“These Are the People You Have Been Searching For”

Debbie Pearce was raised by her grandmother in severe poverty in Kingston, Jamaica. “The first home I knew was a one-room wooden shack in the ghetto,” Debbie remembered. “We didn’t have running water in our shack that combined with many others to form a compound. There was one main pipe. Everyone caught their water there in buckets.”

Her grandmother rose from the tattered bed she shared with five other family members at 5:00 a.m. every morning. She woke her grandchildren and took them to the gully to search for bricks. Eventually, they had collected enough bricks to build an oven to bake bread, which they sold to neighbors.

Debbie’s best friend was born outside, in the streets, to a mother who was only 14 years old. At 19, Debbie’s friend left her third boyfriend and moved in with her mother, adding her three children to her mother’s six. “My friend had the responsibility for nine children under the age of seven before she reached her 20th birthday,” Debbie remembered. “As I looked at my friend’s life, I realized that I wanted something better for myself. I wanted a home and a family. I knew I had to leave the ghetto.”

Debbie’s grandmother had taught her to pray and to believe in God. Debbie visited many churches searching for God and deeper meaning in her life, but she felt confused about the teachings in the various churches. She did, however, notice a good feeling when she studied the life of Christ.

One day, she became friends with a young man. After 10 months of knowing him, she asked him if he went to church. He told her, but “it was some long name,” Debbie recalled. “The Church of Jesus Christ of something something Saints. I wasn’t the least bit interested—it sounded like just another church to me.”

Her friend left “to serve the Lord for two years in another country. I figured he was going to be a pastor,” she reflected. A few months later, she became curious and sought out the church’s meeting place.

“As I walked through the doors of the meetinghouse, I felt a feeling that is impossible to describe; it was joy, peace, comfort, surety, and happiness all in one,” Debbie said. At the end of the meeting, she said, “a calm feeling came over me, and I heard the words in my mind, ‘Debbie, this is the place, and these are the people you have been searching for.’” Debbie was baptized a short time later.

Debbie worked hard through high school and attended Ricks College in Idaho. She later served a mission in Utah. Reflecting on her many blessings, she testified, “I know Heavenly Father loves us all and is mindful of our circumstances, no matter where we are. He desires, above all things, our happiness.”