Elder Enrique R. Falabella

Of the Seventy

Elder Enrique Rienzi Falabella Arellano believes nothing is more valuable than a personal testimony of Jesus Christ and how the Atonement can affect one’s life.

Elder Falabella learned early that gaining a testimony begins with a desire to know the truth and a willingness to live it.

Born on May 9, 1950, to Udine and Leonor Falabella, Elder Falabella was 12 when missionaries knocked on his family’s door in Guatemala City, where he was born and raised. The oldest of four children whose mother had died several years earlier, Elder Falabella recognized that there was something different about the missionaries. He saw it in the love they showed and the power with which they taught.

“I wanted to know what they knew,” he recalls. That desire and his willingness to do what the missionaries asked led to his conversion.

“Very early on I learned to appreciate the Savior’s words: ‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself’ (John 7:17). If we will live gospel principles, the Spirit can touch our hearts, and we will learn that they are really true.”

After he served in the Central America Mission, he and his wife, Blanca Lidia Sanchez, were sealed on June 21, 1975, in the Mesa Arizona Temple. Elder Falabella earned a degree in agronomy from the University of San Carlos in Guatemala and later studied marketing at the University of Costa Rica. He worked for a chemical and pharmaceutical company prior to his call to serve full-time for the Church.

As his and his wife’s five children grew, Elder Falabella served as stake mission president, bishop, regional representative, stake president, and Area Seventy, serving as President of the Central America Area for two years. He was serving as a branch president at the Missionary Training Center in Guatemala City at the time of his call to the First Quorum of the Seventy.