A Truckload of Saints

From an interview with Elder Benjamín De Hoyos of the Seventy, currently serving in the South America North Area; by Melvin Leavitt, Church Magazines

“Thou shalt go to the house of prayer and offer up thy sacraments upon my holy day” (D&C 59:9).

I grew up in Monterrey, Mexico, in the state of Nuevo León. My parents were faithful Latter-day Saints, and I can’t remember a single time when we failed to attend church. When I was five or six years old, my father owned an old dump truck that he used to haul construction materials and garden soil. Each Sunday my sisters and I climbed up into the bed of that truck while my father and mother climbed into the cab. Then we drove to the home of my cousins, where their family climbed up to join us. Next we picked up the Gonzales family, then the Solanos family, and so on. By the time we arrived at the chapel, the dump truck was filled not with soil but with Saints.

Some people who lived nearby thought it was most entertaining to watch more than 20 men, women, and children in white shirts and ties or Sunday dresses come pouring out of a dusty dump truck. Neighbors came outside each Sunday just to enjoy the spectacle. They laughed at us, but we weren’t a bit embarrassed. We were happy to be going to church. We repeated that performance twice each Sunday all through the 1960s.

When the truck wasn’t available, my family walked. Even if it was raining or cold or sizzling hot, we walked just the same, though it took at least an hour going and an hour coming back. And in those days there were Church services in the morning and the afternoon. We always attended both.

When I returned to Monterrey after many years, every one of my fellow dump truck passengers was still active in the Church. That experience united us and made us strong. I still attend all my meetings. How can I do less now than I did then?

Children, go to your meetings. Go on foot. Go by car. Go in a dump truck. But go.

Illustration by Paul Mann

Photographs courtesy of Elder De Hoyos

Benjamín De Hoyos as a baby (middle row) with his family.

As a missionary.