Chapter 21
A Seed of Love
At the start of 1981, sixty-three-year-old Julia Mavimbela ran a community garden near her home in Soweto, a Black township of over a million people on the west side of Johannesburg, South Africa. Julia, a former elementary school principal, had started the garden a few years earlier to help the young people of the township as they grew to adulthood under apartheid, South Africa’s official policy of racial segregation.
As a Black woman herself, she knew how difficult it was to live under this system. The laws demeaned Black people and treated them as lesser citizens. For decades, the government had forced every Black South African to carry an identification booklet stating where the person could and could not go. If Black individuals were discovered in white neighborhoods at the wrong time of day, they could be beaten, arrested, or even killed.
When Julia was younger, she had been forced to move from her multiracial neighborhood in Johannesburg to a house in segregated Soweto. Now, as she watched young people struggle against these injustices, she worried about the bitterness growing in their hearts. With her garden, she hoped to teach them how to move beyond their anger before it destroyed them and their loved ones.
“Look,” she would say, “this soil is solid and hard. But if we push a spade or a fork, we will crack it and come out with lumps. Then, if we break those lumps and throw in a seed, the seed grows.”
She wanted the young people to carry the message of the hard earth in their hearts. “Let us dig the soil of bitterness, throw in a seed of love, and see what fruits it can give us,” she would tell them. “Love will not come without forgiving others.”
This was a lesson Julia was still learning. Decades earlier, her husband, John, had been killed in a head-on collision with a white driver. When Julia went to the police station to claim his belongings, she found that the money he’d had with him at the time had been stolen after the crash. And although she believed John was not at fault in the accident, an all-white court had blamed him for it.
John’s death had left Julia to raise their children alone, and she had struggled to support them. Yet when times got difficult, she had felt the presence of Jesus Christ near her, giving her comfort and reassurance.
Now, more than a quarter century after John’s death, Julia knew forgiveness was vital to healing her pain. But she still struggled to forgive those who marred John’s good name and stole from her and her family.
One day, in June 1981, Julia was invited to help clean out a youth facility and library that had been looted and set on fire in recent riots over apartheid. When she arrived there, Julia was surprised to see two young men clearing out the debris with shovels. The men were white—a shocking sight in Soweto.
With big smiles, the young men told Julia they were American missionaries who had come to help. They knew a little bit about gardening and talked with Julia about her community garden. They also asked if they could visit her. Julia was not eager to meet with them. By inviting two white men to her house, she risked violent retribution against her and her family. Would her neighbors think she was collaborating with the police or the apartheid government?
She started to make an excuse, but then she felt a thump in her chest and knew she had to let them visit. She told them to come in three days.
The men arrived right on schedule, dressed in white shirts and wearing name tags. They introduced themselves as missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She listened politely to their message. But by the second visit she was trying to figure out how she could graciously tell them she wasn’t interested.
One of the missionaries then pointed to a picture of Julia and her late husband and asked, “Where is he?”
“He is deceased,” she explained.
The missionaries told her about baptism for the dead. She was skeptical. Over the years, she had attended many churches. Never once had she heard anyone say the dead could be baptized.
A missionary opened the New Testament and asked her to read 1 Corinthians 15:29: “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?”
The verse captivated her. She started listening to the missionaries with an open heart. As they taught her about eternal families, she learned that baptisms and other ordinances could be performed for the deceased by their loved ones in temples. She could also be reunited with those she had lost—including John—in the next life.
When she began reading the Book of Mormon, her life began to change. For the first time, she realized that all people were one family. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ gave her hope that she could finally forgive those who had hurt her and her children.
Six months after meeting the missionaries, Julia was baptized. A month later, she was invited to speak in stake conference. Under government apartheid, the Church had made no attempt to proselytize among Black people in South Africa. But apartheid had begun unraveling by the early 1980s, making it easier for Black and white members of the same religion to meet and worship together. A few months before Julia’s baptism, a congregation was established for the Saints from Soweto.
Julia was nervous when she stood before the mostly white stake. She worried that her pain over John’s death might act as a wedge between her and other Church members. But her heart was full of prayer, and the Lord prompted her to share her story.
She spoke about her husband’s death, the cruel treatment she received from the police, and the bitterness she had carried for so long. “I have finally found the church that can teach me to truly forgive,” she testified. Like the lumps of soil in a garden, her bitterness was broken.
What remained, she said, was peace and forgiveness.
When government officials proposed constructing a temple in the German Democratic Republic, the First Presidency authorized Henry Burkhardt to secure a permit to build a meetinghouse with a special wing for administering endowments and sealings for the living, but no proxy ordinances for the dead.
After fasting and prayer, Henry and his counselors in the Dresden Mission presidency proposed constructing the building in Karl-Marx-Stadt. The city had a large number of Saints, and they needed a new meetinghouse. Local officials refused to issue a permit to the Church, however, reasoning that the city did not need more churches. They instead proposed Freiberg, a university town nearby.
“Impossible,” Henry told them. “We want to have Karl-Marx-Stadt.”
The matter seemed settled in the mission presidency’s minds. But as they fasted and prayed, Henry and his counselors began to seriously consider building in Freiberg. The town was home to a small branch of Saints and close to branches in Dresden and other cities and towns in the region.
The more Henry and his counselors pondered the matter, the more convinced they became. “Yes,” they said to themselves, “the Freiberg option is in fact not that bad.”
Civic leaders in Freiberg seemed eager for the Church to construct a building like the Swiss Temple in their town. Across the GDR, the government was seeking to strengthen relationships with people of faith who respected state authority. The GDR now officially recognized some religions and sought to rebuild historic churches that had been damaged during World War II.
Since the Saints in Freiberg already had a suitable meetinghouse, Henry had a strong impression that the Church should set aside its plan to construct a hybrid building and instead build a standard temple that included a baptismal font and allowed for other proxy ordinance work. He proposed the idea to Church leaders in Salt Lake City and received approval to obtain a site for a fully functioning house of the Lord in Freiberg.
Henry then brought the plan to a Freiberg town meeting alongside Frank Apel, the mission executive secretary and a Freiberg native. The council offered the Church two possible building sites. The first lot was in the center of town, but it was small and below the level of the road, making it hard for passersby to see it. The other site was an undeveloped field on a hill northwest of town. There were no public transportation stops nearby, but the site itself was highly visible to the surrounding area.
Once Henry and Frank saw the second site, they knew they had found the right place for the temple.
On February 27, 1982, Elder Thomas S. Monson visited the GDR to check on the East German Saints and speak with Henry about the new temple site. It had been nearly fourteen years since Henry and his wife, Inge, had first met the apostle, and they shared a cherished friendship. Elder Monson presented Inge with a decorative plate and new skirt from his wife, Frances. He also surprised Tobias, the Burkhardts’ fourteen-year-old son, with a pocket calculator—a rare commodity in the GDR.
The next day, Henry took Elder Monson to the site. Although he understood why the Church could not build the temple in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Elder Monson had questions about the Freiberg location.
“Have you thoroughly considered this choice?” he asked Henry. “Is this really the right place? How will the people come here without adequate public transportation?”
Henry answered Elder Monson’s questions as best he could. He then affirmed that he and his counselors strongly supported building a temple there. They had fasted and prayed about the site, he said, and they felt it was where the Lord wanted His house in the GDR.
Elder Monson needed no more convincing. The Church purchased the land and submitted revised architectural drawings to the East German government.
On March 31, 1982, David Galbraith sat quietly in an office in Jerusalem as Amnon Niv, the city’s chief engineer, examined a large hand-colored map of the Mount of Olives. A half dozen other city planners stood in the room with them.
David had been anticipating a meeting with Amnon for months. The Church was ready to move forward with its plans to build a Jerusalem Center for BYU study abroad students and local Saints. Once established, the center would give the Church an official presence in the Holy Land. It would be a place of learning, understanding, and peace, where Church members could come to walk where Jesus walked, learn more about the ancient roots of their faith, and gain an appreciation for the cultures and beliefs of the people living in the Middle East.
Church leaders, including David, wanted to build the center on the spot President Kimball had admired during his 1979 visit to the city. But the site was near Mount Scopus, the highest point on the Mount of Olives, and a government-designated “green zone” cut through part of it, making it virtually off-limits for construction. Other developers had attempted to overturn the zoning without success. If the Church hoped to build there, Amnon would need to adjust the green zone’s boundary.
Mayor Teddy Kollek supported the Church’s desire to build a center in the city. He believed the Church’s friendship with Muslims and Jews would help both groups better understand one another and live in peace. Still, he agreed that the Mount Scopus property would be impossible to acquire. At his urging, David had looked at other possible sites. And whenever he found a promising location, he reached out to Church headquarters. Yet none of these sites received approval, and President N. Eldon Tanner had advised him to focus on Mount Scopus.
One day, Mayor Kollek had encouraged Amnon to set up a meeting with David and listen to what he had to say. David Reznik, the local architect the Church had hired to design the BYU Jerusalem Center, was also invited.
Reznik showed Amnon some of his plans for the school and pointed out its proximity to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which he and Amnon had helped design years before. Amnon continued to study the map for several minutes, his silence matched by the silence from all in the room. “Bring me a felt pen,” he said suddenly. Nobody in the room had a pen, so someone scrambled and found one for him. He then stretched his arm out and began to draw on the map.
With everyone watching, he modified the green zone, drawing a red line around the exact spot where the Church wanted to build the Jerusalem Center.
“This is the building line,” he proclaimed. He grabbed an official rubber stamp, pounded it down on the map, and signed his name. “That’s it!” he pronounced.
Everyone nodded in agreement. David was dumbfounded. The Church had just received approval for something everyone thought was impossible. He couldn’t wait to call Church headquarters and tell them about the miracle.
A few months later, in July 1982, Olga Kovářová and a small group of Saints traveled by car to a reservoir near Brno, Czechoslovakia, for her baptism.
Since her first sacrament meeting at Otakar Vojkůvka’s home, Olga had grown to admire the faith of the older Czechoslovak Saints. She felt uplifted by their discussions during Sunday School and comfortable sharing her own thoughts.
In the months leading up to her baptism, Olga had received the missionary lessons from Jaromír Holcman, a member of the Brno Branch presidency. The first few lessons had been difficult and uncomfortable because the religious words sounded so foreign to her. The plan of salvation seemed like a fairy tale, and Olga wrestled with questions she had about Heavenly Father.
She also worried about the problems that would come after baptism. The Church had begun growing in central and eastern Europe after 1975, when Henry Burkhardt and his counselors in the Dresden Mission presidency appointed a man named Jiří Šnederfler to preside over the Saints in Czechoslovakia. But the Church was still little known and little understood in the country. Even as her mind was telling her to forget about Christ’s gospel, though, her heart told her it was the truth.
Olga fasted the entire day of her baptism. When the time came, she rode to the reservoir with Otakar and Gád Vojkůvka and Jaromír and his wife, Maria. The group gathered by the water and said a prayer. But before they could proceed with the ordinance, they were startled by the sound of several fishermen walking along the bank. The men drew closer and settled near the place where Olga was to be baptized.
“The water’s edge is pretty steep at most places here,” Otakar said. “This is the only place we know of that has a gradual and safe descent into the water.”
With no other choice, Olga and her friends waited. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Still the fishermen showed no signs of leaving.
Olga leaned her head against a tree trunk. “Maybe I am not prepared enough,” she thought, “or my testimony isn’t strong enough, or I haven’t fully repented.”
She was about to kneel in prayer when Jaromír took her by the arm and walked her back to the other Saints.
“I think we need to pray again to make it possible for Olga to be baptized today,” he said.
The group knelt together as Jaromír pleaded with God on Olga’s behalf. She could hear the emotion in his voice. When the prayer ended, a few minutes passed and then the fishermen stood up suddenly and left.
The water was still and quiet as Jaromír led Olga in by the hand and spoke the baptismal prayer. When she heard her name, Olga felt that a chapter in her life was ending. Everything was about to change now that she had decided to follow Christ and His restored gospel. Complete joy swept over her, and she knew her baptism was being recorded in heaven.
The small group was soon on their way back to Brno in Jaromír’s car. As they rode, they listened to a cassette tape of the Tabernacle Choir. Olga felt like she was hearing angels, and she marveled when Jaromír told her that the singers were all members of the Church. She wondered what life must be like for Saints who lived in a country with religious freedom and a living prophet.
After arriving in Brno, the Saints gathered in Jaromír’s house. Jaromír, Otakar, and other priesthood holders placed their hands on Olga’s head. As they confirmed her a member of the Church, she felt the Holy Ghost envelop her. In that moment, she knew she was a daughter of God.
In the blessing, Jaromír declared that through Olga, many young people would join the Church and be taught the gospel in a way they could understand. The words surprised her. It seemed impossible, for the time being, that she could share the gospel openly.
Even so, she kept those words in her heart and longed for a day when they would come true.
On November 27, 1982, the skies over Johannesburg, South Africa, were overcast as 850 people gathered for the groundbreaking of the first house of the Lord on the African continent. Julia Mavimbela had come to the ceremony with ten families from Soweto, the Black township on the west side of the city. From the moment Julia learned about temples, she had wanted to have ordinance work done for her late husband and parents. She was determined to take part in every important event in the temple’s construction.
Presiding at the ceremony was Elder Marvin J. Ashton of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. In his concluding remarks, he spoke of the spiritual excitement he sensed from the South African Saints. Once the house of the Lord was completed, Saints who had once needed to travel thousands of miles to temples in the United States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, or Brazil could now look forward to having their own temple nearby.
After Elder Ashton spoke, he and other Church leaders ceremonially broke the ground with spades. Other Saints then pressed forward, eager to participate. Not wanting to push through the crowd, Julia and the other Saints from Soweto backed away. Some of the leaders saw them and invited them to step forward, pick up a spade, and break the ground as well. Julia was sure the Spirit had a hand in calling them to the front.
Over the next months, Julia found joy in serving in the Relief Society. Many people in her branch were recent converts, and experienced Church members from other wards in the stake mentored them until they were ready to lead the branch themselves. The Relief Society president, a white woman, called Julia as her first counselor.
The branch was one of the first organized from a Black township. It met in a ward building in a neighborhood in Johannesburg. To get there, Julia and other Black Saints from Soweto had to take a taxi into the city and then walk the rest of the way to the chapel. After a while, the branch began meeting in a high school in Soweto, and Julia was pleased that she could attend church closer to home.
But the new meeting place presented challenges of its own. Every Sunday morning, the Saints had to arrive early to sweep the floors and clean the windows and chairs to make the school suitable for sacrament meeting. And sometimes the person who scheduled the building would double-book it to make more money, leaving the Saints without a place to meet.
Soon, the Johannesburg Stake began calling more and more Black Saints as leaders in the township branches. In her branch, Julia was called as the new Relief Society president.
She immediately felt inadequate. Although she was an experienced community leader who knew how to help and motivate people, the Saints in her branch were used to Church leaders being white. She could almost hear her branch members doubting her abilities and thinking, “She is Black like us.”
Still, Julia refused to be discouraged. She knew what she was capable of accomplishing. And she knew the Lord would be with her.