Power in the book

One time I was working with language missionaries in Orem. I was helping a struggling branch establish missionary work. I went door to door in their branch, house to house. I asked the people questions with regards to their membership or activity. Many had been baptized before in other places and we had no idea who they were.

I Along with this re-gathering of lost sheep, we were also trying to become friends with those who had not yet been baptized. We were trying to get a feel for their level of preparation to receive the gospel.

I was knocking doors in a 4 plex and came to the bottom right door. I knocked and the lady answered. I told her who I was and that I was trying to get to know them. She emphatically said that she had no interest. She said that she hated the church. I was a bit taken aback but I said that if there was ever anything we could do for her to let us know. I thought that might provide a graceful exit. Upon hearing this she said, ” I have something for you to do”. She said that her husband couldn’t read and that if we could teach him to read, he might be Interested in what we had to say.

Later that day I met her husband. He was a friendly, hard working and humble man. He had lived a crazy life over the years as a taxi driver in Mexicali with all that this entailed including multiple affairs and frequent law breaking, etc. let’s just say it wasn’t a very holy existence. He said that now he was ready to take his life in a different direction.

We set reading appointments with him to meet three times a week, Mondays- Wednesdays – Fridays from 7-9 pm. This is when I and my Aaronic priesthood age sons would go meet with him.

We started by teaching him vowels, consonants and the sounds they make. We then started to read the Book of Mormon. This is how we taught our kids to read.

We would read the Book of Mormon while this man followed along. When we got to a one letter word like “y” which is “and” in Spanish he would read it. He soon moved on to 2 letter words like “yo” and “tu”, then 3 letter words etc. Finally after three months of this he was reading everything. One day he stopped reading, picked up the Book of Mormon and said ” I have taken reading classes from professional teachers more than 20 times trying to learn to read. They all told me that I would never read. They said that I was handicapped and not capable of learning to read.

Then you show up with no teaching experience and I can read! He said, I want you to know that it isn’t because of you. You don’t even know what you’re doing. He held up the Book of Mormon and started shaking it toward me and said, I want you to know that there is a power in this book. He continued to shake it and said, there is a power in this book that has unlocked my capacity to learn and made it so that I can read. He shook the book at me again and said “there is a power in this book” and I want to be baptized. I was good with that! Three weeks later he was baptized and I was good with that.

About a month later we were getting him ready to go to the temple to do baptisms for his father and grandfather plus have his aunt and mother baptized. He had done their family history work and was ready to go.

He was worried about baptizing them because his aunt and father were very strict Catholics. They had made him promise on their death beds to continue the family tradition of taking flowers to the cathedral every week and putting them at the feet of the virgin. Because of this he was torn and worried about following through with their vicarious work.

The day we were going to go to the temple he had an accident at work that required emergency surgery. They asked me to give him a blessing and off he went. When he got out of the hospital he was fired up to go to the temple to do the work. He said that he had a vision of his father and aunt dressed in white in a field full of flowers asking him to do their temple work and not to worry about the flowers any longer. He went to the temple the following week and took care of them.

As a new member, he did everything he could to become part of the branch. This was important to him as he had always been active in church. As a kid at his parents request he had always participated in church every Sunday. He brought that level of devotion with him and it was a wonderful thing to see.

He wanted to do home teaching and really tried to care for his people. If there were other people that didn’t do their home teaching, he would ask them if he could do it for them. He was all in.

The other side of this was that he was still a very uneducated and socially unskilled person. He hadn’t been through a refinement process in his life and it was certainly in work in progress. He paid his tithing much to the angst and chagrin of his wife. It made her so mad but he did it anyway.

He went to the temple to do baptisms for the dead often which made him very happy. What he wanted more than anything was to have his wife get baptized and join the church but the closer he got to the church the more antagonistic she became.

She was hateful, abusive and dismissive. She treated me well because I had done some things to help the family but that was about it. With regards to members of the church receiving any kind of olive branch from her it was not happening.

Finally, he’d been a member of the church for a year. He had passed the sacrament and became an elder. He wanted to go to the temple.

I want to make sure that this next portion is not read as being critical of leadership in his wards. They are some great men who I admire and consider friends. I know that they have a lot on their plate and are trying to do the best they can and somehow God finds a way to provide.

In his church classes, people would talk about the blessing of the temple and he wanted those blessings. He went in and talked to his branch president about this and his branch president said that he would not allow him to go to the temple because of his wife’s antagonistic behaviors. His heart was broken. He saw that there were a lot of women whose husbands weren’t members of the church that had been allowed to go to the temple and couldn’t figure out why he was different.

He thought about it for a few weeks and then changed wards. He moved his family four blocks east into another ward boundary and attended for a year doing all the things he had done before hoping to get the chance to go to the temple and take out his endowment. After a year, he went to the Bishop and asked if he had proved himself. The bishop said, I don’t feel good about this because of how hateful your wife is towards the church. He was stunned. He called me crying. He felt like they were treating him as if he were a second class citizen. We met and discussed a plan.

I called every Spanish-speaking Bishop or branch president in Utah County (there are many) and laid out the situation out warts and all. I asked each of them if they would be willing to help him go to the temple. Finally, in American Fork the branch president said yes! He said he would love to help him go to the temple. He said that he had to move into his ward and attend for another year. He said that if he would do that and be faithful and worthy, he would get him ready and let him go to the temple.

He moved his family to American Fork and encouraged by the branch president, he doubled down on his efforts and testimony. At the one year mark he went to the temple and took out his endowment.

The reason why I included this last part is because to me it’s very instructive. Why was he able to withstand all of the abuse and bigotry he perceived from people who he loved? It’s because of the power in the book. The power in the book that taught him to read was the power that changed his soul. It was the power that made him strong enough to withstand the kind of negative interactions that normally would chase a new member of the church away.

It was the power in the book that gave him the strength he needed.. Since that day his life has changed. His wife divorced him because she wasn’t going to be with a Mormon. With her endless mocking and abuse behind him he set his sights on his real goal. He met a woman in the ward, fell in love and they’ve been sealed in the temple. It all happened because of the power in that book. When our testimony is built on that revelation, it can withstand hell and deliver us to heaven, that’s his story.