Ensign

September 1999

Volume 29 Number 9

Contents

• First Presidency Message: The Quest for Excellence

  President Gordon B. Hinckley

• Personal Revelation
  Elder L. Lionel Kendrick

• Becoming Our Children’s Greatest Teachers

  Ronald L. Knighton

• What an Eight-Year-Old Taught Me

  Rebecca Johnson

• New Light on Paul’s Teachings

  Richard D. Draper

• “Have Faith and Abide with Me”

  Lorin John Hamilton

• The Church Grows in Strength

  William G. Hartley

• Images of an Era: Gaining Strength

• A Look at the Church: 1898–1951

• Ah Mu: Generous Samoan Saint

  Rebecca M. Taylor

• When a Loved One Struggles with Same-Sex Attraction

  A. Dean Byrd

• Why Write It?

  Brad Wilcox

• Poetry

• I Have a Question

  • Why we are encouraged to limit sacrament meeting musical selections to hymns or hymnlike selections

    Daniel L. Carter

  • What the gospel of Jesus Christ teaches about self-fulfillment

    Timothy B. Smith

• Mormon Journal

  • Downhill toward Disaster

    Brent W. Case

  • Struggling to Say “I’m Sorry”

    Name Withheld

  • Would We Have a Child Who Lived?

    Erika Heymann

  • Not Enough for My Mission

    Patricia A. Mitchiner

  • How Could He Pray for a Bicycle?

    Andrea Burger James

• Portraits

• The Visiting Teacher: Turning to the Savior in Adversity

• Random Sampler

• News of the Church

On the covers: Front and back: Photography by Welden C. Andersen; posed by models.

Inside front: Baptism at Kiev, by Nikolai Krisochenko, oil on board, 16″ x 20″, 1998. Courtesy of Museum of Church History and Art. Painted in April 1998, this scene depicts the artist’s baptism in the Dnepr River outside Kiev, Ukraine, his homeland.

Inside back: Gadfield Elm Chapel, England, by Al Rounds, watercolor, 26″ x 17″, 1999. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Gary Carver. The Gadfield Elm Chapel in Worcestershire, England, was built by the United Brethren religious group in 1836 and given to the Latter-day Saints when most of the group joined the Church. The small stone chapel could seat about 100 people. Once when President Brigham Young was at the pulpit, there was not even standing room for the attending crowd.