I picked up a girl one Thursday night in Salt Lake City in front of the temple by the City Creek shopping center. I was taking her out to West Valley so it was going to be a little bit of a ride maybe 15 or 20 minutes.
We started to go when I asked her what she did for a living and she said she worked with events. I said that’s really cool I work with events too but a little bit different. She’s a party planner I do meetings, conventions and incentives. Shameless plug here if you need help with a meeting, convention or incentive please let me know!
Right off the bat I got the impression that she hadn’t prayed in a long time and that her Heavenly Father really wanted her to pray.
I talked to her about how we are a corporate travel agency but Covid had chased away 99.3% of our business and it hadn’t let up much. We had to lay everybody off and then it was a really rough time and she concurred but the party industry had certainly rebounded quicker than the corporate travel scene. I told her that I speak Spanish and she though that would be very helpful. She asked how I learned it and I said I learned it on my mission in Argentina.
She said her brother had served a mission in Paraguay and that he had gone through Argentina to get there. We talked a little bit about that. She had two brothers that had served missions and one of them was going to BYU right now with his brand new wife.
She asked me if it was a big adjustment moving from corporate travel to Uber and I told her that is was. I told her it was scary and that there was a lot of pressure. I told her about God protecting me during drives and how I called upon God and know that he sent angels who protected me. She said wow.
We then started talking about her family and then I mentioned to her that I had served in the MTC and that I would’ve been there the same time her brother was there.
I had the prompting to talk about Elder Bednar‘s Character of Christ film. We would show Character of Christ to the missionaries in their first week at the MTC. The film, Character of Christ talks about how the character of Christ is to turn out in service and love to others instead of turning inward to satisfy your own needs and desires. Christ never turned in, he always turned out even when he was being tempted. It was interesting as Elder Bednar points out that the temptations of Christ were all for him to turn in and deny who he was by turning in instead of turning out.
I mentioned to her that when I first started driving when the pandemic happened and we had to lay everybody off I was focusing inward and really struggling and the spirit told me to remember the character of Christ and that I should start turning out instead of turning in. I told her that’s why I’m here today.
I told her that Heavenly Father has blessed me with opportunities to turn out and that he puts people in my car and I am given the opportunity to share the gospel, sometimes members and sometimes non-members. As I said those words the spirit told me she was one of these people. It was a very clear prompting and her face was kind of lit up in the backseat.
I talked to her about how a lot of people struggle because they don’t use the atonement of Christ as they should. I told her that God gives people free will and some people use it poorly. I told her that when those people use their free will poorly we have to make a choice to turn to Jesus and turn out or turn to Satan and turn in and become angry and disaffected.
I told her that in choosing to be angry or hurt instead of accessing the atonement people don’t even realize that they’re rejecting the atonement of Jesus Christ but they are certainly missing the blessing it would be to their life.
What I heard in the backseat was crying. She was crying quite loudly and sobbing profoundly. I said this has been your issue hasn’t it? She said yes! how did you know? I talked to her about how the Holy Ghost will whisper to our hearts when God wants us to say or do something. I told her that I had received a prompting that she was in trouble. I received the prompting that she was slipping and that I had this message for her, that her father in heaven wanted her back.
I told her I received a prompting that she had been offended and that she felt like everybody was judging her and it made her angry and that’s why she had left the church.
She told me that she had left the church when she was 17 years old and hadn’t been back in nine years.
We talked about how even though Satan whispers in her ears that everybody is judging her and everybody is looking at her the truth is that nobody has time to focus on her. For the most part people live in their own little world and they don’t turn out like they should.
I also told her that the good news that they’re not judging her as much as she thought they were could also be accompanied by other good news. If we believe in not judging people for their sins, we should understand that as much as we don’t want them to judge us for our sins we shouldn’t be judging them for their sin either. Judging others is their sin. The same intolerance they exhibit that makes us angry is the sin we need to be tolerant of.
She said that’s beautiful I’ve never understood that. The spirit whispered to me that she had never understood how the spirit works and it never really felt like she had a confirmation of the gospel. As luck would have it the spirit of God like a fire was burning in the backseat. The power we felt was incredible. I asked her to tell me what she felt and she said she felt peace and power and warmth and love. I told her that this was the spirit of God and that when she felt it, she knew that the things she was hearing are true. I told her that the things I was saying were true and so that spirit was testifying of that.
She said, wow that’s cool. I said no one has ever identified the spirit to you like that, have they? She said no. I told her that when people have this and feel the spirit, it becomes like a homing beacon. They can follow it and it brings them to God. It brings them home to their father. I said, as much as you love your family, you need to understand that this is all about family. Your father in heaven is your father and for thousands of years that relationship was the most central relationship in your existence and it felt like this for you.
I told her, no one else in the world could tell her what the spirit felt like and that it was between her and her father. She said yes this is awesome.
I asked her if she had a Book of Mormon and she said yeah she still had the quad she received when she was baptized in 2004. I said you need to read that book. She said this is where we start running into problems. I said, you don’t know that that book is true? She said no and I’ve never really wanted to read it. I bore my testimony that I knew that right there in that moment she could feel by the spirit that the book of Mormon is the word of God and that would it would bring her closer to God If she would read it, it would bring the spirit that she was feeling there tonight into her life and she needed that. I said that this is what she had been missing. She started sobbing again and said OK I’ll read the Book of Mormon. I told her that God will bless her efforts because he knows that it’s hard for her.
I identified the spirit again and she recognized it. I pointed out that because of these feelings she knew the Book of Mormon and the church are true. She said yes and that this confirmation was something she had sought and not understood. Because of this she didn’t think that she had received her answer. She was excited to feel it and know.
I told her that she needed to think about what I said about turning out like Jesus Christ and let Christ carry her burdens so that she could feel the spirit to come back to the church. I told her that one of the first impressions I had when she got in the car was that she had not prayed in a long time. I asked her how long it had been since she prayed and she said that it had been since she was 17 when she left the church.
She said she had been feeling lately that she had a desire to pray but she didn’t how to start. I told her that sitting there in the car and feeling this she she knows 100% that her father in heaven wants to hear from her because she is his daughter and fathers love their daughters. I told her that right then she was thinking about other challenges and more things that her father and her brother Jesus Christ could help her with because they wanted to walk with her.
I asked her if she had anything she’d like to say and she said I told you four things about me and you told me everything about what’s in my heart and I know it’s God and I know he sent you here today. I’ve been getting signals lately and ignoring them but tonight God sent you. She said you are not easy to ignore.
I asked her if she was going to do the things we talked about, pray and read the scriptures. She said yes I will. I need the spirit in my life. I need this feeling that I’m feeling in this car tonight all of the time. She said laughing, can’t you tell we arrived 15 minutes ago and I’ve been sitting here for all that time and I don’t want to leave?
She thanked me and said I sure hope I get to ride with you again. So do I.
Sometimes God sends you a lift 