Something to Live For

Not long after my wife and I arrived in the mission field, a mission leader asked us to meet with a young Jewish husband and wife who were studying the gospel. Just the month before, they had been running a prosperous business in New York, but they felt that something was missing from their lives. They decided to sell their business and move to California, where the wife’s older sister had gone two years before.

The night they arrived at the sister’s house, the couple was treated to a wonderful meal. Afterwards the sister said, “There’s something you need to know about what’s happened to us since we’ve come to California. We’ve joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Overcoming their cultural trepidations, the couple soon began taking the missionary discussions themselves. They were baptized the week after we met them.

About six months later I received another phone call from the mission leader. “Would you be able to come visit with this couple again?” he asked. “The husband has just been told that he will die within the next twenty-four hours from leukemia.”

We immediately went to help comfort them. They wanted to know whether they could be sealed in the temple before the husband passed away. I told them that they could not because they had not yet been Church members for a full year. They asked me to double-check, and that evening I confirmed that their sealing would need to be done vicariously.

“No, no,” the husband said. “That’s not the way it’s going to be. I just won’t die.” Two weeks later he left the hospital alive.

Eleven months after the couple’s baptism, I received another call, this time from the wife. “They’ve given my husband another twenty-four hours,” she said. “We don’t think he’ll come out of it this time. Can we be sealed in the temple now?”

I talked to the doctors and the temple president and made the arrangements. The young man was wheeled to the temple on a gurney, and the couple received their endowments together. For the sealing ceremony, we positioned the man so he could reach across the altar from his gurney and take his wife’s hand.

“That’s not what I came here to do,” he said. Painstakingly he crawled off the gurney and knelt with his wife for the sealing. Afterwards workers helped him back onto the gurney, and he was returned to the hospital. He died there several hours later.

I will never forget how, with the older of her two young children clinging to her legs, the young widow bore her testimony. “My husband left me financially secure for the rest of my life. But the gospel has given us something money can’t buy. I am so grateful to be unified with my husband and children for eternity.”

This couple showed us what it means to live—and die—with eternal perspective.