Thinking back on when her boyfriend initially gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon, Finnish member Mia Kemppaala recalls “taking it out of courtesy, and I remember that I tossed it in the back of my cupboard.”
She could not have guessed that years later she would be asked to speak with President Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in his address to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Helsinki, Finland.
Kemppaala said on the Church News podcast that she has always considered herself to have faith in Jesus Christ even when she wasn’t actively religious. “But I was always taught to pray, even when I was a child, like in the evenings, and I was really content about my faith; I wasn’t actively looking for anything else.”
This view on faith isn’t unusual in Finland, where religion is quickly becoming less and less talked about. According to a youth barometer, 30% of Finnish youth feel that they are religious, and 60% of the youth consider themselves nonreligious.
When Kemppaala started dating her now husband and found that he was a member of the Church, she thought, “OK, it’s good for you that you have your faith, but I will never become a member of that church.”
However, Kemppaala was pushed to challenge her assumptions about the Church when her boyfriend left to serve a mission. While she had initially thought that members of the Church were forced to serve missions, in talking with her boyfriend, she realized he was serving because he wanted to.
“What if these assumptions that I have, what if they are not true,” she began to consider. “What if there would be even like a 1% chance that the Book of Mormon would be true? Are my assumptions limiting me from even finding it out, because I’m not giving any room for the thought for the 1% chance of it being right?”
So, one of the first places she turned to was the same Book of Mormon that she had tossed into a cupboard. After randomly turning to 2 Nephi 33:10, she felt strongly that these were the words of Christ.
“You’d think that receiving such an answer would have immediately gotten me to convert myself and be baptized as a member of the Church, but you’re wrong, because still I kept having my doubts,” she joked.
It took a package from her boyfriend containing the Church pioneer film “Legacy,” to get her to meet with missionaries. “I want to experience that type of faith. I want to have that type of faith as they have, and I want to feel what that is,” she decided. “Now I’m going to have such faith. And I’m going to have the missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ to come and teach me.”
Kemppaala continued to learn about the gospel and meet with missionaries for years. She laughingly admits she was “a lot of stubborn” about baptism until she realized: “I cannot ever be sure. I always had a question, and then I found an answer; then I had another question, then I found an answer. But then I realized that, you know, this continues forever, and I have to sometimes just take the leap of faith.”
When she was baptized, she was already married to her husband who Kemppaala recalls “had a very strong feeling that one day, eventually, I would find my way. And I did find my way. And he was the one who also baptized me.”
Fast forward to 2022, when Kemppaala attended President Holland’s meeting in Finland when, to her surprise, she was asked to bear a few words of her testimony.
With only a few minutes to gather her thoughts, her mind raced until she remembered what she learned from her calling as ward translator: “I don’t need to know the entire picture. I don’t need to know everything before I can act. But what I need to know is that I’m not alone. It is not just me, but I have Heavenly Father, I have Jesus Christ, and I have the Holy Ghost, who are guiding me and who are giving me the thoughts that I can say and the thoughts that I can share with other people. And I knew that I’m not alone.”
And so, standing before the congregation, Kemppaala bore witness of how “precious the information and the knowledge is that we know that we are daughters and sons of God and we have our divine potential, our divine nature, and how with the help of the Holy Ghost, we can do difficult things here on earth, and we can succeed. And we don’t need to know exactly everything beforehand; we just need to act when the prompting comes.”
