Chapter 34
Strength for Any Situation
On the morning of October 15, 2004, Anne Pingree stepped off a plane in Santiago, Chile. As second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency, she had come to meet with the local Saints and train Relief Society and priesthood leaders.
In her meetings, Anne planned to use the simplified training booklets developed by the Relief Society board’s literacy committee. Each booklet had about two dozen pages featuring color photographs and simple principles from the Church Handbook of Instructions. She hoped to use the booklet on Church welfare to help Relief Society and priesthood leaders learn to value each other and work together.
Before leaving the United States, Anne had received an email from Elder Carl B. Pratt of the Chile Area presidency. The Church had recently opened two welfare resource centers in Chile, each one housing a bishops’ storehouse, an employment center, and a counseling office. When dispensing welfare resources, bishops were supposed to work with Relief Society presidents. But the bishops in Chile were not doing this.
In Santiago, Anne learned more about the problem during an initial meeting with Elder Pratt and Elder Francisco J. Viñas, the Chile Area president. Elder Viñas explained that many Chilean Saints had a difficult time reading, so they led by tradition instead of consulting the handbook. As in many areas of the world, sexism was strong in Chile, and some stake presidents and bishops did not counsel with their Relief Society leaders.
“What I want you to do is teach the how-tos,” Elder Viñas said. “Teach that we lead by learning the principles in the handbook.”
Over the next week, Anne talked to hundreds of Saints. Many spoke of their appreciation for Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s recent service as Chile Area president. Although he and Elder Oaks had been called to serve in their respective areas for one year, the First Presidency had extended both assignments another year, giving them more time to support local leaders and strengthen the Saints.
Focusing his attention on Chile’s low membership retention and meeting attendance, Elder Holland had worked closely with missionaries and everyday Saints to bring people back to church. To relieve the burden of priesthood leaders in areas where wards and branches were weak, he had reorganized many Church units, reducing the number of stakes in Chile from 115 to 75.
He had also shortened Sunday meetings in the area from three hours to two hours and fifteen minutes, giving Saints more time to study the gospel of Christ, be with family, visit struggling members, and fulfill callings. While the Church in Chile still faced difficulties retaining members, many Saints were optimistic about its future.
In meetings with Relief Society and priesthood leaders, Anne reminded them that they were colaborers in the Lord’s work. “Brethren, please follow the example of the First Presidency and the Twelve,” she urged. “Listen to women’s voices—to their wise understanding as they share helpful information in welfare committee meetings, ward council meetings, and monthly stewardship meetings.”
She also urged the Relief Society leaders to be ready to counsel with priesthood leaders. “Come prepared to council meetings to make a meaningful difference,” she said. “That means coming with solutions and ideas, and not just identifying challenges or problems.”
When speaking about welfare, Anne used an overhead projector and the simplified welfare booklet to teach the leaders how to conduct ward welfare committee meetings and home needs visits. She emphasized that Relief Society presidents were responsible for making the home visits at the request of bishops.
“The president visits the sister in her home. She can evaluate the needs of the sister. When she carefully listens, the Spirit will help her suggest ways to meet those needs,” the booklet taught. “After the home visit, the president returns to the bishop or branch president and reports on what she learned.”
Anne felt that most of the priesthood leaders came to these meetings with open minds, eager for clarification on how to work with the Relief Society on welfare. And the Relief Society presidents seemed especially grateful for the training. After one meeting, a woman approached her and said, “I was troubled. Now I know what to do.”
Later, Anne reflected on the people she met. The goodness of their lives and their dedication to the work of the Lord inspired her.
“I’m grateful for all that I learned and especially for all that I saw in this nation,” she reported to the Relief Society general board. “They are trying hard to do what they can do to build the Church.”
On the other side of the world, meanwhile, Allwyn Kilbert and his fellow missionaries in the India Bangalore Mission welcomed new mission leaders Brent and Robin Bonham to their field of service.
The Bonhams had just come from Utah, where they received training in a new missionary guide called Preach My Gospel. The guide was designed to give missionaries the flexibility they needed to teach the Savior’s gospel as guided by the Spirit to address the needs of the people they met.
As Allwyn learned more about Preach My Gospel, he was excited to implement it. He had joined the Church in his hometown of Coimbatore, India, in March 2001, and he felt indebted to the missionary program. When his grandmother died a few months after his baptism, he found comfort in what the missionaries had taught about the plan of salvation. And after reading articles about missionary work in the Liahona, the Church’s international magazine, he decided to serve a mission himself.
Latter-day Saint missionaries had first come to India in the 1850s, and since that time a handful of Saints had always lived in the country. Yet the Church did not begin to grow there until the last few decades of the twentieth century. In the 1980s, Church leaders sent senior missionaries from the Singapore Mission to areas in India. Through these missionaries and the efforts of the local Saints, the Church took root. Among the more than one billion people in the country, just over fifty-four hundred were Latter-day Saints.
This growth remained slow for many years. In 1996, three years after the India Bangalore Mission was established, the government restricted the number of foreign missionaries laboring in the country. Most people in India were Hindu or Muslim, while a small minority were Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Baha’i, or Parsi. When Allwyn and other missionaries taught about the Savior and His Church, many people were unfamiliar with basic principles in the lessons.
Allwyn believed Preach My Gospel could help the missionaries tailor the gospel message to all people, regardless of their backgrounds or beliefs. For over forty years, the missionary lessons had been made up of six scripted lessons. In contrast, Preach My Gospel asked missionaries to focus on learning gospel principles so they could better adapt their lessons to the people they taught.
The new curriculum provided missionaries five lessons on the Restoration, the plan of salvation, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the commandments, and the laws and ordinances of the gospel. Other chapters in the book taught the missionaries more about the role of the Book of Mormon, recognizing the Spirit, developing Christlike attributes, and other important principles.
“Central to our Father’s plan is Jesus Christ’s Atonement,” read one key passage from the first lesson. “Through the Atonement we can be freed from the burden of our sins and develop faith and strength to face our trials.”
Over the next few months, President and Sister Bonham prepared the mission to switch to Preach My Gospel. At a zone conference in August 2004, they spoke to the missionaries about using time wisely, one of the principles from the new curriculum. The next day, Allwyn wrote home to his family about the changes. “The system that has been introduced is not only for India but all throughout the world,” he told them. “Missionaries are given more freedom and also accountability.”
In September, President Bonham called Allwyn to be a zone leader in Chennai, a city on India’s southeastern coast. At zone meetings, Allwyn used Preach My Gospel to train the other missionaries and help them adjust to the new method for sharing the gospel.
Before long, missionary work accelerated in Chennai. Allwyn and his companions met a woman named Mary and her grandson Yuvaraj. The family had become interested in the restored gospel when Yuvaraj enrolled in a school run by a local Latter-day Saint. As the missionaries taught the lessons from Preach My Gospel, Mary showed a special interest in being sealed to her late husband, who had died years earlier. The missionaries could tell that family was important to Mary, so they adapted their messages to focus on its eternal nature. When Allwyn and his companions invited her and Yuvaraj to be baptized, they accepted.
On the day of their baptism, five other people were baptized as well.
On Sunday, December 26, 2004, Stanley Wan stepped out of his Church meetings in Hong Kong to take a telephone call. More than ten years had passed since he’d helped President Hinckley select the Hong Kong Temple site. He was now an area authority seventy in Asia and worked as the Church’s welfare manager in the area.
The phone call was from Garry Flake, the Church’s director of humanitarian response. His voice sounded urgent. He wanted to know about a tsunami in Indonesia.
Stanley didn’t know what Garry was talking about. He hung up and called the Church’s office in Indonesia. No one there knew much about the tsunami, but news reports were surfacing.
Earlier that morning, a massive earthquake had struck in the Indian Ocean, off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The force of the quake had radiated out across the ocean, propelling towering walls of seawater toward land. In Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Thailand, mountainous waves had crashed into towns and villages, flooding streets and leveling homes and buildings. An unknown number of people were missing or dead.
Once they understood the scope and seriousness of what happened, Stanley and Garry decided to meet in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to assess the situation. The Church had several missionaries and about 850 members on the island. But unlike Indonesia and India, Sri Lanka did not have a Church administrative office or local Church staff.
Right away, Stanley left for the airport. He arrived in Sri Lanka around midnight and found the island teeming with reporters, charity organizations, and people looking for friends and family. At his hotel, his room had been given to a higher-paying guest, so he tracked down the local missionaries and slept on their floor.
The next day, Garry Flake arrived from the United States, and he and Stanley spent the morning meeting with branch leaders and members. They then traveled around the island to assess the damage.
Sri Lanka’s eastern coast was the hardest hit. Everywhere they looked, houses and buildings had collapsed. The roads were crammed with cars and people trying to escape the chaos. Trains and buses had stopped running. Thousands upon thousands of people sat homeless beside piles of rubble, while soldiers searched for survivors.
In recent years, the Church had provided disaster relief around the world, helping refugees in war-torn Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan; flood victims in Venezuela and Mozambique; and earthquake survivors in El Salvador, Turkey, Colombia, and Taiwan. Now, in southeast Asia, the Church had several pallets of medical supplies ready for use in the areas affected by the tsunami. With Church humanitarian funds, Stanley and Garry purchased additional emergency medical supplies, food, and other resources for local leaders to distribute to victims. They also directed Church members to use a local meetinghouse to assemble hygiene kits and other relief supplies.
After spending a few days in Sri Lanka, Stanley and Garry traveled to Indonesia. There they met with the country’s Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare, with whom Garry had worked before.
“What is your greatest need?” Garry asked him.
“We need body bags for the dead,” the minister replied.
Stanley and Garry reached out to contacts in Beijing, and they found a company that could ship ten thousand body bags a day. Stanley and Garry then arranged the transport to Indonesia.
With the body bags on their way, the Church provided tents, tarps, medical kits, and used clothing for the tsunami victims. It also joined with a Muslim relief organization to deliver more than seventy tons of additional supplies.
But there was so much more to do. Everywhere Stanley and Garry turned, they could see people in need. Thousands had been reported dead in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Thousands more were dead in India and Thailand.
And the death toll was rapidly rising.
Allwyn Kilbert was lying on his bed, waiting for his turn to use the shower, when the earthquake struck Chennai, India. The night before, he and his fellow missionaries had been exhausted after attending a Christmas activity with their branch. When his bed started to shake, he thought his companion was trying to be funny.
“Why are you shaking my bed?” he called out. “I’m already awake.”
His companion, Revanth Nelaballe, entered the room. “It was a tremor,” he said. “An earthquake.”
Earthquakes were uncommon in southern India, but the missionaries didn’t think much about it. Still, when they arrived at church later that morning, Allwyn sensed that something was wrong. After sacrament meeting began, branch president Seong Yang unexpectedly excused himself from the stand and left the chapel. His cell phone had been buzzing almost nonstop with calls about a tsunami flooding the coast. He left the building to check on his home, which was near the beach, and assess the needs of the Saints affected by the disaster.
Later that day, Allwyn and his companions headed to the beach to see what had happened. Police officers had set up barricades to keep onlookers back and were patrolling the area on horseback. Along the beach, people were pulling bodies out of the water, which had reached more than half a mile inland. All along the coast, low-lying fishing communities were ravaged, and many fishermen had lost their boats and equipment. In the town of Nagapattinam, 185 miles south of Chennai, there was widespread destruction.
The next morning Allwyn and his companions went to the Chennai First Branch meetinghouse to help with a service project organized by the two branches in the city. Overnight, the Church had sent truckloads of supplies from a town nearly four hundred miles away. For the next two days, the missionaries and members assembled and sorted relief kits containing clothing, bedding, hygiene items, and eating utensils.
On Tuesday, December 28, Allwyn and his companions met with President Bonham, their mission president. Since the tsunami hit, Latter-day Saints in India had gone to work distributing Church-provided goods among the victims. After loading trucks with hundreds of hygiene kits and other supplies, the missionaries traveled with President Bonham to deliver them to an Indian Red Cross station.
At the station, the man who greeted them recognized their name tags. “Oh, you’re from the Church,” he said. “What did you bring?”
They replied that they had lanterns, hygiene kits, and several tons of clothes. The official was thrilled with the donations and told them to drive the trucks into the facility.
Inside they found people crowding around huge piles of clothing. Workers wearing masks and gloves sorted through the piles, making sure the clothes were clean and in good condition. People from different religions and organizations were also dropping off supplies, and Allwyn and the other missionaries spent several hours unloading the trucks and moving the supplies to where they were needed.
As he looked at the people from different groups, Allwyn was struck by how they all worked together out of love for their neighbor.
“There are good people everywhere,” he thought.
In May 2005, Emma Acosta and her boyfriend, Hector David Hernandez, had been dating for six months. She was nineteen years old, and he had recently returned from a mission to Guatemala City. They were deeply in love and had begun talking about marriage. But in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where they lived, young men and women usually did not marry until after they had dated for a few years and completed their university studies.
Emma had recently enrolled at a public university, and she was determined to earn her degree. One year earlier, at the Church’s general Young Women meeting, President Hinckley had urged young women to take their studies seriously. “Get all of the education that you possibly can,” he’d said. “Training is the key to opportunity.”
Hector David also planned to attend university. He and Emma knew that many married students dropped out of school because of the financial responsibilities that came with marriage and raising families. Still, they felt prompted by the Spirit not to put off marriage.
One day, Emma told Hector David about a ward temple trip to the Guatemala City Temple. She had never been to the temple before and wanted to go.
“Why don’t we go together and ask the Lord what He wants from this relationship?” Hector David suggested. Over the years, Church leaders had urged young people to seek the Lord’s guidance on questions of courtship and marriage. Emma and Hector David did not need to go to the house of the Lord to receive personal revelation, but it was a holy place where they could feel close to Him and His Spirit as they sought guidance.
Guatemala City was a fourteen-hour journey from Tegucigalpa. On their first morning at the temple, Emma and Hector David performed baptisms for the dead. When Emma stepped out of the dressing room, she found Hector David waiting for her by the baptismal font, dressed in white. As he baptized her, she received a personal witness that she should marry him.
Later, after Hector David finished an endowment session, he joined Emma in a garden on the temple grounds. He took her hand and hugged her. He too had received an answer. “I feel that the Lord is going to be with us,” he said. “He is going to give us the strength for any situation that comes from here on.”
A few weeks later, Emma was working at her family’s grocery store when she received a call from Hector David. He told her that he had just spoken to her father about marrying her. The conversation had not gone well. Her father was a Latter-day Saint, but he had not been to church in a while. He did not understand why Emma wanted to get married already.
After the phone call, Emma saw her father enter the store, his face serious. He congratulated her on her engagement, but it was clear he was disappointed. He was worried that she would not finish her degree.
“If you plan to get married, you’d better look for a job,” he said. “I don’t want you to come to work here anymore.”
Unsure where to go for work, Emma went to the Church’s employment resource center in Tegucigalpa. Opened in 2002, it was one of hundreds set up around the world to help Saints find better employment. The instructors at the center were local returned missionaries. They talked to her about the Perpetual Education Fund, which President Hinckley had unveiled in 2001, but for the time being she was not interested in taking out a loan for school. They also gave her tips on how to interview for a job and helped her create a résumé. Equipped with these skills, she soon found work at a bank.
As her wedding day approached, Emma felt discouraged. Although her father had agreed to help pay for the wedding, he and other relatives were vocal about their opposition to the marriage.
Their disapproval weighed heavily on Emma. One day, she knelt alone in her living room to pray. “This is what you asked us to do,” she told Heavenly Father. “I’m trying to be obedient.”
Suddenly, the story of the Savior walking on water came into her mind. She remembered how Peter tried to go to Jesus, only to sink when he became afraid. Like Peter, Emma also felt like she was drowning.
But then a feeling of peace came over her. “Daughter, you are concentrating on the storm,” the voice of the Lord told her. “I just need you to see me. Focus on me, on what I have already put in your heart.”
She felt as if the Lord was taking her hand, just as He had taken Peter’s.
In late September 2005, Angela Peterson had been hard at work all month getting ready for a visit from a high-ranking public official from the Middle East. As part of her new job at an international and government relations firm in Washington, DC, she was sometimes asked to plan walking tours, dinners, and cultural events for important visitors.
When the official arrived, he and Angela talked, and they found they had several things in common. They had both been raised in rural areas, and both prized family and faith. The official did not drink alcohol because of his Muslim beliefs, and he was impressed that Angela did not drink either.
Angela had planned plenty of events for the official’s stay, but after several days, he said, “I think I’ve seen all of Washington now! Is there something else you could show me, perhaps something different?”
An image flashed through Angela’s mind: the Washington DC Temple. She hesitated, wondering if it would be appropriate to take him to a place that was sacred to her. Still, the image of the temple wouldn’t leave her mind.
“There is actually one place that I haven’t shown you,” she told him. “It’s the most important place to me in Washington, DC.”
The official enthusiastically agreed to go, and Angela started making arrangements. She called the director of the temple visitors’ center, Elder Jess L. Christensen, who offered to close the building for a few hours to give the official a private tour.
The next day, Angela picked up the official and drove him along a beautiful, winding parkway to the temple. During the nearly hour-long drive, he asked her question after question about the Church, and she felt thoughts and words coming to her with complete clarity. He listened closely and seemed interested in the First Vision, the Book of Mormon, modern-day prophets, the Church’s global humanitarian work, and the law of tithing.
By the time Angela rounded the final bend of the parkway, it was evening, and the house of the Lord shone brightly in the setting sun. As they crossed the temple grounds, the Christus statue in the visitors’ center was plainly visible. Elder Christensen conducted the tour, which featured a display of the Book of Mormon in many translations, including the official’s native Arabic.
At the end of the tour, Elder Christensen played a video of President Hinckley testifying about the importance of families. Beside the television screen was a framed copy of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” The official read it silently and nodded.
“This is what I believe,” he said. “This is what my people believe.”
On the drive back to the city, the official told Angela he was impressed with the Church’s emphasis on family, and he was happy to know of another faith that valued families as his own did. On the final day of his visit to Washington, Angela gave him a copy of the proclamation.
“I wanted to give you something that I think would be meaningful to the people of your country,” she explained.