“I’ll Do What He Asks Me to Do”

When Charles A. Didier was five years old, the German military invaded his country. During the German occupation, Charles’s mother, Gabrielle, cared for the family alone while her husband, Andre, an officer in the Belgian army, participated in the underground resistance movement. “We spent half of the war without him,” Charles remembered.

Two years after the war ended, Charles’s family moved to Namur, where his father was now stationed with the Belgian army. It was there that Charles and his young siblings looked out their window one day in 1950. “We saw two young Americans with their bikes just walking in the streets,” he remembered. Because of the recent alliance between Belgium and the United States during the war, Charles’s family felt a strong kinship with Americans and invited the two missionaries into their home. While the children were mostly excited to speak with two young Americans, Gabrielle became interested in the gospel message. In 1951, she became the first member of her family to be baptized.

Andre, who had no interest in religion, did not support Gabrielle’s decision. She had promised her husband that she would not pressure their children to join the Church and that they would not be baptized until they were 21. “He wanted us to make our own decision,” Charles remembered. Charles and his siblings were soon attending Church meetings and activities regularly. After six years of consistent involvement with the Church, Charles was baptized in 1957.

Charles was especially attracted to the Church’s emphasis on strong families and its doctrine of eternal marriage. Two years before his baptism, Andre and Gabrielle divorced after 25 years of marriage. Having witnessed firsthand the “problems in our home,” he remembered, he was attracted to the “gospel principles, because I knew that those principles were sound and true and if I can put them into practice then I will succeed in my home with my children.” In 1962, Charles was sealed to Lucie Lodomez for eternity in the Bern Switzerland Temple.

Charles and Lucie Didier, ca. 1970

In March of 1970, Charles and Lucie were called to preside over the France-Switzerland Mission, the first Europeans to preside over a mission. Three years later, as their mission service was about to end, Charles was called as a regional representative and, being fluent in French, Dutch, English, German, and Spanish, he was also appointed to oversee the translation and distribution of Church materials for Europe. In 1975, he joined the First Quorum of the Seventy. “There are some things you plan for the future, certain things you imagine will happen to you,” he remarked. “But when that calling of a General Authority comes, you close the door and say, ‘Now I am in the hands of the Lord 100 percent. I’ll do what he asks me to do.’”