century) we continue to receive divine direction from the heavens. I wholeheartedly sustain the fifteen men who direct the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as modern prophets. I know many of them from personal relationships, and affirm that they are sincere, are accepted by Christ as those chosen to direct His Church. They receive revelation and inspiration from the Lord, in ways that are not miraculous, but quite normal in the Lord’s communication with His children. I have known many of the past prophets and can assuredly testify that they are what we sustain them to be—prophets who represent Jesus Christ. Their desires for us are the same as Christ’s: our happiness now and in the eternal future.

There are still many things I do not know about God, about His Son, about the scriptures, about modern revelation, but I have had sufficient proof and assurance that I cannot deny all that I have stated above. There are so many eternal truths that are much beyond my ability to comprehend at this stage in my eternal life.

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Thomas E. (“Ted”) Lyon (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) teaches Latin American literature and culture at Brigham Young University. In July 2006, he was named Honorary Consul of Chile in Utah.

Posted December 2011

My twin and I, born in 1939, came along as Dad and Lowell Bennion were now the only two teachers at the newly created LDS Institute at the University of Utah. During all my growing up years the Institute and the students it attracted were the center of Dad’s professional and spiritual life. My earliest memories were of Dad doing service projects with students, and Mom feeding them her famous hamburgers. Of his constant service, staying late to close the building so that the Lambda Delta Sigma chapters could meet after school hours, chaperoning Lambda Delta Sigma socials on weekends, and on Sundays providing the priesthood support for the first student Church units (the Stadium Village Branch), and speaking at hundreds and hundreds of sacrament meetings.

My mother was called to the Primary General Board in 1944 at age 38, and because of her skills as a writer and editor was assigned to produce the lesson manuals for many of the Primary classes until Correlation assumed this assignment. This calling meant traveling throughout the U.S. training branch, ward, and stake primary leaders. She returned from these journeys to tell us of the great faith and devotion of Church members in places far from Salt Lake while Dad saw to our needs (we ate a lot of hot dogs when Mom was gone).

My father had the gift of framing the history of the Church in stories about the people who had preceded us. One of the blessings of being with my Dad was to hear him tell us of the history of the Church, often tied to a particular place where we happened to be. As the history of the Church came to life in his stories, I was astonished at the strength of those who preceded me, and who had founded the Church and struggled mightily to insure its survival. Dad’s stories covered many aspects of our history. I heard the story of the Mountain Meadow Massacre at age nine on my first trip to California, as we neared Cedar City. Dad strived for an honest history—highlighting the faith of those who lived it, but also recognizing problems that had occurred.

One story I remember was of my grandfather, who was President Grant’s bishop and often walked to work with him. President Grant had severe insomnia and he dealt with it by riding the “Bamberger” train to Ogden in the morning because he discovered he could always sleep on a train. It gave him a couple of hours of sleep, which was enough to get him through the work day. This story helped me understand the human side of President Grant, but also his devotion to his calling as the prophet.

Foundations of My Testimony

So I grew up warmed by the testimonies of my parents. I also saw the Church in action. Dad took my twin and me to pick peas early one summer morning in the welfare pea patch. The Second World War had just ended and I recall my mother’s meal time prayers, asking the Lord to help those starving in Europe, especially the good Dutch Saints she and Dad knew so well. As we worked in that pea patch Dad explained that we were doing exactly that, helping to feed the hungry. (In the mid-1990s, a Brother Manfred Schütze visited our ward and thanked us for saving his life through the welfare system, and I again thought of that pea patch, and its meaning in terms of Christian service.)

The Church decided to build a new ward in the vacant lot next door to our house, and I learned to help doing jobs a small boy could do, such as cleaning up bits of lumber, and cement sacks, as I watched the priesthood and Relief Society do the heavier work to create a chapel. As newly ordained deacons my twin and I went with the adult priesthood to haul bales of hay from a Church dry farm in South Jordan to the Church dairy. It was my first priesthood assignment besides passing the sacrament. Again I felt part of a great enterprise serving the needs of others, carried out by the ordinary people I attended Church with each Sunday.

During my teenage years I fell in love with a lovely young woman who was a staunch Episcopalian, and the intensity of our love kept the relationship alive for three years despite her moving to California. My parents were wise enough to let me make my own decision in the matter, though their concern with my course was evident. The intensity of her beliefs, and her refusal to consider “Mormonism” as anything but a cult, forced me to question my own beliefs, and I even toyed with the idea of becoming an agnostic in an attempt to bridge the gulf between us. It also prompted me to read the New Testament in its entirety, and I knew without a shadow of doubt that Jesus was the Christ, that he had been resurrected, and that through him I, too, would be resurrected. I simply could not abandon the Church. Though I did not have a witness of its truthfulness, I certainly knew of the goodness of the members, their devotion and great faith, and with great reluctance I terminated our relationship in the spring of 1957.

In June 1957, I served six months active duty in the U.S. Army, and I recall falling to my knees after “lights out” the first day after starting basic training at Fort Ord, California, and asking for the Lord’s help to get me through the most challenging circumstances I had yet faced. I felt great comfort, and found attending Church to be a blessing through the next six months. At Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, our group leader, a sergeant, only made it to church one Sunday, which meant that we eighteen- and nineteen-year-old priests had to organize and conduct our own sacrament meetings, and we did! During this time I made several attempts to read the Book of Mormon, found Ist Nephi a truthful testimony, but foundered on the Isaiah chapters in 2nd Nephi.

In January 1958, I was enrolled at the University of Utah, with only a vague idea of what I wanted to do professionally. One option was to follow in my father’s footsteps as a teacher of history. Another was journalism. I began working on the student newspaper, found I had some talent for writing, and was on track to become the editor of the paper.

In February 1958 I felt the need for a patriarchal blessing. Our stake patriarch was a retired railroad worker of modest means, but with a great spiritual presence. Before the blessing he asked what I hoped to obtain from the blessing, and I told him I needed direction concerning what career I should pursue. In his kindly way he told me that I was asking a great deal of him, and that it would require great faith on my part to fulfill such a request. He then proceeded to pronounce the blessing, and explicitly counseled me to seek knowledge of a scientific nature. Such a career course had never occurred to me, nor did I feel I had the intellectual abilities to succeed, mathematics having been problem for me. I left his house feeling much like Jonah when told to go to Nineveh. I finally resigned from the paper and began taking some basic level science classes, but with no clear career goal in mind, hoping the Lord would help me to fulfill the blessing the patriarch had pronounced.

In June 1959, I accepted a call to serve in the New Zealand mission. It was certainly the hardest two years of my life up to that time. I soon realized that though I had a testimony of Christ I did not have a testimony of the Restoration, only a strong belief in the truthfulness of the Church. As my companions and I bore witness our investigators of European ancestry would counter our testimonies with, “Of course you believe that because you were raised that way, but I was not raised as you were, and cannot accept what you say.” Their other response was often, “Well, Darwin explained it all!” The contrast with our Polynesian investigators was astonishing. Their reaction was one of complete faith and acceptance of our testimonies, though they often lacked the faith to change their lives sufficiently to be baptized. Their response brought home to me the meaning of the beatitude “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” I also saw the power of conversion to make astonishing changes in the lives of people we taught who did accept baptism.

I continued to pray for the witness of the Spirit that I had read about. It came on December 6, 1960, at a day-long testimony meeting with all of the missionaries in the Auckland area presided over by Elder Spencer Kimball. As I came forward to bear my testimony, I was filled with the most powerful yet peaceful feeling I had ever experienced. I felt as if my very soul was filled with a golden light, and I knew, not just believed, that Jesus was the Christ and that Joseph Smith was a prophet who had restored the Church to the earth. The memory of that event is still with me and remains the anchor of my faith to this day.

Upon returning from my mission I put the promises in my patriarchal blessing to the test and enrolled as a freshman pre-medical student. The first few weeks were a challenge, but then I was blessed to be able to pass the examinations, and with grades high enough to make medical school a possibility. I entered the University of Utah School of Medicine in the Fall of 1963 and graduated in June 1967. I worked two summers during the second and third years of medical school as a very junior surgeon/research assistant with Russell M. Nelson, then a cardio-thoracic surgeon, now an Apostle. He had said that the one trait that set me apart from his other students was an insatiable curiosity, and he was right.

Because of his powerful example, I set off to be a surgeon, but soon realized that my desires to be surgeon did not match with my curiosity and with what the Lord wanted me to do. So, after a year of internship, I entered the Harvard School of Public Health to pursue a Master’s Degree in Public Health. I was interested in a discipline I had only heard about, epidemiology. It was a branch of medicine which no one in my medical training to that point had ever talked about, but it is where I ended up; so I became an epidemiologist studying the causes of chronic diseases.

I have taught the subject at the University of Utah since 1974, have published over 140 scientific papers on the subject, and hopefully have made one or two contributions to the discipline. I was the first to document and quantify many of the benefits of living the Word of Wisdom among the LDS using the methods of epidemiology. This research has continued and been expanded by others, and has helped the Church in its missionary efforts. I was blessed in this effort by the strong encouragement and help of Dr. James O. Mason, then in charge of the Church’s health programs, now an emeritus general authority. I was also helped because the Church, unique among any churches I am aware of, maintains a central file of Church members. Without the efforts of nameless ward clerks throughout Utah who updated the ward records and recorded the births and deaths in their ward, it would have been impossible to do such research.

One highlight of my professional career was to be invited to present some of my findings on the health of the LDS to the Princess Takamatsu Cancer Conference. Princess Takamatsu, the sister in law of the Emperor of Japan, complimented me personally on my contribution to her conference. My findings had been the only scientific report that the Japanese newspapers chose to report, and she was pleased with the publicity. I felt I had had a small part in being able to bear testimony to the wisdom of the Lord in revealing the Word of Wisdom through Joseph Smith.

I also stumbled on the adverse effects on the health of children in Southern Utah caused by exposure to radiation from the testing of atomic bombs at the Nevada Test site. My research on that topic caused me to testify before the U.S. Congress five times, and finally resulted in financial compensation to those injured.

As I near retirement, my wife and I have experienced the blessings of working weekly in the Salt Lake Temple, and have come to a greater appreciation of the great work for the dead, and the power of commitments made in the temple and the eternal nature of the sealing ordinances performed there. I hope the demands of memorization in our temple assignment have also helped to keep my aging brain a little more agile.

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Joseph Lynn Lyon is a professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He received his B.S. and M.D. degree from University of Utah, and a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.

He has published over 140 articles in the peered reviewed scientific literature. He has been the recipient of 29 grants and contracts, mostly from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has served as a reviewer for a number of scientific journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Posted December 2011

East Garland was not a town. It was an agricultural area, with the town of Garland on the west, the town of Tremonton on the south, the Bear River on the east, and Fielding, another agricultural area, on the north. The only non-farm building in East Garland was the church house. As was the case at that time, especially in rural Utah, all the people in East Garland were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dad and Mother had attended Bear River High School. Mother graduated valedictorian of her class. She was an avid reader all her life. Dad was only able to complete his sophomore year, as his father needed him to help on the farm. However, even though Dad’s formal education was short, I never met a man who had more wisdom.

While we lived in East Garland, Dad said we would go to church together as a family, and we did. There was no pressure. It was simply something we did on Sunday as long as any of us children were living at home. Sometimes we walked to church, since the church house was only half a mile away. In addition to teachings at church, Dad and Mother taught us concepts from the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Mother also told us about our great great grandparents and great grandparents, who were among the first to join the Church in Europe. Some were disowned by their families, and others were mocked by friends who did not join the Church. Like others, they said goodbye to their homeland and came to a new country by ship and crossed the plains to Utah with other pioneers. Both of these were heart-breaking and fatiguing trips, but they were determined to come. They were from Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark, but mostly from England. Of this group of ancestors, I only met my Grandfather Delos Adams and Grandfather Joseph Atkinson. The others had passed on before I was born.

In 1936, Mother’s sister and her husband, who lived in California, purchased a bare seventy-five-acre farm in Yuba City, California. By “a bare farm,” I mean that there weren’t any crops growing on it. There was a house, a barn, and a deep well pump for irrigation. They wanted Dad to come and develop their farm. After much thought, Dad and Mother decided to move to Yuba City, which is about fifty miles north of Sacramento. We made this move in 1937, when I was five years old. Dad prepared the ground with his team of horses, and planted alfalfa, peaches, and almonds. The first crop of alfalfa came the second year we were there, and, at age seven, I became the designated alfalfa mowing and raking person with Dad’s team, as well as being an irrigator. Of course, Dad had to harness and unharness the team, since I could not reach the top of their backs. This continued after Dad bought his own farm.

As soon as we arrived in Yuba City, Dad and Mother located the Church. We continued attending church as a family. When I was eight years old, I was baptized in the font at the Gridley Stake chapel. I cannot say that I had a real testimony at that time. I had learned a lot about the gospel in church and from my parents. I was familiar with Joseph Smith’s quest to find the true Church; his visitation from God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ; the instructions he received at that time; his organizing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and his translating the Book of Mormon from golden plates given to him by the angel Moroni.

A person might conclude that anyone who had three generations of grandparents plus parents with strong personal testimonies of the gospel would automatically inherit a strong testimony. But it doesn’t work that way. A testimony is personal, and one must discover for himself or herself the truthfulness of these things. During my later teenage years, I began to see more clearly the disparity between my parents’ testimony and what I was thinking. I could not say in all honesty, “I know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only true church on the earth.” I thought it was the true church. This may be a necessary beginning condition, but it is not a sufficient condition for a real testimony. Like many others, I concluded that the Book of Mormon was the starting point because of a promise that it contains in chapter ten, verse four, of Moroni, which states:

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

Like many others who wanted verification from Heavenly Father, I began to put this to the test. I studied the Book of Mormon, fasted, and knelt down and prayed many times with a sincere heart to know if it was true. I also prayed to know if Joseph Smith truly saw God, the Father, and Jesus Christ. I also prayed to know if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the true church on the earth. These efforts continued after I began attending the University of California at Berkeley. In due time, Heavenly Father did answer my prayers by the gift of the Holy Ghost. Since that time, I have had other personal experiences that could easily be called miracles. These will not be discussed, as they are most sacred to me. I have also witnessed positive changes in the lives of others who have sincerely put this to the test. These experiences have further strengthened my testimony about the truthfulness of the Church.

For many years it has been my testimony that I know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christ’s true church on the earth. I know that Joseph Smith did see God, the Father, and Jesus Christ, and conversed with them. I know Joseph Smith was chosen by Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ to be the prophet to restore His Church to the earth with the same organization and doctrine as the church Christ established when He was on the earth. I know the prophet Joseph Smith was given the holy priesthood as part of this restoration, and it continues in the Church today. I know the prophet Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from the golden plates by the gift and power of God, and that it is a second witness of Heavenly Father’s plan for us to return to Him, and that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world.

This same process is available to anyone who sincerely desires to know the truthfulness of these things. I encourage you to put it to the test.

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Jed A. Adams received his B.S. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and then proceeded on to receive a Ph.D. in agricultural economics, also from the University of California at Berkeley. He spent his entire career with the California Department of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento, retiring in 1993. As a young man, he served in the Spanish American Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1954-1956).

Posted December 2011

Confirmation at Bellingham

Several years ago I attended an eight week Institute in the Philosophy of Religion at Eastern Washington University in Bellingham, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Institute was directed by Professors William Alston and Alvin Plantinga and included as faculty some of the most prominent philosophers of religion in both the U.S. and Great Britain. We met all day Monday thru Fridays and a half day on Saturday, as well as three evenings a week. Near the end of July, sensing participant burnout, Professor Alston announced that we were going to take a day off the coming Friday and that, for those interested, plans had been made for a whaling boat excursion of the coast of Puget Sound.. All of us eagerly signed up.

On Thursday night—the eve of the excursion—I remembered that I had accepted an invitation to teach the priesthood lesson on Sunday in the High Priests group of the Bellingham 2nd Ward—my ward for the summer. Realizing that there would be little time later, I decided to read and begin to prepare the lesson. The manual that year was based on the Old Testament. The particular lesson dealt with seeking and receiving spiritual confirmation of gospel truth. The introduction to the lesson included a passage from Jeremiah containing the phrase “in mine heart like a burning fire,” and a quotation from President Harold B. Lee which said (I’m paraphrasing): “One is not truly converted until he sees the spirit of the Lord resting upon the leaders of the Church and that testimony goes down into one’s heart like fire.” As I read and pondered the lesson material, I felt a very strong impression that there was someone who was struggling with his faith who very much needed this lesson and that I consequently I needed to prepare the lesson with great care and prayer—so much so that I should forego the whaling boat excursion on the morrow and spend the entire day Friday in preparation. I tried to brush these feelings aside—I really wanted very much to go on that whaling boat expedition. But the feelings persisted. The thought came to me: you will only pass this way but once. There is someone who will especially benefit from your thorough preparation of the priesthood lesson. The battle continued. That’s a very vain and presumptuous thought, I countered. God doesn’t need me; he can do his work through anyone. The conflict continued for some time, but eventually my lower self lost the battle. I gave up the excursion and spent all day Friday preparing the priesthood lesson. I read and reread the lesson, together with the scriptures cited. I took several walks to ponder the manual’s content and spent much time on my knees praying for guidance. And guidance came. Impressions were clear. You need to deal with these issues; you need to invite class members to respond to these questions. You need to reflect on these scriptures, you to need to share these experiences. Never before had I felt such clear direction in my preparation. By the end of the day, my lesson outline was completely and clearly spelled out. I thought about the members of high priest group, wondering for whom I was specially preparing the lesson, but I drew a blank. Having been in the group for only six weeks, I didn’t know any of them very well.

It was the first Sunday in August and Ward meetings began with fast and testimony meeting. Near the end of the meeting, a young woman (probably in her early forties) came to the podium to share her testimony. Before doing so, she explained that she and her family were from out of state and that they were on their way to Vancouver, Canada, which was hosting the World’s Fair. They felt impressed to stop in Bellingham to attend their meetings. She bore her testimony and returned to the bench, a few rows ahead of mine, where her husband and children were seated. Her husband immediately followed her to the podium. He explained that, before the meeting, he had made a deal with his wife: although he had never spoken a word in a Church meeting, if she would bear her testimony, he would bear his. He began by sharing some personal background. He reported that he had never been a believer. And that his study of the hard sciences, including chemistry, in college had served to confirm him in his atheism. While in college, he met and subsequently married the woman who was now his wife. She was, and she had always remained, an active Latter-day Saint. Throughout their married life, she had always taken their children to the church, while he almost always spent his Sundays reading the newspapers, watching TV, and resting. Occasionally, he went to church with them, almost always when a family member was speaking or otherwise performing. And he sometimes participated with his wife in Church social activities. In time, his rabid atheism was supplanted by an open agnosticism. It was then that he, at his wife’s urging, was baptized. He became fully active in Church activities. Nevertheless, he said, until this morning, he had never before borne his testimony, asked a question, or even spoken a word in a Church meeting. In ending his remarks, he said: “I cannot honestly say ‘I know the Church is true.’ I have never experienced a spiritual confirmation of its truthfulness. But, I can honestly say ‘I know the Church is good.’” And, he concluded: “I hope the Church is true.” He then returned to his seat.

While this brother was speaking, I received a powerful spiritual confirmation that he was the person for whom, with God’s help, I had prepared the priesthood lesson. Accordingly, immediately following the close of the fast and testimony meeting, I introduced myself to him and invited him to our high priest group meeting. “Thank you,” he said, “but I’m an Elder.” “That’s alright,” I said. “You’re supposed to meet with the high priests this morning.” Puzzled, he nonetheless came with me.

In the group meeting, I presented the lesson material—asking the questions, pondering the scriptures, sharing the experiences—as I had been divinely guided to do. Consistent with what he had reported in his testimony, this brother did not say a word.

But he lingered in the classroom following the closing prayer until only the two of us were left in the room. Then he thanked me for the priesthood lesson, reporting that the issues dealt with in the class were the very ones that he had struggled with throughout his life. “Now I know how to resolve them,” he said, “Thank you very much.” He continued, “During the lesson, I received a spiritual confirmation that the restored gospel is true.” And then with tears streaming down his cheeks, he continued, “God brought me to Bellingham this morning.” And, through my tears, all I could say was, “I know.”

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David Lamont Paulsen is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University (BYU), where, from 1994 to 1998, he held the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding.

Professor Paulsen received an associate’s degree from Snow College in English, a bachelor’s degree from BYU in Political Science (graduating that year as BYU’s valedictorian), a J.D. from the Law School of the University of Chicago in 1964, and then, after several years spent as a practicing attorney, a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1975, with emphasis in the philosophy of religion.

With Donald W. Musser, Professor Paulsen edited Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christian Theologies (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008). He also wrote the foreword to The Mormon Doctrine of Deity: The Roberts-Van Der Donckt Discussion (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000).

Professor Paulsen has contributed articles to The International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Analysis (“Divine Determinateness and the Free Will Defence” [43:1]), The Harvard Theological Review (e.g., “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses” [83:2]; and, with Carl W. Griffin, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God” [95:2]), Faith and Philosophy (“Must God Be Incorporeal?” [6:1]), and Speculative Philosophy.

He has also contributed essays to the FARMS Review (including, among others, with Ari D. Bruening, “The Development of the Mormon Understanding of God: Early Mormon Modalism and Other Myths” [13:2]; with Brent Alvord, “Joseph Smith and the Problem of the Unevangelized” [17:1]; and, with Cory G. Walker, “Work, Worship, and Grace” [18:2]), the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (e.g., with Roger D. Cook and Kendel J. Christensen, “The Harrowing of Hell: Salvation for the Dead in Early Christianity” [19:1]; with Brock M. Mason, “Baptism for the Dead in Early Christianity” [19:2]; and, with Kendel J. Christensen and Martin Pulido, “Redeeming the Dead: Tender Mercies, Turning of Hearts, and Restoration of Authority” [20:1]), and BYU Studies (e.g., “The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives” [35:4]; “Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil” [39:1]; “Joseph Smith Challenges the Theological World” [44:4]; “Are Christians Mormon? Reassessing Joseph Smith’s Theology in His Bicentennial” [45:1]; with Julie K. Allen, “The Reverend Dr. Peter Christian Kierkegaard’s ‘About and Against Mormonism’ (1855)” [46:3]; “What Does It Mean to Be a Christian? The Views of Joseph Smith and Søren Kierkegaard” [47:4]; with Clark H. Pinnock, “Open and Relational Theology: An Evangelical in Dialogue with a Latter-day Saint” [48:2]; and, with Martin Pulido, “‘A Mother There’: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven” [50:1]).

Posted December 2011

My progenitors

My father was born in Provo, Utah, and went with his family to Southern California when his father was seeking work during the Depression. His mother was of Mormon handcart pioneer stock and his father was a Catholic from Wisconsin. They met when my grandfather was stationed in Provo with the US Army to guard the power plant during early World War I. Grandpa didn`t join the Church until many years later. Grandma was just a small town girl who made great pies and hugged her grandchildren a lot. As a side note, this simple country girl took up china painting when she was fifty and had one of her pieces put on permanent display in the Smithsonian before she died.

My mother was born in Houston, Texas, and was a convert to the Church before I was born. As another side note, her father learned to fly from Wilbur Wright and was one of the “early birds” whose name is engraved on the Wright Brothers Memorial at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Her parents divorced when she was young and her mother joined the Church a few years before she died. Her father was always gracious, but was not interested in the Church.

Even though my father’s mother was a believing Mormon, his family was not active in the Church. Family legend has it that her grandfather was on his way to the bishop’s storehouse to pay his tithing with a wagonload of potatoes when one of his neighbors told him there was no need to go because he had “just been excommunicated” from the Church. Family legend does not say why. My father was baptized quite late for those born in the Church (at age sixteen; the usual age is eight) and he did not set foot in the church again until he was reactivated while serving in the Navy during World War II. Apparently his mother sent word to the Church that my father was stationed in Florida and he was visited by a Church member who challenged him with an inquiry as to what he was doing “about the eternal welfare of his family?” He responded positively to the challenge, became active and converted my mother.

My early experiences

I was born a couple of years later with my father and mother both active in the Church. They took me to church and taught me right and wrong, but were not rigid, by-the-book Mormons. I suspect my mother was never fully converted because she occasionally remarked that she was still a Methodist at heart. I remember my mother once telling me that I would “never amount to anything in the Church because,” as a California Mormon, “I was not related to anybody” of importance. Balancing that statement, I also remember her saying that I was “special” because my father had promised God while my mother was pregnant that he would “dedicate me to His service” if I were a boy (I have an older sister and a younger brother). These comments stuck with me my whole life.

I always thought there was a God. I felt the presence of spiritual beings, especially while going to sleep at night. I attended church meetings with my parents and went up through the age grades in the Primary (the children’s organization). I noticed as a youth that if I sat near the front of the chapel in church meetings that I felt a special warmth that I did not feel if I sat out in the overflow area where most kids wanted to sit. I was never severely tempted to smoke or drink or be immoral. I was just a normal Mormon kid who became an Eagle Scout, studied hard in high school, and looked forward to a life of happiness and achievement. In my senior year at Burbank High School I was captain of the swim team and student body president. I felt like I was king of the school. I didn’t think of myself as a missionary, but found myself frequently involved in discussions about religion at the back of the bus on the way to swim meets and with non-LDS girls I was dating. To my surprise, three of my close high school friends joined the Church. In my senior year I decided to turn down an offer of admission to a prestigious California university and go to BYU. The principal called me into his office and pleaded with me to reconsider because he felt I was about to make a mistake I would “regret for the rest of my life.” A profound turning point for me was when I was getting on the bus for the All Night Party at Disneyland after the evening high school graduation ceremony held in the Burbank Starlight Bowl in the Verdugo Hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley. As I saw the lights stretching over the large valley I remember being struck by the thought that all the “glory” of high school and of this world was fleeting and ultimately of little value. I felt an emptiness that longed for filling.

Going off to college

My parents moved from Burbank as soon as I graduated and I lived with my sister, three years older than I am, in an apartment in a neighboring town during the summer because we both had summer jobs in the area. Those three months were the spiritual low point of my life: I was away from home for the first time and living in a lonely, anonymous environment. My sister had her own life and I felt stranded. I hardly went to church at all that summer. When it became time to head up to BYU in the fall, I looked forward to turning over a new leaf and being completely active in the Church. When I got to Provo, I was 100 percent active in my BYU student ward, and for the first time I discovered how fulfilling and meaningful church service could be. I went to BYU expecting to be surrounded by “farmers” (as a Southern California teenager, we made fun of people at the beach with “farmers’ tans”). I was admitted to the Honors Program and was quickly disabused of any feelings of superiority. I had great professors and was impressed with the quality of the students, and especially of the recently returned missionaries I met on campus. When I started at BYU, I told myself and others that I would go on a mission after completing my undergraduate education, but the enthusiasm of the former missionaries had penetrated and I applied to go as soon as I was old enough the summer following my freshman year.

My mission

I studied Japanese on a lark as a freshman and, not surprisingly, I was called to serve in Japan. I was kind of a “hot shot” at the beginning of my mission because I was one of the very few missionaries who had studied Japanese before the mission. In those days, missionaries were literally dumped into Japanese society without formal language training and were expected to be stopping people on the street and inviting them to meetings during their first week in the country. I remember the first missionary testimony meeting I attended; experienced missionaries bore what I perceived to be fervent testimonies that they “knew” the Book of Mormon and the Church were true. I recall saying something weak like, ”I hope the Church and the Book of Mormon are true.” While not satisfying to me, I did not worry about it, or go tell my mission president that I wanted to go home because I didn’t have a testimony. I just went to work with my companion doing what missionaries are supposed to do, and studied hard about the Gospel, as well as the language. At another missionary testimony meeting a couple of months later, I found myself saying, and believing it, that I “knew” the Church and the Book of Mormon were true and that Jesus Christ was my savior. I can’t put my finger on exactly when I gained this conviction. It just came, and has never wavered since then.

I had read the Book of Mormon only once before my mission and had never read the Bible cover to cover. I came to love the scriptures on my mission. I also learned that the value of a single soul is great in the sight of the Lord. I had one convert baptism to my name when I left Japan, and he went inactive in the Church shortly after joining. However, there was a college student that my companion and I contacted while he was working out with the university swim team just three weeks after I arrived in Japan. We scaled a chain-link fence to get access to the pool area. He was baptized after I was transferred to another area, and he later became one of the top church leaders in Japan who has brought dozens, if not hundreds, of people into the Church during his life. He is a living example of that old saying, “you can count the number of seeds in the apple, but you can’t count the number of apples in the seed.” Despite the paucity of baptisms, I felt a deep satisfaction when boarding the plane home that my mission had definitely been worth the two-and-a-half years I had spent on it.

As a returned missionary at BYU

After my mission in the spring of 1968, I was obliged to enroll immediately at BYU and had to stay for summer school to keep from being drafted. I really didn’t want to be there. My parents had divorced while I was on my mission and my father had remarried to a lovely lady who was not a Mormon. He met me at the Los Angeles airport while I was waiting for my flight to Salt Lake and was smoking a pipe, as if to signal me as to his activity status in the Church. He told me that, due to the change in his circumstances, he could not help me financially and I was on my own. I arrived at BYU penniless and with no idea how I would support myself.

A miracle occurred soon after arriving at BYU, when the professor who taught me Japanese as a freshman told me that I could have a room in his house for free. He had ten children and I was treated as number eleven. I ate with his family and all I had to do in return was to be what I have jokingly referred to as his “slave” (e.g. I built a fence, helped him finish his basement, baby-sat his children and served as his research assistant). This was entirely acceptable because I had time but no money.

One afternoon that summer I was studying in my room at the professor’s house and was not at all happy about life. I felt lonely and wanted to be in California with my family. Like many recently returned missionaries, I had a hard time getting back into the dating and social scene after the mission. I wondered if anyone loved me. In this state of heightened emotional sensitivity, I remember looking out the window and seeing clouds swirling around the top of nearby Mt. Timpanogos after a brief summer shower, and I had a strong feeling I should go outside into his large and private back yard (which I had fenced). The sight of the mountains, near dusk with the setting sun making them aflame with various shades of red, overwhelmed me. I began to pray vocally and asked my Heavenly Father, simply, if He loved me. At that moment I felt as if my body was being filled with a hot liquid, beginning in my toes and moving slowly upwards. When it got to my head I began to cry and spontaneously started to sing the LDS hymn “Oh, My Father,” which goes in part:

O my Father, thou that dwellest
In the high and glorious place,
When shall I regain thy presence
And again behold thy face?
In thy holy habitation,
Did my spirit once reside?
In my first primeval childhood
Was I nurtured near thy side?
….
I had learned to call thee Father,
Thru thy Spirit from on high,
But, until the key of knowledge
Was restored, I knew not why.
In the heav’ns are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare!
Truth is reason; truth eternal
Tells me I’ve a mother there.

When I leave this frail existence,
When I lay this mortal by,
Father, Mother, may I meet you
In your royal courts on high?
Then, at length, when I’ve completed
All you sent me forth to do,
With your mutual approbation
Let me come and dwell with you.

I had no doubt that my Heavenly Parents loved me more than I could comprehend, and all I really wanted in life was to return to live with them someday.

After that late summer experience, the fall semester rolled around, and I was called to serve as the head of the young men’s organization in my ward. I worked with the head of the young women’s organization and we planned and executed many fun activities for our ward. Toward the end of the winter term we started to date and got engaged shortly thereafter. We were married that summer. To my surprise, I was called to serve as a counselor in the bishopric of our singles ward just ten days after our marriage. This reinforced how much I loved church service. I subsequently served in two other bishoprics at BYU before graduating. The opportunity to serve continued in graduate school, when I was called to be a member of high councils while in my PhD program at the University of Michigan and while attending Harvard Law School.

Graduate school

Our first couple of years in Ann Arbor were challenging, both academically and church-wise. I was actually not admitted to the Anthropology Ph.D. program at first, despite the fact that I had a full 4 year fellowship in Anthropology from the National Science Foundation. The professor with whom I wanted to study told me to come anyway and enroll in a Japan Studies M.A. program, while taking the full first year course work for the anthropology Ph.D. program and, thus, getting to know the department faculty. I later learned that I was the first applicant to the program from BYU and a student from Princeton was admitted for the only slot available. I was duly admitted the second year and was not delayed in my progress. A year later I failed the part of my doctoral exams which was read by a professor who was a former Mormon and very bitter about the Church. I told my advisor, with whom I had become very close, that this professor “hated me” (he scathingly referred to my religion as a “cargo cult” in his written critique of the exam), which my professor did not think possible because he said the other man was a “professional.” When told that he threatened me on the telephone with physical violence over an imagined slight, my advisor promptly arranged for a new committee member and I retook the exam and passed.

The ward in Ann Arbor was a real eye-opener to us. There seemed to be a sense of questioning the doctrines and folkways of the Church, especially the idea of deferring to the authority of the Brethren in Salt Lake City. I had a strange feeling that the many psychologists in the congregation were psychoanalyzing me every time I participated in the meetings. I felt like a rube from BYU. In the first couple of years more than one of my cohorts in the ward became noticeably disaffected regarding the Church. I made a conscious decision at the time to not question Church authority or aspects of the doctrine that I did not fully understand. Similar to my experience as a young missionary, I decided to “not sweat the small stuff,” get on with my life and Ph.D. program, and suspend judgment on certain matters until I could understand them later. I consciously decided that my religion was my life and that no amount of “intellectual honesty” was worth giving up or damaging my belief system. I realized that the “group” of believers really mattered to me. This reaffirmed the path that my mission firmly set me upon.

The church experience at Harvard was vastly different than that in Ann Arbor. There was a sweet spirit of testimony and even humility among the many first-rate students and faculty affiliated with Harvard, MIT, and other excellent universities in the area. We loved it in Boston. We had a particularly faith promoting experience while there. The Church needed to build a new meetinghouse for our ward and the bishop (a young professor at MIT) challenged the members, many of whom were graduate students, to contribute to the building fund in an amount that would “hurt.” He said he was reluctant to say this because, from his experience, the Saints were almost always faithful and he did not want anyone to do anything “foolish” by giving too much. The only money we had accumulated was a certain amount set aside to buy a sewing machine, which my wife had earned while babysitting. When the bishop sat down with us to find out how much we would give, we gave him a check for that amount. Surprised, he asked us where we got that kind of money. When we told him, he began to cry, saying this was the kind of sacrifice that he was worried about. At our insistence he accepted the money. A few weeks later I got a letter from the financial aid office at Harvard Law School saying there was an error made in calculating our aid amount and they needed to talk to me about it. Such a notice from that office was almost always bad news (e.g. they found out my father earned more than he said and I owed them money). I went to the office in trepidation. As I talked to them they explained, with some embarrassment, that they were teaching a new employee how to calculate need and randomly pulled my file out of a filing cabinet packed with hundreds of student aid files. They said that while going over the numbers they realized they had under-calculated my need and that they owed me additional aid amounting to over 3 times the sum we had donated. As I stood and related this experience to our ward members in the next fast and testimony meeting, the bishop sitting on the stand again began to cry. My wife got her sewing machine. This reinforced our testimony that Heavenly Father blesses us as we have the faith to sacrifice and live his commandments.

Professional life and Church service

After law school, I was recruited into the management consulting firm Bain & Company and, after three years there, two of which were in Tokyo, I was invited to return to BYU in a tenure-track position in Anthropology. The decision to leave Bain was not easy because I was going from a comfortable income to the likelihood of 1/3 of my salary at that time. I waffled back and forth about going or not, and one evening told my wife that I decided to turn down the university position. The next day I went from our home in Tokyo to Osaka on a business trip. As I ran to catch the bullet train to return to Tokyo, the doors closed in my face and the train departed. To that point, I had never missed at train or a plane. As I stood there , I heard a voice from the far end of the platform calling out “Walt Ames! Walt Ames!” It was my friend, a BYU Japanese language professor, leading a group of BYU students on a study abroad trip who had just gotten off the train I had intended to board. What were the odds of this happening in the teeming Osaka train station? What if I had been two seconds faster and gotten on that train? It immediately struck me that it was literally BYU calling me and that it was an answer to prayer. I called my wife from Osaka, told her we were going to BYU and to have the movers come the next day.

A month after joining the faculty, I was called as a counselor in a BYU student stake presidency and a year later, at age thirty-eight, I became president of the stake. I told the Apostle who called me that I had not yet been a bishop. He told me not to worry about that, to just rely on the Lord and do the job. As he was setting me apart, I felt almost an electric shock as he placed his hands on my head. Afterwards I could not restrain myself from testifying to the small group of people in the room that I knew that he was a true Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. As president of a single student stake comprised mostly of recently returned missionaries and young women interested in that demographic, I had numerous spiritual experiences working with young people as they tried to live the Gospel. To cite just one, I remember an occasion where my counselors and I were setting a young man apart to a position in an elder’s quorum presidency. With my eyes shut and my hands on his head, I saw in my mind’s eye a being dressed in white joining us in the circle with his hands on the head of the young man. After the setting apart I felt impressed to ask him about his father. He told me that he was deceased and had been a faithful member and priesthood bearer. I told him about the experience and said I felt that it was his father in the circle with us. The Apostle who had called me to be stake president (a former president of the university) later told me that he felt the real reason I had come to BYU was to serve as stake president.

After four years or so at the university, and with the blessing of the Apostle who had called me, I left BYU to set up the Tokyo operations of a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based management consulting firm. While there, at age forty-three, we received a telephone call from a member of the First Presidency of the Church calling my wife and me to preside over the Japan Nagoya Mission. Living in Japan for an extended period was not easy for a family (we had six children, the youngest aged two at the time). When asked in a pre-calling “chat” with a General Authority of the Church about how a mission would fit in our lives at that time, my wife was asked for her response first. In her typically honest and faithful manner she replied “Terrible! But if the Lord wants us to serve, we will do so.” She had borne the brunt of raising the children in a tough school, social, and medical environment in Japan. When I was asked, I saw it as a great adventure and said I would look forward to it immensely. We received the call. After being set apart by the member of the First Presidency who called us, he stopped us at the door as we were leaving his office, looked my wife in the eye, and said the things she was worrying about “would not happen.” The mission turned out to be a great blessing in the lives of our entire family. We saw countless miracles during the three years of our unpaid service.

Recent years

Our life has passed, it seems, in a flash since our mission experience. I returned to BYU for another year and then became an executive recruiter with a global executive recruiting firm in their Tokyo office. I worked for fifteen years in several different global firms in this industry, mostly recruiting senior executives to work in multinational enterprises in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. Church-wise, I have had the privilege of finally being called to serve as bishop in one of the English-language wards in Tokyo. I am now retired on disability and working as an adjunct professor at Utah Valley University and at BYU. My wife shared with me an insight the other day regarding something that had been weighing on my heart. She said that the reason I had been called to prominent positions in the Church so early in age was that the Lord knew I would become disabled, and if He had waited until I was older I would not have had the chance to serve. The Spirit whispers that she is right. Throughout our married life my wife and I have prayed to be in a position to serve others and our Heavenly Father and we have had many opportunities to do so in formal Church callings and in quiet and informal ways.

My testimony is based on numerous profound spiritual experiences and miracles which I cannot deny, and the realization that life is meaningful only if we serve others. My mother was right in that I have been able to spend my life in God’s service. Of course my life is not yet over, and I hope in the end she will be proven wrong in that I will have amounted to something in the Church. Despite some weakness in my parent’s activity in the Church, I have been able (thanks largely to my wife) to raise a progeny who have founded themselves on the rock of the Gospel.

I know the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored to the earth and is found in its fullness in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I know the Book of Mormon is the word of God and will bring happiness to those who follow its precepts. I know the Church is led by Apostles and Prophets and I have had the blessing of sitting at their feet and hearing the word of God uttered directly from their lips. I know that God lives, that He loves me and that His gracious hand is in all things. My fondest hope is to live my life in such a way as to fill the measure of my mortal creation and to find true and everlasting joy with my family gathered around me in the presence of my Heavenly Father and Mother.

I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, AMEN.

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After graduating from Brigham Young University (BYU) with a B.S. in Anthropology and Asian Studies, Walter L. Ames earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

He has taught at various periods for BYU, and currently serves as an adjunct faculty member at both BYU and Utah Valley University.

He has also served as a managing director at Russell Reynolds Associates, a partner at Ray & Berndtson, a vice president at A. T. Kearney Executive Search (which acquired Ray & Berndtson), and a partner at Edward W. Kelley & Partners (which acquired A. T. Kearney Executive Search), and is currently a partner with Heidrick & Struggles.

He is the author of, among other things, Police and Community in Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), and a contributor to, among other things, Japanese Law in Context: Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).

Posted November 2011

Scientific discovery can be so very exciting and competitive that it can be totally engrossing. Some of my coworkers tend to become “workaholics” in pursuit of discovery, setting aside other “distractions,” working single-mindedly to be the first to solve a specific problem. Were it not for some firmly rooted religious practices in my life, including Sabbath Day observance, I too would probably have become consumed with the quest for scientific discovery with resulting neglect of other personal and family values. Instead I have found, and bear testimony, that Sabbath Day observance has had a very positive impact on my career. For me, Sabbath observance implements one of the great natural laws of human endeavor, namely that, in any intense effort, a proper rest gives added perspective and renewed strength. In my life, an effective rest is not physical inactivity with my mind still engaged in scientific matters, but rather total absorption in a completely different activity. Focused religious contemplation and engrossing service in the Church provides a beneficial rest for the mind. Time and again, not only in my professional career but also in my studies long ago, I have witnessed how Sabbath Day observance has blessed me professionally. It seems paradoxical that the absence from scientific activity in body and mind for short periods could be so beneficial in scientific pursuits, but that has clearly been the case in my career.

My religious faith has blessed me in another way that is not so empirically transparent. Over my career, I have also been invited to assume various ecclesiastical callings, including serving twice as a bishop and as a member of a stake presidency. I do not have data to prove it statistically, but I have noticed that periods in which I was the most involved in ecclesiastical callings were also the periods during which I was the most successful professionally, for example in the production of scientific papers. I have not promised such a positive correlation between Church work and professional success to others. But I do bear testimony that, as I have been engaged in the work of the Lord, dedicating time and emotional energy to that work, He has blessed me with inspiration to prosper professionally. In this as well as in other ways, it has been cherished experience to accept personally challenging Church assignments in faith, and then to witness the hand of the Lord blessing one to accomplish the Church work and at the same time to thrive professionally.

A recent manifestation of the Lord’s inspiration in scientific pursuits occurred during the humanitarian mission that my wife and I served in Syria (2008-2010). In addition to pure humanitarian work, my duties included serving as a faculty member at Damascus University. The Lord blessed me to be very productive professionally, despite the limited resources, as a means of serving others and representing the Church. It was a marvelous experience to witness again such science-related inspiration.

I bear personal testimony that my religion, besides being a source of strength in my professional life, has also brought great joy in my personal life and in family life for my wife and me.

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James Matis is a Professor Emeritus of Statistics at Texas A&M University. He received a BS in Mathematics from Weber State, an MS in Statistics from BYU, and a PhD in Statistics from Texas A&M. He has been on the faculty of Texas A&M since 1970.

He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and an elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He received the Founder’s Award, the highest honor from ASA, for “outstanding leadership . . . advancing statistical education.” He also received university-level Distinguished Achievement Awards in both Teaching and Research from Texas A&M. He has published over 150 scientific papers appearing in over 40 journals, and has been a consultant for business and government agencies. His international experience includes service as a statistical expert for the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), twice to India and once to the People’s Republic of China. He was twice awarded a Fulbright research fellowship from the US State Department to India and, on another occasion, was awarded an Indo-American fellowship to India. He has also taught in South Africa, and was recently a faculty member at Damascus University for two years as part of an LDS service mission.

Posted November 2011