“Contents,” Ensign, Feb. 1974, 1
Ensign
February 1974
Volume 4 Number 2
On the cover: This view of President Lee, taken by Merrett Smith of Los Angeles, is Sister Lee’s favorite portrait photograph of her husband.
In a recent meeting I listened to a young girl’s heartwarming testimony. Her father was afflicted with what the doctors had pronounced was an incurable malady. To his wife one morning, this stricken father, after a night of pain and suffering, had said with great feeling, “I am so thankful today.” “For what?” she asked. He replied, “For God’s giving me the privilege of one more day with you.”
Today I could desire with all my heart that all within the sound of this broadcast would likewise thank God for one more day! For what? For the opportunity to take care of some unfinished business. To repent; to right some wrongs; to influence for good some wayward child; to reach out to someone who cried for help—in short, to thank God for one more day to prepare to meet God.
Don’t try to live too many days ahead.
—President Harold B. Lee,
First Counselor in the First Presidency
October 5, 1970
Inside front cover: With all my soul and conviction, and knowing the seriousness and import of that testimony, I tell you that I know that He lives. I am conscious of His presence much of the time when I have needed Him most; I have known it out of the whisperings of the night, the impressions of the daytime when there were things for which I was responsible and on which I could receive guidance.
So I testify to you and tell you that He is closer to the leaders of this church than you have any idea. Listen to the leaders of this church and follow their footsteps in righteousness, if you would learn not only by study but also by faith, which testimony I bear most humbly and sincerely in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
—Elder Harold B. Lee,
Council of the Twelve
April 1968
Inside back cover: I find myself almost trembling with a sense of my own inadequacy when I recall the great leaders of this dispensation who have preceded us in leadership positions. As I have thought of this, through long hours of meditation and prayer, I sense the reality of the fact that one, such as I, does not take the place of those who have gone on before.
We who are called to occupy these positions merely fill the vacancies created by the passing of time. Those who have gone on before still hold their places in the eternal worlds and in the hearts of the hundreds of thousands whom they have served.
—President Harold B. Lee, newly called as first counselor to President Joseph Fielding Smith, April 6, 1970.