“Where the Father Sends Me, I Will Go”

After she retired from a career as an educator in California in 2017, Elba Morales decided to explore. “I said, where the Father sends me, I will go.” She lived in North Carolina for a few months before moving to Long Island, New York, for three more months. Around this time, her daughter Lidia told her she should come back to Huánuco, Peru, to visit her family.

After this conversation, Elba prayed. Afterward, “I had total certainty that the Spirit had told me to come to this place, to Huánuco,” she said. “Soon after, when I was pondering over there and was getting my things ready and packing my suitcase, I had the idea that I take my baptismal certificate and patriarchal blessing with me.”

In Huánuco, Elba learned from fellow Saints that a regional Church historian was in town, conducting oral history interviews with early Church pioneers. Jose Giraldez, the interviewer, told Elba that if she had come one day later, she would have been too late. “Now I have one more proof that Heavenly Father makes the arrangements,” Elba said. “Everything has a purpose.”

Drawing on the documents she had brought, Elba narrated her story for Jose. When Elba was a young mother living in Huánuco in 1965, she became a Latter-day Saint. “The day I was baptized,” she said, “the happiness and joy I felt in my heart was so great. I knew that in being born again, my life was going to change.”

Challenges quickly arose, however. Her husband stopped going to Church shortly after their baptism and did not want Elba to worship with her congregation. She hid her attendance from him. Her two oldest children were not allowed to be baptized. Eventually, it became hard for Elba to remain active.

In 1986, Elba’s youngest son, Daniel, was baptized with help from the sister missionaries. He was 12, and her oldest children were 24 and 22. Not long after Daniel’s baptism, Elba left her children and country behind to escape her abusive husband. Her sister invited her to immigrate to California, and her children agreed she should go. “I left with a broken heart, but I trusted in Heavenly Father,” Elba said. “He had always placed angels in my path that had helped me to persevere.”

In her new home in California, she wrote to her children and prayed for them. Her daughter Lidia became a second mother to Daniel. In 2000, Elba returned to Peru for the first time to see her children. “Heavenly Father is so great, so powerful, that he again gave me the opportunity to hug my children,” she said. “Not one of them had been sick, nor even had an accident. Nothing. It had been a good life for them.”