One night I was heading home. It was late and I had been having a good day so I felt like I could go. I started to drive out of downtown to the west on 4th south when I got a call. It was to a restaurant worker over on the east side on Highland Drive halfway down the valley. The debate raged. I have developed a policy of not taking any calls that take over 11 minutes of drive time to arrive. Because of fuel costs and the small amount of money I received for that ride it doesn’t make financial sense. This usually happens late at night when all the other drivers have knocked off and that lets you know when it’s time for you to go home. If you have to drive over 11 minutes, everybody else already went home and you should too. This was one such call.
He was a young man with long hair and he was locking up the joint. We started to chat and he talked about how he had left his former employer to come and work for a friend. To me it didn’t seem like a great career path move but I admired his loyalty to his friend. I started feeling right then that we were going to be talking about the church.
His previous employer was a soda pop distribution company and we talked about how cheap it was to buy soda when you work for the company. I know this because my cousin worked for one. My passenger said he had lots of soda stockpiled but he wasn’t sure how good it was for you. He said that he poured some on his sidewalk and it stained it. He wondered how good that could be in your body. I knew I had an opening right here to talk about the church. I said, for sure you wouldn’t want to drink alcohol or beer? He said that he’ll have a couple here and there but that not drinking was something that he should consider. I talked to him about how important it was to keep your body in good shape and not bring bad things into it.
This led me to a discussion about a young man that I picked up two nights before who is the subject of another story. I had taken this young man and his girlfriend downtown to a hotel and then brought them back to their hotels. These two had gone to purchase drugs. I didn’t see it, I didn’t know it for sure but the spirit told me what was going on and by the end of the ride I was able to help the young man and I’m still in contact with him.
I talked to him about how God will put people in my car so that I can help them like I did that kid. I told him that everyone has different needs and God knows what those needs are and that night at that time he needed that young men rescued from the situation.
When I said this he kind of got his back up a little bit, he said before you do missionary work you need to realize that you need to do missionary work on yourself. This was a bit combative and was his take off of the “don’t tell ME what to do if you’re doing anything wrong” thing people used to justify the fact that they’re not doing the right thing. This is the way they assuage their guilt by saying “well they have no right to talk to me because they’re not perfect either”.
I told him that he was 100% correct, I said that no one agrees with that more than me. I said that everyone has faults and that we all need to repent and get better all the time. I told him that our prophet says we need to repent every day. I told him that God uses people to help other people even though they’re imperfect and sometimes he puts people in my car and I can help them through his power.
He told me the story of his family and how they were very active in the church but then they went through a rough patch. About ten years ago their dad lost his job and his dad, mom and now he himself had started to drink. They quit going to church 10 years ago and now didn’t even really consider the church anymore. I told him I could relate to the stress of losing your job because that happened to me just now but I told him that in thisI had seen the hand of God as he lifted me. I told him that the reality is I think that we’ve been blessed because we paid our tithing among other things even though it was difficult.
I told him that it’s all about how you react to it. I mentioned Elder Bednar’s Character of Christ talk. In that talk he discusses how Christ always turned out and fought the temptations, the impulse to focus on himself and his personal comfort and standing. He chose instead to turn out and bless others, even when things were the darkest he sought to comfort and bless others.
I told him that one of the things I felt promoted by the spirit to do after I lost my job was to turn out and tried to help others. I told him that this is how my experiences in the car like the one two nights before happen. In sharing the gospel I am able to turn out instead of focusing inward, feel the spirit, help other people and be a better person. Even though I am not perfect God has worked through me and I want to keep doing it.
He asked me how I could buy that, “there’s only one true church”. He said that he believed that there were only two things, good and evil. He said that therefore all churches that teach of Jesus are true and good. I told him I couldn’t disagree totally with that but that there were a couple of things that he needed to consider. We discussed authority and we discussed baptism. I asked him if it was important for people to be baptized. He said yes everyone needs to be baptized. I asked him if it was important that it be done by someone who has God’s permission to do that. He was quiet. I said that’s the difference.
I’ve then described to him the analogy of the church of Christ when he was on the earth as a mirror hanging on the wall with 12 pegs holding it solid. Those pegs were the apostles. Once they were all killed, that church that everyone loved so much, that was perfect and was organized by Christ fell to the ground and crashed into hundreds of pieces like a mirror would. I told him that the people loved the church and they loved the teachings of Christ and they came swooping in to grab up pieces of that mirror. They then took the pieces they grabbed, that they loved and although incomplete or not the total picture, reformed it into a functional mirror.
I told him that’s what happened in religion to the church of Christ. People grabbed onto teachings and reformed their churches around those truths. Those truths still exist as truth but those people don’t have the full truth. They don’t have the authority which was one of those pieces they missed. I told him that baptisms for the dead was proof of this. A perfect father in heaven had a perfect plan to save all of his children if they would be saved, no matter where they were born or when they were born and it was part of that mirror. That was a piece that nobody picked up. It is an important piece because it proves that God loves everyone everywhere that was ever born. It shows the perfection of god’s plan.
I told him that this is why it was so important for Joseph Smith, when he went to the Sacred Grove and God the father and Jesus Christ appeared to him so that they could restore the whole church, the whole mirror, and not just reform it out of the shattered pieces of teachings. He said, wow! When I did baptisms for the dead as a deacon I had no idea how important that was.
I told him that God called Joseph Smith to restore the church and all of its teachings. He said that this was amazing.
Sometimes the spirit comes in powerfully and abruptly. But other times it simmers and builds to a crescendo. This was one of those times. By now we were feeling the spirit, And it was very strong. I felt like as long as the spirit was going to bless us with his presence we should identify it and I asked him what he was feeling physically and emotionally at that moment. He said that he was feeling enlightenment and peace. He said it felt very familiar and good.
I told him that this is how he feels in the presence of God and this is how he feels when truth is revealed to him. I asked him what God was trying to tell him with the presence of his spirit. He told me he was trying to tell me that the things we were discussing were true. I testified of that. I told him that there were two reasons why it felt familiar. The first reason was that he ad felt it in the church and in his family when he was young. I told him that the second reason why it felt familiar was because his spirit remembered that feeling from being in the presence of God in the pre-existence. I told him that his spirit craved this feeling and that his spirit couldn’t get enough of this feeling. That’s why it feels familiar, because it feels like home with our heavenly father.
By this time we were done with the ride. We have been sitting in front of his house for five minutes and it was 3:30 am. He wasn’t budging. I felt impressed to point that out to him so I did. I said, so when you feel the spirit like this it makes you not wanna leave doesn’t it. You have no desire to get out of my car because of what you’re feeling. He said yes! He was excited and you could tell he was engaged in what he was going through.
I asked him what this meant to him for his future. He said, well I guess I need to go to church. I said that would be a good start. If you go to church you’ll feel the spirit just like you do in my car and it will give you a weekly lift. I asked him if he would go to church this Sunday, he said yes! I asked him what time he went to church and he said 7 AM. I told him I didn’t think that’s when he went to church. I looked up his ward on the meetinghouse locator and found that they meet at 11 AM. It had the address, time, the bishops name and phone number. I took a screenshot of that and I texted it to him so he could have it.
I asked him if he was going to go to church this week and he said yes! He said that his family needs to feel this spirit and do this too. I told him that he needs to lead his family back and he said yes.
I told him about deciding to come and pick him up at night. I told him how I nearly didn’t come and he told me that I was the third driver. The others had rejected him. I told him that there were no such thing as coincidences and he agreed. This was clearly a prearranged meeting that was presided over and conducted by the Holy Ghost.
Finally after sitting in front of his house for about 15 minutes and talking along with my fair share of yawning, I told him that I had to go but we would keep in touch. I told him to go inside and pray. I told him he could take that spirit with him if he would. I told him that if he would read the Book of Mormon he would feel the presence of God and know that it’s true. I told him if he would do these things he could have God with him always. He was very happy with that thought and seemed to develop a resolve to do this thing. He got out of the car and started towards the house and I drove off.
10 minutes later I received a text thanking me for the lift
Sometimes when we have struggles in life and it’s too much for us to bear God will send us a lift. It might not be right away but it will be the perfect time because God‘s time is always the perfect time. Now it is this young man’s time to come back and bring his family. He knows that and I trust that he’ll do it. He knows that God will be there with a lift when necessary.
Sometimes God sends you a lift 