To this chapel come the three remaining Latter-day Saints of Kalaupapa, a settlement set aside for patients of Hansen’s Disease, the dreaded scourge of the ages known as leprosy. And to serve them every Sunday, holders of the Melchizedek Priesthood from Molokai’s Hoolehua Ward walk down a steep mountain trail to preside over the humble meetings, administer the sacrament, teach Sunday School lessons and, when requested, give blessings for comfort and healing.Two scriptures in particular are exemplified in this setting. One is the Savior’s declaration: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matt. 18:20.) The other is the Master’s eloquent teaching: " . . . when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God." (Mosiah 2:17.)

For generations, leprosy’s saga has blighted the history of Kalaupapa peninsula. The first authenticated cases of the disease in the Hawaiian islands go back to the 1830s. In 1865, Hawaii’s King Kamehameha V signed the “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy,” and on Jan. 6, 1866, the first “shipment” of patients were sent to a settlement at Kalawao, a short distance from the current settlement of Kalaupapa. In its early history, patients were treated inhumanely. As there was no dock, patients entered the settlement by jumping overboard the ships bearing them to their banishment. Those reluctant to jump were pushed.

“If they could not swim, they drowned,” said Kuueli Bell, one of the three Latter-day Saints at Kalaupapa, who serves on the patients council and is the settlement’s postmaster. “People were sent here to die. This was a living tomb.”

Bordered on three sides by the ocean and on one side by then-trailess and unscalable cliffs ranging up to 3,000 feet, the peninsula was as an open-air prison. Patients had no way to leave.

Sister Bell explained that compassionate souls such as the Catholic Church’s Father Damien and Brother Joseph Dutton, and nuns such as Mother Marianne Cope were instrumental in changing the plight of the patients. “We love Father Damien,” she said. “He came here in 1873, and he worked with the patients for the rest of his life. He contracted Hansen’s Disease himself, and died here in 1889. We never met him, of course, but we feel like we know him. We talk about him all the time, like he was here just yesterday.”

Sister Bell and another Church member, Lucy Kaona, were among special guests at ceremonies in Rome when Pope John Paul II beatified Father Damien in 1995.

Sister Bell, Sister Kaona and fellow Church member Peter Keola talk about another legend of compassionate service, Jonathan Napela, who was baptized into the LDS Church in 1852 by Elder George Q. Cannon and was instrumental in helping missionary work excel in Hawaii. In the 1870s, his wife, Kitty, contracted Hansen’s Disease and was sent to the peninsula. Unable to bear living without her, he accompanied her and devoted the rest of his life to serving her and other patients. When patients first arrived, they did not have even housing. He appealed for government assistance to build a more comfortable place for them to live and to get better medical care and food. He eventually contracted the disease himself. He died in 1879, two years before his beloved wife died.

“This was a terrible place to come to in the old days,” Sister Bell said. “But people like Father Damien and Brother Nepala made a big difference. They were good friends.”

After meetings on a recent Sunday, Hoolehua Ward Bishop Leonard Elia stood outside the LDS chapel here. He explained that the LDS Church services at the settlement come under the jurisdiction of the Hoolehua Ward, and that it’s primarily members of the elders quorum who come each week to officiate. Frequently, he comes himself. On that day, he left his home “topside” about daybreak to walk down steep trail cut in more recent years. The trail, which descends some 1,700 feet in about three miles, is a popular tourist attraction. (See related article on this page.)

“There’s a reverent air to this place,” Bishop Elia said. “I consider this to be sacred ground, made sacred by all the suffering of the Saints and of all the people who have come here, many to die of leprosy. Some came as helpmates to their wives or husbands, sons or daugthers. Because of their great love, they eventually caught the disease and died.”

Bishop Elia said there are about 8,000 graves on this leaf-shaped peninsula that is about two-and-a-quarter miles wide and just about as long.

While there have been several hundred Latter-day Saints here in years past, the Church at Kalaupapa is in its declining years, a fact that brings a note of sadness. In 1969 the practice of sending patients to the settlement for isolation was abolished. The disease is now controlled by medication and isolation isn’t necessary. While Sister Bell and others were forced to come here originally, they now consider this their home and choose to remain, although the quarantine has been lifted. “When these members are gone, the Church won’t be here any longer,” Bishop Elia said, explaining that no new residents are permitted to move in as the settlement is in transformation from a community for patients to a full-fledged national park, and proselyting is not permitted. There will be no renewal of Church membership, unless residents seek out the gospel on their own. Missionaries visit occasionally, bringing company to the three members who reside here.

There is no younger generation at Kalaupapa waiting in the wings to carry on the work since no one under 16 is allowed in the settlement. Children, who are more susceptible to Hansen’s Disease, are not permitted to visit or live here, although patients who are under treatment are not contagious. “As a precaution, children are kept away,” Bishop Elia said. “Old-timers tell me they miss having children around. It doesn’t seem natural to be in a place where there are no children.”

Both Sister Bell and Sister Kaona know the emptiness of living in a childless society. Children who had been hospitalized for Hansen’s Disease on Oahu were brought here for protection after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. Sister Kaona came here as a little girl. Sister Bell, who showed the first symptoms of the disease when she was 6, came here when she was a teenager. She married another patient, Edward Kaukahi Bell. To them were born a son and a daughter. “Our children were taken from us,” said Sister Bell. “We had no contact with them. None. It was a great sorrow to have my children taken from me, but I didn’t want them to get the disease. I was more fortunate than some. My mother took my children. Lucy also married another patient; her family took her child. My mother brought my children to the receiving station so I could see them. I couldn’t touch them, but I could look at them through a glass partition.” Her son died at age 32 of a heart attack; her daughter lives on the island of Oahu.

Sister Bell, Sister Kaona and Brother Keola don’t know how they contracted Hansen’s Disease, but none of them seems bent on asking, “Why me?”

“I think we just accept it,” said Sister Bell. She has no obvious signs of the disease to the casual observer, but Sister Kaona and Brother Keola bear evidences of how it has ravaged their bodies. However, a spirit of cheerfulness, optimism and gratitude dominates Church meetings they attend at Kalaupapa. Sister Kaona, in bearing her testimony, said, “I know that Heavenly Father loves me because He has been so good to me.”

The change allows residents of Utah to subscribe for mail delivery of the Church News, a service that for decades has been available only to residents outside the state of Utah except for those who live in certain Utah ZIP codes.

Utah residents may now receive by mail the Church News, along with the Deseret News National Edition, for the same rate as out-of-state subscribers, which is $30 per year.

The Church News, an official publication of the Church, publishes news and features about the Church, its leaders and members worldwide.

While the Deseret News National Edition is not an official publication of the Church, it is a thoughtful source of news and analysis on topics related to faith and the family in contemporary society. While its focus is not centrally on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it promotes wholesome values and includes perspectives harmonious with LDS standards. Also, it provides a complementary perspective on issues that the Church magazines and Church News would not normally address.

A letter sent out with the February 2014 issue of the Ensign states: “As members of the Church, we have been encouraged by the Lord and His servants to be an influence for good in our communities. Rather than simply accept the perils of our day, we are to make a positive difference in the world. This, in part, is what it means to be the ‘salt of the earth’ and the yeast that leavens the whole loaf (see Matthew 5:13; 13:33).

“We can be such an influence as we become well informed about current events and join in community discussions and decision making. There are many resources available to help us: local and national periodicals, school and council meetings, trusted online news sources, and community forums.”

The letter noted that the Deseret News National Edition is one such resource.

The Church News and Deseret News National Edition are available to residents of the United States and Canada. To subscribe, please visit deseretnews.com/subscribe.

gerry@desnews.com

Before the Accra temple was dedicated, members had to travel to the Johannesburg South Africa Temple or the London England Temple to receive temple blessings. Only about 415 members in the Accra temple district had been endowed prior to the new temple’s dedication.

The Accra Ghana Temple District includes all of Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin and, until the Aba Nigeria Temple is dedicated, Nigeria. While English is the official language in Ghana, multiple languages are employed by members, including French, Twi and Ga, and dozens of other West African dialects.

In the dedicatory prayer, President Hinckley said, “We thank Thee for the brotherhood that exists among us, that neither color of skin nor land of birth can separate us as Thy sons and daughters who have taken upon us sacred and binding covenants.”

President Hinckley presided over, conducted and addressed all three dedicatory sessions; the first session included a ceremony to place a sealed box of items of historic significance behind a coverstone in the temple’s facade. Histories of the Church in Ghana, photographs, copies of the Church News, books and a medallion commemorating the building of the temple were among the items included.

The Accra Ghana Temple has been woven into the fabric of President Hinckley’s thoughts, prayers and efforts ever since he announced in Accra on Feb. 16, 1998, plans to build a temple here.

In an interview with the Church News and KSL-TV, President Hinckley described the dedication of the temple as a culmination “representing the dreams, hopes and prayers of many people.” He referred to the dedication of the temple as the dawning of a new day in West Africa.

He described some of the difficulties in acquiring a building permit, which caused a lapse of five years from the time of the application until the dedication.

“We’ve had a difficult time getting permission to construct this building, but it finally came and the building is completed,” he said. “There’s just a euphoria that has gone through our membership here in appreciation for this great and significant thing.”

He said that the temple “gives them every privilege that any member of the Church anywhere in the world can have. They’re put on a par with everybody else. That’s a significant and wonderful thing.”

He first came to Accra in 1993. “I looked around for temple sites,” he said. “We were then building temples across the world and thought of a need for one here. We went all over this city, looking everywhere, but didn’t find exactly what we wanted. We came again in 1998. At that time I met with Jerry Rawlings (then president of Ghana) and had a long and very interesting visit with him. At that time we made the announcement to the people at Independence Square that we would build a temple here. They just burst into applause.

“That began the long, long journey of getting a permit and getting the temple built. It’s a miracle, really. This beautiful building is a miracle. I think it’s the finest thing in West Africa. The construction, the woods inside are so beautiful, and the marble. Everything is beautiful; we’re grateful to have it.”

He described the first time he saw the completed temple, as the car in which he and his wife, Marjorie, were riding approached the temple grounds. It was night, and lights bathed the temple. “I said, ‘It’s here, it’s finally here.’ I felt that way because I’ve been living with all these delays, following the progress or lack of progress these years, the five years since we made the application and the completion of the temple. What has happened here is just wonderful.”

As he concluded the dedicatory sessions, he said, “This is not the end.” He said the construction is completed, but added, “This is the beginning for the saints in this area.” He appealed to the members, “Put yourselves in a position to come to the temple.” He told the youth that this is not a temple just for their mothers and fathers, but it also is their temple. He asked them to stay worthy and, upon reaching age 12, to come to the temple to do baptismal work. When they do that work, President Hinckley said, “you are unlocking the door, opening the gates for someone beyond the veil.”

The “new day in West Africa” President Hinckley mentioned in the interview dawned with a haze over Accra. This is the dry season in Ghana, a time of “harmattan,” the winds that bring a reddish dust from the Sahara Desert. No one seemed to pay any attention to the dust and regarded the wind as relief from equatorial heat. Attention was focused on the temple.

Members arrived early to queue up for admittance to the temple. On Monday, Jan. 12, the first day the temple was open for work, members arrived earlier still. Takoradi 2nd Ward Bishop Jones Aidoo and his wife, Doris Sakiua Aidoo, arrived at 6:15 a.m. At 9 a.m., they were sitting on a bench, looking toward the temple. They were scheduled to attend the second session, which began at 10 a.m.

“Why did you come so early?” they were asked. “We wanted to just sit and look at the temple,” Sister Aidoo said. “We wanted to see the beautiful temple. We are so happy to be here.”

E-mail: gerry@desnews.com

The hymn stirred memories. I once stood in Shepherds’ Field and heard an angelic chorus singing of the birth of the Savior Jesus Christ.

It was in 1993. I was on assignment to report on the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on its tour to Israel Dec. 26, 1992, to Jan. 6, 1993. (The choir is now named The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.)

In addition to concerts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the videotaping of the choir’s weekly “Music & the Spoken Word” to be broadcast on Jan. 3, the choir sang Christ-centered hymns at several sites of significance in the Savior’s life: Shepherds’ Field near Bethlehem; the Mount of Beatitudes and the Sea of Galilee; the grounds of Dominus Flevit (a church built on the Mount of Olives commemorating the area where Jesus wept over Jerusalem); and the Garden Tomb, believed by many to be where Jesus was buried until His resurrection on the third day.

Ed Payne, producer of the documentary by Bonneville Communications, selected the sites during an earlier visit to Israel and obtained permission for videotaping the choir in the various settings.

In Shepherds’ Field, I looked in the distance at “the little town of Bethlehem” as the choir sang of Jesus, Who was born in “royal David’s city.”

I met two representatives of the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, owners of Shepherds’ Field, who went to watch the documentary being filmed. The choir was already singing of the Savior’s birth when the Franciscans entered the field.

The Rev. Peter Vasko, director of Pilgrimages, St. Saviour’s Monastery, and the Rev. Raphael Caputo stood near the film crew and choir staff members, listening to that momentous event.

“I often wondered what the angelic chorus of long ago sounded like when they sang to shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem,” the Rev. Vasko told me. “I need wonder no more.”

The Rev. Caputo said he and his colleagues were excited when they learned the choir wanted to use Shepherds’ Field. “Your reputation goes before you,” he said in comments to the choir’s president, Wendell M. Smoot. “We’re extremely pleased that you’ve been here, that you’ve given witness in your own way to the Lord in the Holy Land, here in Bethlehem where He was born.”

He said it was a pleasure to hear “such an angelic chorus’ music once again reverberating through the hills and fields of Bethlehem. This is music from heaven.”

The Tabernacle Choir sang several hymns that day in Shepherds’ Field. The one featured in the documentary was “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”

As I sang with members of my stake on Dec. 2, I remembered those sights and sounds from that January day in 1993 and seeing nearby a shepherd with some of his flock, with Bethlehem visible in the background.

“Shepherds, why this jubilee? ...

Come to Bethlehem and see

Him whose birth the angels sing,

Come, adore on bended knee

Christ the Lord, the newborn King”

("Hymns," No. 203).

Born in 1915, he was called as a General Authority in 1946, initially as a member of the First Council of the Seventy, and then served as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles from 1972 until his death in 1985. He is better known and widely respected as a scholar, particularly of the scriptures — and especially those pertaining to the life, ministry and teachings of Jesus Christ.

On several occasions, I had the opportunity to see Elder McConkie as a leading theologian who also had a keen sense of humor.

Here are some examples of his sense of humor:

Entering its sesquicentennial year in 1980, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints introduced a physical fitness awards program that encouraged members to engage in physical activities. I knew Elder McConkie walked to his office from his home in the foothills above Utah’s Capitol and walked the return trip home several days each week, and that he enjoyed running. I figured if we could show a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles engaged in some physical activity, that might encourage the general membership of the Church to find time for exercise.

Elder McConkie agreed to be photographed for my report. He wore a T-shirt that one of his sons gave him. Lettering on the back of the shirt read, “Lengthening my stride,” an adaptation of President Spencer W. Kimball’s admonition, “Lengthen your stride.” Elder McConkie put the shirt on backwards so that the motto would be seen in the photo.

John Hart, one of my Church News colleagues, was the photographer. We met up with Elder McConkie outside his home. John suggested Elder McConkie run in a wide circle so he could a get variety of shots. Elder McConkie happily complied and kept up a conversation as he ran the laps. I remember a particularly humorous quip that he took several laps to complete: “When you go home tonight — you can write in your journal — that you had a member of the Twelve — running around in circles today.”

In an interview in 1976, Elder McConkie said, “I have a keen sense of humor, actually, but it doesn’t project over the pulpit and it’s not generally known. For instance, one of the Brethren who came into the Twelve said, ‘The greatest shock of my life was to find out what Elder Bruce R. McConkie is really like.’”

Elder McConkie said: “Life surely isn’t eternally a long-faced thing. I get a great deal of enjoyment out of life and associating with people.

“There’s been a good many instances where some elaborate and extensive practical jokes have been pulled on me by Dilworth Young (a member of the First Council of the Seventy from 1945 to 1975) or someone else, that add a savor and an interest to what’s going on.”

I learned from Elder McConkie’s wife, Sister Amelia Smith McConkie, that he was an avid rock hound. They often went out into the desert and mountainous areas looking for agates, jasper, petrified wood or various kinds of rocks. When I visited their home for an interview in 1976, she showed me the tumbler he used to polish the stones, from which he would make various pieces of jewelry, such as rings, necklaces or pendants, and other items, such as bookends.

One day, I was surprised to receive a gift from Elder McConkie — an oval bloodstone that he had fashioned into a pendant.

I often think of Elder McConkie and his extensive writings about Jesus Christ, especially as the “Come Follow Me” manuals help us — individuals, families and class members — learn about Him.

Elder McConkie’s books include a set of six volumes about the Messiah and the three-volume “Doctrinal New Testament Commentary,” as well as other books. His last book, “A New Witness for the Articles of Faith,” was published a few months after his death on April 19, 1985.

In a Church News interview with David Croft in 1975, Elder McConkie said, “One of the things that I enjoy doing more than anything else is just the simple matter of studying the doctrines of the gospel and organizing them by subject and solving and analyzing doctrinal problems.”

Further, he said: “People eternally ask me questions, and they ought to figure them out themselves. I mean, I don’t have any more obligation than they do to know what the answers to these things are and they have the same sources to look to that I do.”

I doubt any of us who were present in the Tabernacle or who saw or listened to the broadcast of the 155th Annual General Conference, on April 6, 1985, will ever forget Elder McConkie’s powerful, stirring testimony of the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Speaking in a trembling voice, he concluded, “I am one of His witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in His hands and in His feet and shall wet His feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better then than I know now that He is God’s Almighty Son, that He is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through His atoning blood and in no other way.”

Elder McConkie died 13 days later.

She greeted me with warmth, motioned me to sit in a comfortable chair and then scooped up an assortment of books, papers, pens and other items strewn on the dining room table and other spots in a well-lived-in home. I identified with the habit of leaving such items out when stepping away for a few hours, or even days. Added to my observation was the fact that I was in the home of an apostle and his wife who were devoted to the study of the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation about her family with Sister McConkie, a daughter of Joseph Fielding Smith, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles when she was born in 1916; in 1970 he became the 10th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I felt as though I had been invited to sit in on a quick course in a portion of the history of the Church.

Reflecting on her father’s teachings, Sister McConkie said, “Dad had the ability and the grit to make his children (he had 11) love him. None of us would have done anything to hurt him.”

Sister McConkie said she felt a great responsibility during her growing-up years because she felt her father’s influence wouldn’t have been as great if his own children didn’t live the way they were taught. She said the same responsibility should be felt by all young people who are members of the Church because the world knows of its standards and is constantly looking at its members.

She said her father would tell her the story about the son of Alma, and then quote, “Wickedness never was happiness.”

“He told me that when I was a little girl, and that stuck with me all my life. I had a complete sense of security as long as I was in his home.“

Sister McConkie said she is certain she never would have walked if it had not been for a blessing President Smith gave her. “I had polio when I was 2 years old, and Dad gave me a blessing and took care of me. Mother was very busy with the other children, so Dad generally took care of me. I am convinced I would never have walked without the blessing he gave me and his faith.“

She said her father was constantly teaching and guiding his children in the paths they should follow. President Smith’s personal influence was felt in the McConkie home, since he was living with them at the time of his death in 1972. “It was a thrill to have Dad living with us … to hear him pray. He often said: ‘Help us to be true to every covenant we’ve made. Keep us from the things contrary to Thy will.’

“I used to hear him pray, ‘Let Thy purposes speedily come to pass.’ It worried me. I could just see the Lord answering his prayers and the world coming to an end! But as I’ve grown older, I see the wickedness and misery and I realize what a great promise we have of eternity.

“Dad has been a great influence on my life. I tell my husband that I am what I am because of Dad. There are so many lessons I have learned from Dad.

“He was kind, thoughtful and loving. I used to get upset with the children and would say, ’What do you do with them?’

”‘Love them and be patient,’” would be his answer.

Sister McConkie said her mother, Ethel Reynolds Smith, set an example in the home by honoring her husband and respecting his position. Sister McConkie followed that example. She and Bruce R. McConkie married in the Salt Lake Temple on Oct. 13, 1937. Just as diligently as he served as an apostle, she fulfilled many responsibilities, including serving three times as a Relief Society president. 

Sister McConkie passed away in 2005.

— Gerry Avant is a former Church News editor. She continues to write frequent columns for the Church News.

I met Sister Doxey while she was serving on the Primary general board prior to her calling in May 1984 to serve as a counselor to Barbara W. Winder, who was sustained as Relief Society general president during that April’s general conference. 

I described observing Sister Doxey — who managed the affairs of home, family, Church and personal interests — as “watching an expert juggler of time and energy.” It seemed that she kept dozens of projects in simultaneous motion. 

She said, “I find that step by step we are prepared for what we are to do.”

She explained that she wouldn’t have guessed that serving on the Primary general board would have prepared her for something like serving as second counselor in the new Relief Society general presidency. She was called to the Primary general board while in Spain with her husband, David W. Doxey, as he presided over the Spain Barcelona Mission.

“Serving on the Primary board was such a change from the mission,” she said. “But, step by step, I learned again my reverence for children. I learned again that children are sanctified and are not little adults. We need to respect them. One of my majors in college was child development. Being on the Primary board was a wonderful stepping stone to revert to my training and rearing my children.”

The Doxeys had five sons and three daughters. One child died in infancy.

“I love being a mother,” Sister Doxey told me. “That’s my favorite position in the whole world. As a young girl, I wanted to be a mother like my mother. I received my patriarchal blessing when I was 14, and it gave me great strength and direction through my teenage years. It spoke of children yet unborn to come to me. 

“When I went to the University of Utah, I studied interior design. David, my fiancé at that time, was going into the construction and real estate business. I wanted to be a support to him, so I decided I’d earn architecture and interior design. I got to my junior year and discovered I really wanted to be with children. I tried to change my major, but was counseled to work toward a double major, in interior design and child development.”

A postscript: At age 61, she received a master’s degree in family science with an emphasis in religion from BYU.

She drew upon textbook learning to supplement her common-sense judgment while rearing sons and daughters in a home she designed. Her parents, Bliss L. and Eva M. Bushman, had positive influences upon her life. Her mother provided an example in rearing children.

“Mother came from a family of 15 children,” Sister Doxey said. “She had great patience and love, and was home all the time. She taught us, but not as verbally as I taught mine. Sometimes, I think all I do is talk, talk, talk. Even if it’s in the middle of the night, I talk with my children.”

When Joanne Bushman was 5, her family moved to New Mexico, where she had a happy childhood. Her family returned to Salt Lake City when she was 15. At East High School, she met David Doxey. They became friends and began dating before he was called to serve a mission. 

“I was a member of the how-many-months club as I waited two and a half years for him to come home. I was in college and, since I was waiting for a missionary and didn’t date, I was free to work in service organizations and get my grade average up. It was a learning experience in patience. Our communications were spiritual. We learned a lot about each other during that time, and we waited a year after he got home. It was a long engagement. It was well worth it.”

She said they “balanced” each other. She said he wasn’t very outgoing while she never seemed to meet a stranger. They loved to travel, and he knew all about that. It seemed the things she didn’t know anything about, he knew everything about.

Sister Doxey said she had her own interests, which included studying Spanish and Egyptian history, and anything that had a tie with the gospel.

She also wrote poetry. Working with a music composer, Marjorie Kjar, she put many of her poems to music and, for a while, had her own music publishing company. Some of the better-known of her more than 50 songs are “Seek the Lord,” “Where Love Is,” “Labor of Love,” “Joy of Being a Woman,” “Circles of Womanhood,” “For Such a Time as This” and “Be Thou an Example.” 

In addition to numerous callings in the Church, Sister Doxey served as an assistant to the matron of the Salt Lake Temple and matron of the Madrid Spain Temple. 

He was a member of Australia’s commando forces during World War II when he and 10 others were ambushed on New Guinea in the Solomon Islands on Christmas Day, 1944. More than half his patrol was killed, and Sackley, then 22, was severely wounded. He struggled for hours to get to safety, but every time he moved an enemy fired at him.

About mid-afternoon, he heard someone whisper, “Lay still until dark, and then roll into the river. Keep yourself afloat. We’ve got fellows who will catch you about 100 yards downstream.”

The 15-foot plunge from the cliff into the fast-moving Purari River was the beginning of a journey that led the tough commando to recovery and a new life.

“In the eternal perspective, that ambush was about the best thing that had happened to me up to that point,” said the blue-eyed, 5-foot-8-inch former soldier. “Had I not been injured, I would not have met my wife. And had I not met her, I doubt I would have learned of the gospel.”

From those events evolved everything of importance to Elder Sackley. A native of Lismore, New South Wales, Australia, he told me he had come perilously close to dying. In addition to serious wounds sustained in the ambush, he was suffering from malaria. Also, he was 30 miles behind enemy lines. After he was fished out of the river, he was carried on a litter for six days by tribesmen to an American encampment, being moved by night and hidden by day. Then he was transported to a hospital in Australia.

During an 18-month hospital recovery in Queensland, Australia, he met Marjorie Orth, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who had gone to the hospital with a friend, who was visiting a Latter-day Saint serviceman.

Elder Sackley said he and Marjorie became friends, and she invited him to go to Church. One Sunday he got a pass from the hospital and went. “There had been no converts in that branch during all the war years. It was approaching the end of 1945 when I went to Church, wearing my commando color patches.” 

Marjorie’s mother gave the young soldier an Articles of Faith card that day, and on his next visit, she gave him a Book of Mormon, which he read in two nights and a day.

“In about 36 hours, I knew it was true. I knew there was nothing I could do about it except become a member of the Church,” he said.

After his baptism on June 16, 1946, he devoted his life to serving in the Church. “I made up my mind that I just wanted to be an active member,” he said. He and Marjorie were married March 26, 1947, by her father, John Orth, who was a branch president.

Their determination to be active in the Church cost them financially. When his job as a forestry officer required them to move to a station 160 miles from the nearest branch of the Church and they could attend Church only once every few months, they moved — with no prospects of a job — to Brisbane.

His desire to take his wife and children to the temple caused him to give up his job in Brisbane. He said they couldn’t afford a round-trip ticket to the temple in Hawaii, which was the nearest temple at that time. “I knew wherever we went to the temple I’d need to stay at least a year to work to earn money for our return,” he said. “We decided to go to the Salt Lake Temple. However, there was a 12-year waiting list for Australians to get work permits in the United States.”

In May 1954, they embarked on a 21-day voyage to Canada. They landed in Vancouver and proceeded immediately to the Cardston Alberta Temple. He found work and was offered a better position, but it would require a move to Medicine Hat, some 120 miles from the temple, and the Sackleys had a lot of family history work to do. He told the company’s president, “I didn’t come halfway across the world to move away from something we’ve dreamed of doing for years.” 

After a year working as an administrator in a Cardston school district, he felt he had earned enough money to move his family back to Australia. When the school district offered him more money, he worked another 25 years there. He spent the last years of his education career in Medicine Hat, where he was offered a job as vice president of administration at a new college.

Later, he served five years as college president, the position he held when he received a telephone call from President Spencer W. Kimball and President N. Eldon Tanner, who told him, “We need you.”

That was all Elder Sackley needed to hear. “I said goodbye to the board of governors on Dec. 18, 1978, and we’ve been in the mission field pretty much full time since then.”

In 1979, Elder and Sister Sackley went to the Philippines, where they opened a mission in Quezon City and, later, in Baguio. Three years later, they were called to serve in the Salt Lake Temple. In 1983, they were called to direct the Washington D.C. Temple Visitors’ Center. 

In 1986, the Sackleys were called to preside over the Nigeria Lagos Mission. He was president of that mission when he was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy. 

In 1982, the Canadian ministry of education inquired if he would consider returning to his career. His response was, “If we have anything left in life, we give it to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to which we owe our allegiance.”

Elder Robert E. Sackley died Feb. 22, 1993, near Brisbane, Australia, at age 70 while serving as a counselor in the Pacific Area presidency. 

She told me about the first time she attended a Relief Society meeting. It was 1947, and she was a new bride. In that meeting, the  ward’s Relief Society president counseled visiting teachers to “see if there is anything amiss in the homes you visit.”

“I thought she said ‘a mess,’” Sister Evans told me. “I went for years thinking the visiting teachers came to my house to see what kind of housekeeper I was.”

Sister Evans’ background gave her little understanding of the Relief Society organization. Although she was born and reared in Salt Lake City her parents, Sidney H. and Viola Taylor Frewin, had little to do with the Church. Still, Joy went to Primary with neighborhood children. When she turned 8, her Primary teacher saw to it that she would be baptized.

“My parents were very supportive of my being in the Church,” she said. “They were pleased to have their only child doing what they thought was a good thing, but they were never interested for themselves.”

When she was 12, she made a decision that caused her to drop out from Church activity. “When I was old enough to go to what was then called Mutual — Young Women now — my mother told me I could be a Girl Scout or go to Mutual, but I couldn’t do both. I had to make the decision. Since Girl Scout camp sounded like more fun than Mutual girls camp — it had horses to ride and a lake in which to swim and canoe — I chose to be a Girl Scout.”

She didn’t go to Church again until she was a junior in high school. The Frewin family moved from Salt Lake City’s Capitol Hill area to the city’s east bench, where a friend from school invited her to go to Sunday School. “That was the beginning of reactivation for me,” she said.

That Sunday School class was important to young Joy Frewin for another reason: she met a lanky University of Utah freshman named David C. Evans. They started going out together, “and we have been going together ever since,” she said.

Their courtship was interrupted for four years by World War II. While David served in the military in Europe Joy finished high school and earned her nursing degree from the University of Utah. They were married on March 21, 1947, in the Salt Lake Temple. Soon thereafter, she began her Relief Society experience, and tried to be sure her house was not “a mess” when her visiting teachers came calling.

“I loved Relief Society, but I didn’t participate very much,” she said of those early years in Salt Lake’s Garden Park Ward. “There were some wonderful, powerful women in that ward. Aunt Alice (wife of Elder Richard L. Evans of the Council of the Twelve, David’s uncle) was the spiritual living teacher, and Minerva Bennion (wife of Elder Adam S. Bennion, an Apostle) taught the literature classes.”

Sister Evans said she wasn’t exactly intimidated. “I just didn’t feel I had anything to offer. But I did have much to learn and they were very good teachers. It was like having a roomful of mothers.”

When I met Sister Evans, she still remembered her early years and how unprepared she felt as a relatively new active member of the Church in a Relief Society full of long-time members and General Authorities’ wives. She expressed hopes that her experiences would help her be sensitive to Relief Society sisters who might feel, as she once did, that “I didn’t have very much to offer.”

The next Relief Society she attended was much different. After her husband earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Utah, they moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a computer engineer. 

“There were lots of young families in our ward,” Sister Evans said. “Many of the young mothers were away from their own mothers for the first time. We became very close to each other. We needed each other. I think that’s where I really learned about Relief Society, and the kind of service that can be offered by anyone, regardless of background or experience.”

From that time forward, service was a key component of Joy Evans’ life. She served more than eight years as a member of the Relief Society general board, as a stake and ward Relief Society president and in various positions in the Relief Society, Primary and Young Women organizations.

Brother and Sister Evans had 10 children (including Elder David F. Evans, General Authority Seventy) and, for many years, reared two Native American children.

She and her husband served in the Tennessee Nashville Mission. After his death in 1998, she served missions to the Preston England and Manila Philippines temples.

Beverly Joy Frewin Evans was born on Jan. 31, 1926; she died on July 5, 2011.

In June of that year, two young Americans — one of whom was limping — went to Dr. Kim Chang Suen’s medical clinic. He treated the young man who had the limp, administering medication for a foot infection and advised his new patient to return for further treatments. By the third visit, Dr. Kim discovered the young men were missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“The only thing I knew of the Church before the missionaries came was what my minister had told me,” recalled Dr. Kim. “The missionaries and I began talking in the clinic. They invited me to go to Church.”

He paused, shaking his head as he recounted his first impression of the little mountaintop home where a few of Korea’s Latter-day Saints met. “It was such a small house up on that mountain. One of the members of the Church lived there,” he said.

“The next Sunday, I went back to my old church. On the third Sunday, when I came out of my house, the missionaries were waiting for me on the street. They asked me why I did not go back to their church. I felt that the little house on the mountain was not really a church.

“The missionaries kept returning. During the next six months, they taught me the gospel, and I became acquainted with some of the members. They were very kind.

“Korean people are very sensitive. We can recognize something as being good. Even though the small house on the mountain did not impress me, its gospel message did. My wife and our oldest daughter were baptized on Dec. 2, 1967. Our other daughter was baptized when she was 8.”

When we met, Kim Chang Suen was serving in the Church as a regional representative. He told me that he once felt a void in his life, which he feared would never be filled. 

He was born Feb. 2, 1929, in what became North Korea. At age 20, he said goodbye to his tearful parents and began his walk to freedom. 

“I went over the mountain and made my way into South Korea,” he said. “I never saw my parents again. Two of my sisters escaped to South Korea later and told me my father had died. To this day, I do not know whether my mother is alive or dead.”

As the Kims sat side by side on a sofa in their living room, he motioned to a dozen or more books. “This is my family,” he said, referring to genealogical information dating back 70 generations that he had laboriously compiled.

I remember thinking, “This is one man really prepared to ‘take his family to the temple’ after its dedication, which was Dec. 14-15.”

He explained how he began his research. After he arrived in South Korea, he entered medical school. The Korean War started during his senior year and he served in the South Korean military. “I felt that God was helping me the whole time,” he said. “After the war, I received a scholarship and went to Germany to study.

“When I returned to Seoul, I went to the library and searched through all the books for information about my family. If I had not joined the Church, all this information I collected would have been for naught.”

He described how he was overjoyed when he heard a temple would be built in Korea. “My wife and I went to the Hawaii Temple in 1970,” he said. “That was a special privilege.”

“Privilege” was the appropriate word. A national law prohibited a husband and wife, with few exceptions, from leaving the country at the same time. When President Spencer W. Kimball announced in the April 1981 general conference plans to build a temple in Seoul, only 100 of the 20,000 members in Korea had received their endowments; only 20 couples had been sealed.

Again rubbing his hand on the cover of a volume of his family history, he said, “This temple work is most significant.”

— Gerry Avant is a former Church News editor. She continues to write frequent columns for the Church News.

That’s the observation I made in the opening sentence of an article about her after she was sustained during the April 1986 general conference as a counselor in the Young Women general presidency. 

“Stargazer.” That was one of the best descriptions of Sister Malan. She habitually looked heavenward, and at the time I met her she was as intrigued by the constellations as she had been as a girl who spent summer vacations on a ranch near Evanston, Wyoming.

On that ranch, she developed a never-ending love for the outdoors and learned lessons she grew up to share with others. She learned many of those lessons from her parents, Sylvester and Josephine Broadbent Malan.

“Mother taught me to enjoy the world around me,” she said. “Since the ranch was just a summer situation they never bothered to put electricity in the cabin, so with no radio or television we had a lot of time. At night we played games and talked and looked at the stars that seemed so close in that crisp mountain air.”

Jayne spent many summer days riding a horse alongside her father, a successful livestock man who served as a bishop and mission president.

“He taught me as we rode together. A closeness built between us as he taught me that in the eternal scheme of things my personal relationship with my Father in Heaven was the most important relationship there is. He taught me that only two things were really important — the family and the Church.

“And he taught me about sheep. Ours was a sheep ranch, so it was easy for him to teach me about lambs that were lost, and that lambs must be fed and protected from coyotes that wait to pounce on those that are weak. I learned about the trouble lambs can get into when they blindly follow the leader without watching where they are going. He taught me the role of the shepherd, and that gates must be opened to let sheep back into the fold, and why fences must be built to keep them from wandering too far.

“I learned from experience what it was to love a lamb and then to lose it to a coyote. I felt the happiness of finding a lamb that had strayed.”

She continued to learn valuable lessons throughout her growing-up years and young adulthood. At the University of Utah, she started studying medical technology but graduated in drama.

“I got through four quarters of chemistry and loved it, but when I hit quantitative analysis I realized I was sadly lacking in math skills. My dad was responsible for the turning point in my life. He asked me what I would really like to do.

“I liked drama, but I couldn’t think of anything productive I could do with it. My father said, ‘If you are good at it, there will be a place for it. You can always serve in the Church.’ What a prophetic statement that was. I haven’t stopped using the skills I learned from drama.”

When she and her husband, Terry Malan, who was a professional golfer, settled in Wilmington, North Carolina, she worked in children’s theater. In 1959 they returned to Salt Lake City, where they reared their son and daughter. Still interested in children’s theater, she worked on weekly television shows with two other women and wrote musicals for Pioneer Memorial Theatre.

“It was during the time of doing volunteer work in the community that I began developing the skills I’ve been able to use professionally and in Church service,” she told me.

She served on Young Women general boards three times and twice on Relief Society general boards. She wrote or directed dramatic and multimedia presentations and satellite broadcasts.

She recalled what she termed “a turning point” in her service as a general board member.

“I had not been on the YWMIA general board very long when I was assigned to work on a June conference theme presentation committee. It was going to be in the Tabernacle. Eight people were on the committee; I was assigned to do most of the writing. We began working on it in October and had everything ready to go into production by the end of January. Suddenly we were told, ‘We have decided to not use the theme presentation.’

“I was devastated. I had put my heart and soul into it, had fasted and prayed, and had put off vacations. I had done everything I could. I tried to stay in control, but tears ran down my cheeks and I just wanted to get out of the room. I got home and thought the whole situation over. I realized that I was very wrong. I had taken too much to myself. At that point, I realized that it was not my work that I was doing — it was the Lord’s work and His glory. If it was right, it would be used and if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t.”

She savored things her parents taught her. “My mother had the greatest zest for living. She was such a fun person,” Sister Malan said. “She loved to play games, taught us to be competitive, and how to lose. We learned that the world didn’t end when we lost a game.”

I asked Sister Malan, the new counselor in the Young Women general presidency, what advice she would give young people. “I say to them, ‘Enjoy every minute of your life. Don’t be afraid to say no, to stand up for what you know is right, and take your friends along with you. Just be sure you’re not the one who turns somebody in the wrong direction. They could get lost, just like the lambs at the ranch.’ ” 

Jayne Broadbent Malan was born April 18, 1924; she died March 16, 2013.

As a member of the Church News staff, I’ve helped cover 96 general conferences. If things go according to plan, I will be involved in some way in conference coverage for the 97th time when the Church News reports on the 190th Semiannual General Conference on Oct. 3 and 4.

Each conference has had its memorable moments. One that stands out particularly in my mind is the 151st Annual General Conference, April 4 and 5, 1981. At that conference, President Spencer W. Kimball announced plans to build nine new temples, to be located in Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Guatemala City, Guatemala; Lima, Peru; Frankfurt, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden; Seoul, Korea; Manila, Philippines; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

I did not know that I would be assigned to go to Dallas, Seoul and Johannesburg to report on and photograph events for those dedicatory services. Still, I was thrilled to meet and interview several members from the newly announced temple districts.

A few days before the conference began, President Kimball presided over a meeting of about 250 priesthood leaders, including regional representatives, stake presidents, General Authority executive administrators and others. At that meeting, they were told of plans to build the nine temples.

As the place of each new temple was announced, something akin to an electric stir rippled through the audience. Priesthood leaders from each new temple district turned to face one another, shook hands, embraced. And wept.

I met some of the Korean leaders during that conference’s weekend. It was challenging to conduct interviews with a lump in my throat as I listened to them express in trembling voices attempts to describe the joy they felt — joy obviously beyond words — as they wiped tears of gratitude from their eyes.

I began my report about the announcement: “The Korean heard what President Spencer W. Kimball said, but he took a moment to be sure he understood in his mind what he had heard with his ears. When he had translated the prophet’s English into his native Korean, he burst into tears. ‘Komapsumnida. Komapsumnida.’ ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ ”

Elder Han In Sang, then a regional representative and later a member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy, told me, “We have been praying and crying for years for a temple.”

He said Korean members were especially grateful for the future temple in Seoul because a national law at that time prohibited a husband and wife from leaving the country at the same time. “We have 20,000 members of the Church in Korea. Only 100 have received their endowments; only 20 couples have been sealed.”

He and his wife were among the fortunate ones to have been sealed. Two of their five children were born in the covenant. “Can you imagine how I feel, as a father, to know that three of my children still aren’t sealed to me?” he asked with tears in his eyes.

Elder Han first went to the Salt Lake Temple in 1971 when he was in the United States on a business trip. “I went inside the temple, touched the walls and the chairs,” he said. “When I went home to Korea, I told the members that I had been to the Salt Lake Temple and had touched its walls and furniture. I told them if they wanted to touch the temple through me to shake my hand. After the meeting, no one went home; they formed a single line to shake my hand. That was as close as they had come to the temple.”

Ko Won Yong, then president of the Seoul Korea East Stake, said he attended the dedication of the Tokyo Japan Temple in 1980 and heard President Kimball instruct priesthood leaders to tell their members to go to the temple. “I wondered how I could deliver the prophet’s message to my people when we had no temple and they couldn’t leave the country to be sealed man to wife,” he said.

For several months before the announcement was made about the new temples, the stakes in Korea had been conducting temple preparation classes.

Kim Chang Sun, another Korean priesthood leader, was born in North Korea. “I escaped when I was young,” he said. “My mother died after we crossed the border. We will be able to do her temple work. Think of all the people whose work can now be done.”

With tears streaming down his face, Lee Bum Tae, then a stake patriarch in Korea, told how he had always been impressed to promise members the blessings of the temple.

“I knew that a temple in Korea couldn’t be too far away because the Spirit prompted me to name this specific blessing,” he said. “I arrived in Salt Lake City two days after the announcement about the temples. I went to Temple Square at night. I looked up at angel Moroni’s trumpet and realized that the sounds of it will now reach my country, from the Paekdoo Mountains in the north to Cheju Island in the south. And because of this, my country, which I love, will be blessed.”

In six sessions Dec. 14-15, 1985, President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated the Seoul Korea Temple.

A major portion of my conversation with him centered on his experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II. Extracting details from our interview, I wrote this description:

As the temperature dropped to 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero Ki-Young Kim shivered under a blanket in his cell, which was really a barn with wide slits in its plank siding being used as a prisoner of war barracks somewhere between Manchuria and Siberia.

From force of habit, he counted to see how many of his fellow prisoners were still alive. He was Korean, but most of his fellow prisoners were Japanese soldiers captured during World War II and sent to the POW camp guarded by Russians. As the POWs huddled together for warmth, Kim turned to a higher source of comfort — prayer.

The son of a Protestant minister, he had grown up in northern Korea with a strong belief in God and Jesus Christ. No matter what hardships he faced, his father had taught him, the Lord would help him endure. As a prisoner of war, his faith was tested as never before. 

At the beginning of WWII, he had been drafted into military service by the Japanese government, which had occupied Korea since 1910. Just as the war was ending, he was captured in Manchuria. He remained a prisoner of war for four years.

“We were never given any indication of how long we would be there,” said Kim. “Sometimes I got by on a small piece of bread for three or four days.”

With an attitude tempered by Christian forgiveness, he added, “I’m sure our captors did not intend to treat us so badly. They did not have enough to feed their own people; they had little to give prisoners. Russia was a poor country at that time; even their own people had a hard time to live.”

Kim’s linguistic ability helped him and others survive the POW camp. “I was able to learn enough Russian to talk to some of the guards and persuade them to bring extra food,” he said.

“I often prayed for the Lord to save my life. The only purposes I had in life were to see my parents, my brothers and my friends, and to serve the Lord.”

Upon his release, he returned home to his family in northern Korea. By that time, the little nation in eastern Asia had been divided into two countries: North Korea and South Korea.

“My family and I came to South Korea as refugees on a fishing boat at the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, under escort of United Nations forces,” he recalled.

The Korean War lasted three years. Part of that time, Kim unloaded supplies sent from the United States to the port in Pusan, South Korea. By age 27, he had learned some English from American soldiers, which enabled him to work in the officers club and mess hall during the last year of the war.

Many years later, his interest in English made him receptive to missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “I saw two elders on the street one day and, thinking I could pick up some English from them, I stopped to talk. We became friends, and I saw them from time to time on the street. They asked me if they could visit me in my home, and I said they could.

“At first, I was interested only in their language. But when they began teaching the gospel, I recognized doctrine that I had believed all my life. Even though I had been through some miserable circumstances, I still had strong confidence that God is a living Father and that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world.

“Ever since I had come from the north, I had been looking for a good church, but every place I went the members were always arguing with each other. They would get into heated discussions about doctrine and how things should be run in their churches. Although I had hesitated to join any church, I felt there must be a true church on earth. I just didn't know where it was.”

He and his wife, Kum Jae, were baptized in 1970. At the time of our interview, their son Kyung Hun Kim, a returned missionary, had graduated from Brigham Young University and was a mechanical engineer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

I wrote an article in which I described Elder Han as a “living treasure,” a designation given in certain parts of Asia to individuals who make outstanding contributions to a nation’s artistic or cultural heritage. Although no one is officially designated as a living treasure by the Church, I felt Elder Han could qualify as one. He was the first Korean to serve as a mission president.

Quiet and unassuming, at 5 feet 5 inches tall, he described himself as “just a little guy who made a final pass and scored a touchdown” in having found the gospel and its blessings.

He almost didn't get a chance to make that final pass. He was 12 years old when the Korean War erupted in 1950, throwing his life into turmoil.

As a youngster, he was left in charge of gathering food and firewood for his mother and seven younger brothers and sisters. “My father was hiding from his enemies in a cave in the mountains. I didn't have any shoes so, in my bare feet, I walked through the snow to take food to my father twice a week. It was a real struggle to get up the mountain. I still have scars on my feet and legs; I would stumble and fall onto jagged stumps where others had cut firewood. I chopped wood and sometimes cut myself. I gathered food for my family. Sometimes I had to fight bigger and older boys for a head of cabbage in the field. My mother was expecting another baby. I chased fish in freezing streams with my bare hands to try to provide protein for her.”

He said he couldn't understand why he had been born in Korea and under such difficult conditions. But as years passed, purpose and meaning entered his life.

At school, he met a boy who was a member of the Church and who invited him to go to a youth activity.

“They talked about life, happiness and eternal families. I hadn't believed in any of these things. I had studied German, and the first sentence I learned was, ‘The sky is blue, and life is beautiful.’ I laughed, because that was so absurd. I said that could be said only by someone who had not known hunger, poverty and cold. But after I learned about the gospel, my attitude changed. Even in the dark night or on a stormy day, life is beautiful.”

He studied with the missionaries a year before he was baptized; he had a great desire to serve as a missionary. His mission call came while he was fulfilling mandatory military service. He was 27, and the only missionary in Korea who had not been to the temple. “The mission president told me that I was ‘fish on the table.’ He meant I was an experiment. If I worked out well as a missionary, then other Koreans could be called. If I failed, they wouldn't call others.

“The loneliest night of my life was [one Christmas] when everyone was opening their letters, cards and gifts from their families. No one in Korea had been on a mission before, so no one in my family or other local members thought about sending anything to me. … When I became a mission president (Korea Pusan Mission, 1975-1978), one of the first things I did was make certain every missionary received a box filled with something for Christmas."

As a young missionary, he functioned in Taegu as a presiding elder, branch president, seminary teacher and language teacher for other missionaries. He became very ill. He was never sick while in the military for 30 months. He said he was in great physical condition and had a black belt in tae kwon do. “I was very annoyed because I got sick,” he said.

“I was sent back to Seoul for medical treatment. ... I was given the assignment to translate the Book of Mormon into Korean. I was convinced I would die as soon as the work was finished, that the only reason I was being kept alive was to do that work. I was sick the entire time I worked on the translation. I lost 26 pounds from my already little body. ... 

The Lord gave me talents and language. When I was a young boy the Japanese occupied Korea. I was fluent in Japanese. ... In the community, if someone had to speak to the Japanese government people, they would take me along.

“I was very ambitious, but the Lord humbled me. When I became sick, I had to get on my knees and depend on the Lord rather than my intellect.”

Elder Han said translating the Book of Mormon was the most difficult work he had ever done. “But it was also a privilege and a choice blessing,” he said.

After his mission, he married Kyu In Lee. He served as a member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy, 1991-1996.

—Gerry Avant is a former Church News editor. She continues to write frequent columns for the Church News.

In 1976, I interviewed Elder Randall Ellsworth, who had been severely injured while serving as a missionary in Guatemala. Our interview took place one evening in his room in the George Washington University Hospital.

He described how he had been pinned down by a 60-foot concrete steel-reinforced beam during a 7.5 magnitude earthquake that struck Guatemala on Feb. 4, 1976. Some 17,000 people, including 22 Latter-day Saints, died as a result of the earthquake and its aftershocks.

Elder Ellsworth and other missionaries had met on Feb. 3 in the Church’s meetinghouse in Patzicia for a language training program. They all stayed overnight, with Elder Ellsworth and his companion, Dennis Atkin, sleeping on mattresses on the cultural hall’s stage while the other missionaries stayed in a nearby building. The earthquake hit about 3 a.m. A giant beam, weighing several tons, crashed down and pinned Ellsworth’s legs.

For about six hours, friends and his missionary companions pleaded with him to “hang on just one more minute.” When I met him in a hospital room several weeks later, the injured missionary was still “hanging on” not only in a physical struggle but also to his faith as he pursued recovery in the hospital near his hometown of Rockville, Maryland.

“I’ve never wondered why it was me who got hurt,” he told me. “I look at it like a test. The Lord doesn’t want me to suffer, but I will learn from this experience.”

He spoke in soft tones that matched the night’s stillness of the hospital’s corridors. He mentioned the long day spent in language training on Feb. 3, saying it wasn’t physically exhausting, “but I was tired.”

He slept soundly on his mattress. For a few short moments, the earthquake amounted to nothing more than a dream. “When I woke up, the whole place was roaring. I wasn’t scared. I had been in an earthquake before, and nothing bad happened.”

He soon realized something bad was happening in that earthquake. “Pain shot through my body so bad it sort of knocked the wind out of me,” he said. 

His companion left him to go for help. “I remembered my patriarchal blessing. I had been promised that I’d live a long life and would support my family. The thought of dying completely went out of my mind,” he said.

The other missionaries joined in trying to free Elder Ellsworth. They gave him a blessing. One missionary began chipping away at the stage with a hammer and chisel. An agricultural missionary arrived with a chainsaw.

Finally, a hole was cut large enough to lower him at an angle beneath the stage. He was given another blessing and was placed, still on his mattress, in the back of a truck to get medical care. A long line of victims formed at a clinic, where a doctor gave him pills for pain and told him he’d have to wait a couple of hours. His companions took a chance on transporting him to a hospital, stopping at the mission home en route.

“President (Robert B.) Arnold came out and took charge of things. He put his hand on my head and said, ‘Well, elder.’ At that time, the fear drained out of me. I knew I’d be all right.”

Elder Ellsworth didn’t remember many of the incidents that followed: his hospitalization in Guatemala City, evacuation to the Panama Canal Zone and transfer to the hospital in Washington.

When I met him, he was paralyzed from the waist down because of damage to the nerves at the base of his spinal cord. He was spending about five hours a day in therapy, where he began to walk, using parallel bars, then a walker, then crutches and braces.

This is a part of the interview wedged in my memory, a time when this indomitable missionary’s optimism and faith outdistanced my doubts. He displayed little emotion while describing his ordeal, but sobs wracked his pain-ridden body when he spoke of his love of the Indian people of Guatemala.

“I was promised that I’ll stand and preach the gospel again,” he said. “One of the things I want most is to be able to go back and finish my mission.

“There are two reasons I want to go back. I want to be with the people, and I was called on a mission by a prophet of the Lord for two years. I want to finish that mission.”

While writing the article, I questioned whether I should include the statement about Elder Ellsworth being able to “stand and preach the gospel.” I doubted he would be able to. I included that statement. After many months of therapy, Elder Randall Ellsworth returned to his mission.

He graduated in 1986 from the Georgetown University Medical School, where he specialized in eye surgery. He practiced in that field until his retirement in 2011. He and his wife, Silvia “Sherry” Lang, have five children and six grandchildren.

Over the years, he has had multiple reconstructive surgeries. There hasn’t been a day since the earthquake, he said, when he hasn’t been in pain. It would seem that the hard part was what happened during the earthquake, “but the hardest part has been the last 44 years.”

A previous version of this story listed the incorrect medical school where Elder Ellsworth studied. He graduated from Georgetown University Medical School.

We’re now in the 21st century. I interviewed a man who was born in the 19th century, a man who was a young missionary when Heber J. Grant, who was born in 1856, was president of the Church.

My interview with Lorenzo Petersen was a doorway, so to speak, that led back to a past century and, at the same time, was grounded in the then-present looking toward the future. It also gave me a glimpse into missionary work during past decades. He served a mission to Samoa from 1919 to 1924.

“Getting ready for a mission in those days was a good deal different from what it is today,” he said. “There was no mission home where the missionaries were given instructions previous to going out. We were sort of on our own.”

He expected a lot from his mission, but he had to give a lot in order to receive. “I’d heard so much about the beauty and grace of the people,” he said. “The first Sunday I went to church, the [locals] all came in with little mats, which they spread on the floor to sit on. The missionaries sat on a bench at the end of the chapel. I didn’t understand the language, and I couldn’t tell what was going on and was a little disillusioned about that I had expected to find on the islands.

“But later, as I became acquainted with the islanders and learned to speak their language, I began to feel that they were a very choice people. I learned to love them more than anybody I know outside my own family.”

Petersen said he had many faith-promoting experiences en route to a conference at the end of the island of Tutuila, which is about 20 miles long. Most Latter-day Saints in the village where he was laboring walked to the conference; a family invited him to go with them on their boat. When it came time to leave, they were short-handed for rowing.

“We took off anyway,” he said. “As we neared the passage out through the reef, I couldn’t see where we were going. It looked like there was just a solid mass of breakers, but I supposed that if the natives went out through that all the time, they knew what they were doing. It developed that there had been a storm somewhere in the Pacific, and there were exceptionally high breakers that day.

“We started through them and as we hit the first breaker, it took our boat straight up in the air, almost as high as the eaves on a house. If we had plenty of muscle to pull over the first wave, we could have gone up over it and into the trough and over the next. But we didn’t have enough rowers to get up over the breakers, so each time a wave would hit us, it would take us back, and some of the time, instead of hitting the waves head on, we were hitting them sideways.

“It looked very bad. The members began to pray and said, ‘Now we have a missionary on the boat and we are going to conference, and we are in Thy service.  . . .’ “Somehow, I didn’t feel very much fear. We were in that condition for quite some time . . . but we finally were able to get over the breakers.”

During the time Petersen served as a missionary in Samoa, Elder David O. McKay, then of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and later the ninth president of the Church, visited Samoa from May 10 to June 6, 1921. Petersen attended one of the conferences over which Elder McKay presided.

“That was the first time one of the General Authorities had ever visited one of the islands, but it was really something for the [local members] to see an Apostle of the Lord. He received great attention and respect, not only among our own people, but among non-members as well,” Petersen said.

He said the one feeling that he had during his mission that he wished he could keep forever occurred during the time of a district conference. “I couldn’t get over to conference, and I was very lonely,” he said. “I went to Ta’u to get my mail, and I stayed there over Sunday. That Sunday afternoon, I was feeling very blue and dejected. I walked out on a little piece of rock that was off the shore. There I offered up a prayer that I might have consolation.

“A feeling came over me that I had never felt before in my life. It filled my whole being with exceeding joy, and I know it was the power of the Holy Ghost that gave me this feeling for my satisfaction and comfort.”

I wrote about Lorenzo Petersen in January 1973. He died that July.

One understatement pertaining to missionary work is that it is often rife with challenges. I remember one case in which a big challenge was just arriving at mission headquarters. The journey to that field of labor took months.

I interviewed Elder J. Richard Clarke after he was sustained in April 1985 to the First Quorum of the Seventy. He had served over eight years as a counselor in the Presiding Bishopric. In just a few months, he would be serving as president of the South Africa Cape Town Mission, with his wife, Sister Barbara Reed Clarke, serving as his companion. For Elder Clarke, it was a return to a beloved field of labor.

Before serving in South Africa as a young man, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy right after he graduated from high school in 1945. He finished boot camp the day fighting with Japan officially ended and was assigned to Yap Island in the South Pacific.

After his military service, he returned to his home state of Idaho and enrolled in what was then Ricks College and is now BYU-Idaho in Rexburg. He was there when he received his mission call to serve in South Africa.

His account of his travels to his field of labor has tones of “disruption and delay” with which many missionaries today might identify.

He explained that passage on a ship was difficult to book so soon after World War II. He and several other missionaries were assigned temporarily to the Texas-Louisiana Mission and later were booked on a 12-passenger cargo ship sailing from New Orleans in May 1947.

The ship had boiler trouble and then nearly sank after it hit rocks off the coast of Brazil. It was in dry dock six weeks. A voyage that should have taken 21 to 28 days lasted nearly four months.

“The harbor at Cape Town was such a beautiful sight,” he said, recalling his joy at finally having arrived in South Africa.

During our conversation, Elder Clarke said, “I think missionaries ought to develop those skills that will make them confident. Whether you’re trying to win on the basketball court, succeed in business or being a good missionary, the same principles apply.”

He told me how he worked on developing foundational skills he could draw upon as a young missionary.

“I was terrified to give a talk in Church,” he said. “I knew I had to conquer that feeling. Our quarters were next to the meetinghouse. I would go over to the empty building and stand at the pulpit and work and work, just trying to express my ideas, talking out loud, hearing my own voice. I would try to get through my talk without having to read it all. I would practice and practice. I’m still not an accomplished speaker, but I have overcome those fears and concerns.”

Elder Clarke spoke about the role of how learning to work in his youth helped him build foundational principles.

“I’ve always believed in working,” said Elder Clarke, who hired out as a farm laborer during high school and college days. As a youngster, his first job was running a shoeshine stand in a barbershop in Rexburg. He also stacked shelves in a grocery store and worked in a lumber mill.

Whether facing turmoil in the process of actually arriving in the field of labor, overcoming feelings of inadequacy once there or dealing with disruptions such as those brought about by COVID-19, missionaries today can build on foundational principles they have established, or are still developing.

After he returned from serving as president of the South Africa Cape Town Mission, Elder Clarke served in the Presidency of the Seventy from Oct. 1, 1988, to Aug. 15, 1993. He was named emeritus General Authority on Oct. 4, 1997.

The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles sent a letter on March 12 stating that all Church meetings and activities worldwide were to be temporarily suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On May 19, the Brethren sent another letter authorizing the resumption of some meetings and activities using a careful, phased approach. Most units of the Church have not resumed their meetings.

During these “meetingless” Sabbaths members have been encouraged to read the scriptures and engage in personal and family gospel study.

Our current situation reminds me of an experience James E. Faust related during an interview in December of 1985. At that time, he was serving as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He served as a counselor in the First Presidency from March 12, 1995, until his death at age 87 on Aug. 10, 2007.

Here is a brief recap of Elder Faust’s experiences of studying the gospel and worshiping alone:

On Dec. 7, 1941, Elder Faust, then 21, and his missionary companion went to teach the gospel to a woman in her home in Brazil. When they arrived that Sunday afternoon, she was listening to a radio broadcast. The missionaries’ attention was riveted to the announcement in Portuguese: “Pearl Harbor has been bombed.”

Geographical boundaries seemed to dissolve for the 6-foot-tall, blue-eyed missionary. Until he heard that broadcast, his concerns had been predominantly of missionary work, his family and home in Salt Lake City. While standing in that living room in South America, far from home, he knew the attack on the military base in the Hawaiian Islands would have a big impact on his life. Because of his age, he was certain he would be drafted as soon as he returned home from his mission. He had nearly completed his full-time mission, having served almost two years.

“We couldn’t get home because of the war,” Elder Faust recalled. “I went to Brazil in 1939 and came back in 1942 — I was there 33 months. Those were unsettling times, but I got to have an extra long mission, which was a great blessing.”

The extended mission helped fortify him for the challenges of military service, which began within weeks of his return home. He was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps.

One challenge was being the only Latter-day Saint on a ship while being transferred to the South Pacific. Off the coast of New Zealand, his ship was ordered to pull in a tanker that had burned out. The stricken vessel was larger than the ship he was on; towing it took 83 days.

Factoring in the time he’d already been aboard ship before the towing began, he spent about two dozen Sundays worshiping alone. He said he searched for places where he could read scriptures, meditate and pray. Using a pocket-size hymnal, he sang, always solo.

“Most often, I would go way up in the front of the ship, out in the open, where the waves would drown out my singing, and I would have my own service as best as I could,” he reflected.

His military service took him to the South Pacific and Middle East during the perilous, uncertain days of World War II, adding to his life a dimension he said was invaluable.

“I learned some things in the military that I had to learn, and that added to what I had learned on my mission,” he said.

Reading scriptures, singing hymns and studying the gospel on his own fortified and sustained him during the many times he was the sole Latter-day Saint during his military service.

During these meetingless Sundays, I’ve thought about Elder Faust and his solitary worship. I assume he had a limited gospel library, maybe just his scriptures, a book or two, and the pocket-size hymnal. By contrast, we have access to thousands of publications — books; magazines; texts of talks by General Authorities and officers of the Church; and, yes, print and digital editions of the Church News. We have videos of conference talks, Tabernacle Choir performances, inspirational movies and other uplifting items and postings to fortify and sustain us during the Sundays we’re unable to gather with fellow Latter-day Saints.

Still, it will be a sweet experience to meet again in our wards and branches.

That was the opening sentence in an article I wrote in 1986 about Steve E. Baughman, who was sustained as president of the Charleston South Carolina Stake on Sept. 14, 1986.

The next sentence explained why he saw Vietnam as an opportunity:

“In Vietnam in 1969 as a combat soldier assigned to the 1st Infantry Division — known as The Big Red One — he had an opportunity to study doctrines of [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints], which he had joined a year earlier, and to discover the strength of his own testimony.”

Baughman was baptized in 1968, after having spent a summer working in Snowflake, Arizona, where he met Gerri Hale, who invited him to church.

“I was an easy convert,” he told me. “I fancied myself being an intellectual, a ‘thinker.’ Although I had grown up in a strongly religious home and didn’t have any problems with Christian standards, I had become disenchanted with many religious teachings and had almost become a recluse.”

Two young men who had recently returned from missions to South America began teaching him the gospel of Jesus Christ. “What they said was like a breath of fresh air coming into my life,” he said. “Nothing I believed in was overturned, but there was a whole new dimension, an understanding of what I believed.”

Shortly after he was baptized, he returned to Ohio, where he had grown up, and completed his studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “I was the only student member of the Church on a campus of 15,000,” he said. “The nearest ward was 30 miles away. I often rode to Church with a professor and his family. Because the ward was so far away, I didn’t have any contact with the Church during the week; I didn’t even have home teachers. I didn’t know much about the Church, just what the missionaries taught me. I kind of waded through my senior year at the university and returned to Snowflake and took a permanent job.

“That was a summer of malcontent. I wasn’t happy. I avoided the Church and I was miserable. I was pleased when I got drafted. I thought at least something was changing. That was the beginning of good things for me. It was another beginning.

“I was a little cocky about my education and, I guess, about the Church because I felt I knew things that others did not know, even though I didn’t know all that much. I was confident I would be assigned to some place very soft and that I would have a desk job because of my education. Then I got orders to go to Vietnam assigned to infantry. On the plane over, I realized there was a strong possibility I wouldn’t be coming back.

“In the five- or six-day period when I was going through processing, I felt I had to know if the Church and all I had learned [about it] was true. … One of the first details I had led me right by a non-denominational servicemen’s chapel. A sign on the marquee announced [a Latter-day Saint] service. Seeing it took my breath away. I had become convinced that the Church was something only for the western part of the United States. I thought it couldn’t possibly be in Southeast Asia.”

He decided to go to the Latter-day Saint services. “Except for the building and the fact there were only 10 men there — all dressed in combat fatigues — it was like walking into a meeting in Arizona,” he told me. “The same hymns were sung, sacrament was blessed and passed the same way. A flood of positive feelings came back. I knew then how much I had missed the Church.”

He began a personal study program. “As I read the Book of Mormon, I was overwhelmed by its truthfulness. I began writing letters to everybody I could think of to tell them about the Book of Mormon and the Church.”

After he missed a bus during a transfer to a new unit, which caused a mix up in his orders, Baughman spent the rest of his time in Vietnam as a clerk filing morning reports. He and Pfc. Peter Cookson, who was the Latter-day Saint group leader, went through every record in their division in an effort to identify all Latter-day Saint servicemen. “We visited every Church member we could find,” Baughman said. “Our group grew from six members to 35. We had home evening every week and got special permission to do home teaching.

“Being in that environment was a tremendous opportunity for me. I finished reading the standard works and read ‘Jesus the Christ’ and ‘A Marvelous Work and a Wonder’ and anything else I could get my hands on.”

After he had been in Vietnam for 10 months, he was interviewed and granted a temple recommend. He went to the Laie Hawaii Temple while on leave. He married Gerri Hale in the Manti Utah Temple in January 1971. A few days later he left for Germany, with his wife following within two weeks. He became a company clerk, which he said was “the next best thing to being commanding officer.”

“Starting out marriage together so far from home was like being placed in a module where we could develop our own lives together.”

Baughman served nine years as the Columbia South Carolina Stake president. He and his wife served as president and matron of the Columbia South Carolina Temple from 2011-2014, and then as missionaries in the Texas San Antonio Mission.

Steve and Gerri Baughman have five children — one daughter and four sons — and 11 grandchildren. They live in Summerville, South Carolina.

— Gerry Avant is a former Church News editor. She continues to write frequent columns for the Church News.

I wrote about President Spencer W. Kimball, regarding his call to serve in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and Elder James M. Paramore of the Quorum of the Seventy.

Examples of two others who were “qualified” to serve are found in the experiences of Elder Gerald E. Melchin and Elder Lloyd P. George, both of whom were sustained to the First Quorum of the Seventy during the October 1988 general conference.

During our conversation, Elder Melchin told me about a call he received during the 1950s that he felt he couldn’t accept because he didn’t have the required qualifications. He and his wife, Sister Evelyn Knowles Melchin, and their young family had moved from Raymond, Alberta, Canada, to Calgary, Alberta. They were called to serve as stake dance directors.

“I told one of the counselors in the stake presidency I didn’t know how to dance,” he said. However, to his wife’s surprise, he accepted the call. “I had made a commitment that I would serve in any position to which I was called. There was nothing I could do but say, ‘I will serve.’ ”

As things turned out, the Melchins were successful dance directors but only after a lot of hard work. “We went to Lethbridge for a training session,” he said. “Everyone else knew all the terms and steps and were just dancing away, and we didn’t know anything. We were lost on the dance floor. We went home, I studied the steps and Evelyn put in the rhythm for the dances. We had a wonderful time.”

He later served as bishop of the Calgary 3rd Ward, president of the Calgary Alberta North Stake and president of the California Arcadia Mission, after which he served on a stake high council and as the Calgary region welfare agent.

Although he had devoted much time serving in the Church, he felt he could do more. One day in 1984, while visiting in Logan, Utah, he walked to the top of a mountain where he pondered his service in the Church. “In essence, I told the Lord I was ready to do more,” Elder Melchin told me. “Whatever He wanted me to do, wherever He wanted me to go, I was ready.”

When he returned from the mountain to his hotel room, the telephone was ringing. A call was extended for him to serve as a regional representative, a position in which he was serving at the time he was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy.

He said he knew as little about being a general authority as he had known three decades earlier about how to dance, but said he was approaching his call to the Quorum of the Seventy with faith, “literally taking one step at a time.”

Elder Melchin died June 15, 2016, at age 95.

Elder Lloyd P. George is another example of “Whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies.”

Throughout his childhood and into early adulthood, he stuttered so profoundly he could not say his name. His father and mother, his brother and two sisters had never really heard him speak. He was unable to bless the sacrament, offer prayers or give talks in his ward in central Utah. Some of the most prominent speech teachers and therapists throughout the western United States had been unable to help.

He was called to serve as a full-time missionary, although he was unable to carry on a conversation or teach a lesson. However, after a few months on his mission, he began speaking without stuttering. By the time he completed his mission, he was preaching the gospel with force, giving motivating and inspiring talks and bearing a strong, clear testimony.

Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. Elder George was allowed to complete his mission, but he immediately entered the Army Air Corps after his release.

At Ft. McClellan Military Base in Alabama, he was close to being accepted for pilot training, having passed tests for physical fitness and intellectual ability. The only test that remained was for emotional stability.

He was stuck on the first question on a questionnaire: “Have you ever stuttered or stammered?”

Elder George told me that he answered in the affirmative. “Four of us applicants were taken into a room together. We faced four psychologists at a long table.” The applicants put their questionnaires on the table. His was the first one picked up. A psychologist looked at the answer to the first question, leveled his gaze on the young applicant and asked, “Have you ever stuttered or stammered?” The reply was an immediate, “Yes, sir.”

The psychologists questioned the other applicants and then dismissed them but kept the former stutterer in the room. One of the psychologists said, “Repeat after me: ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. …”

Although nervous, Lloyd George repeated the tongue twister without missing a single syllable. He was accepted for pilot training. Not only did he become a pilot, but also a pilot trainer.

Elder George died May 13, 1996, at age 75.