Testimony came at young age
President Henry B. Eyring has known since he was a boy that the church was true. He often speaks of the day he was sitting in a hotel ballroom in New Jersey listening to the speakers at a district conference.
"I was sitting on a folding chair somewhere near the back, next to my mother. I must have been very young because I can remember putting my legs through the back of the chair and sitting aft instead of forward. But then I remember hearing something — a man's voice from the pulpit. I turned around and looked. I still remember that the speaker was at a rostrum set on wooden risers. There was a tall window behind him. He was the priesthood visitor. I don't know who he was, but he was tall and bald, and he seemed very old to me.
He must have been talking about the Savior or the Prophet Joseph, or both, because that was all that I remember much of hearing in those days. But as he spoke, I knew that what he said came from God and that it was true, and it burned in my heart. That was before scholars told me how hard it was to know. I just knew of certainty — I knew it was true. And when I listened to Bishop Hales yesterday, I knew that what he was saying was from God and that it was true, and then the fear left."
Ensign, May 1985
Church held at home
"Before World War II our branch met in a hotel. My memories of Sunday School classes are of rented hotel rooms, where we sat on the bed. During the war, from the time I was eight until I was twelve or thirteen, church was held in our home because gas was rationed. Mother was the pianist and the chorister. Father was the branch president. The dining room table was both the speakers' rostrum and the sacrament table. Usually about ten to twelve people would attend. To me, the Church couldn't have been more lovely. The relationships I felt at church in my home are what I want to have again with Heavenly Father."
Friend, April 1986
Building self-reliance
"I was at home, thinking my priests quorum work was done for the day. The phone rang. It was the bishop. He asked if I would go with him … to visit a poor widow who needed help. I jumped in the car when he came by, nervous about the unknown, but interested to see how a bishop helped the poor.
"I didn't see any food in the car. And my surprise grew when we drove down a dirt lane, in what I thought was a vacant lot, and pulled up in front of a house with no paint and a broken sofa on the sagging wooden porch. We were invited into the dark living room by a woman in a faded and soiled dress. We sat at a table. … The bishop began by asking, 'Now, where is that budget form I gave you to fill out last week?' Then, for what seemed an hour, (the bishop) worked that woman through a budget, a plan to repair her house, and a commitment to change her habits. …
"We drove off in silence, the puzzled priest and the thoughtful bishop. He pulled into the driveway of my house. … He asked me what I thought of what I'd seen. I told him honestly that I had always thought helping the poor meant giving them something, not asking them to do something. And then he opened his scriptures and a black notebook and taught me something he called, 'the welfare principle.' He talked about building self-reliance and told me how to help people develop it."
New Era, June 1986
Exercising faith unto repentance
"If I had the chance to teach one thing, it would be what it means and how it feels to exercise faith in Jesus Christ unto repentance.
"To do it I would try to take the person I loved on a journey from when we were with a loving Father in Heaven to when we can go home to him again. We would see the fall of Adam and Eve and feel its effects on us. We would go to Bethlehem and rejoice at the birth of the Son of God, and to the Garden and to Golgotha as our hearts break at the transcendent gift of the Atonement. And we would go to the open tomb, and to Galilee, and to this hemisphere to feel hope in keeping the commandments of the Risen Lord. Then, we would go to a grove in New York to watch the boy Joseph Smith talk with God the Father and his resurrected Son, to begin the errand that restored the ordinances of the gospel, which can lead us home again."
Ensign, November 1986
Preparing for God's trust
"I pray that we will take the great opportunity God has given us to prepare ourselves. He has trusted us as watchmen of the souls of his children. He has given us a way to look forward to the fruit of the gospel by giving us a calling that requires our whole hearts. As the boy's dreams of kicking the winning goal draw him back to persistent practice with that ball, so our vision of the fruits of the gospel will draw us back to persistent repentance and prayer and study and service."
"I pray that the Lord may say of us, as Alma said of his son Shiblon: 'And now, my son, I trust that I shall have great joy in you, because of your steadiness and your faithfulness unto God; for as you have commenced in your youth to look to the Lord your God, even so I hope that you will continue in keeping his commandments; for blessed is he that endureth to the end'" (Alma 38:2).
Ensign, May 1988
Spending time wisely
"Time is a property we inherit from God — along with the power to choose what we will do with it. It is an inheritance so great that we should feel that it is our 'capital' to invest just as we would invest a financial inheritance.
"As you know, there is more than one way to spend time foolishly. We may sleep it away or play it away. But the real problem comes later after the idleness and the thoughtless seeking for thrills.
"For example, when you choose to see or hear that which is degrading, you may at first feel you have used up only time. However, if you persist in your choice, you will find that, in addition to time wasted, you have allowed Satan to draw you toward sin and then into it. And then you will have built up debts far beyond the time spent — debts that will burden and detract from every minute of existence that follows. The only way to relieve that burden is to find the healing balm of the Atonement of Jesus Christ through repentance, which takes effort — and time.
"Over the years, I've come to understand something that happened to me as a teenager. I was in a hurry to get somewhere one day when I felt, not heard, a voice, which I knew then was from God. It was the thought: 'Someday, when you know who you really are, you will be sorry that you didn't use your time better.' It didn't make much sense to me then … because I considered I was using my time well and I thought I knew who I was. Now, years later, I am really beginning to know who I am — and who you are — and why we will be so sorry if we do not invest our time well."
Liahona, August 1989
Remembering our duty to the Lord
"There were many challenges Orderville faced in the 10 years they lived the order there. One of them they never really conquered. It was the problem of not remembering. That is a problem we must solve, too.
"Just as they forgot poverty on the Muddy, we so easily forget that we came into life with nothing. Whatever we get soon seems our natural right, not a gift. And we forget the giver. Then our gaze shifts from what we have been given to what we don't have yet.
"God has used one method over and over to help with that problem of remembering. A group of people in the Book of Mormon record lost their flocks, their herds, and their fields of grain. Some lost their lives. And then the survivors remembered. In Alma it says: 'And so great were their afflictions that every soul had cause to mourn; and they believed that it was the judgments of God sent upon them because of their wickedness and their abominations; therefore they were awakened to a remembrance of their duty' (Alma 4:3).
"The Holy Ghost brings back memories of what God has taught us. And one of the ways God teaches us is with his blessings; and so, if we choose to exercise faith, the Holy Ghost will bring God's kindnesses to our remembrance."
Ensign, November 1989