On the second night after Rylee Arnold learned she has Type 1 diabetes, she laid in a hospital bed and cried. She was 15, frightened and unsure how she was going to live with the diagnosis. So she prayed.
It was not something she had done particularly well before. Prayer and scripture study hadn’t been a regular part of her life, Arnold, a Utah native and three-time “Dancing With the Stars” pro, said in a recent video for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But that night, she recalled praying “with the most intent that I’ve ever had.”
“Genuinely just asking, how do I get through this? How do I find comfort in this news? How do I grow from this?” Arnold said. “I said that prayer, and immediately after, I had a still, small voice tell me that everything was going to be okay.”
“I remember just feeling the relief,” she continued. “I found a really positive perspective, and I know that was coming from Heavenly Father.”
Arnold said she has experienced that same kind of divine intervention in other moments of her life, too.
One night, Arnold went to bed without her continuous glucose monitor, unaware that she wasn’t wearing it. She woke up to an alarm and, assuming it meant her blood sugar was low, immediately began eating a snack.
It was then that she realized her glucose monitor was not actually on. A finger prick showed her blood sugar was 42 — a dangerously low level.
“In that moment, I knew that Heavenly Father was definitely telling me to wake up, to go and eat some snacks, because if I wouldn’t have, I probably would have died that night,” Arnold said. “It’s just little moments like that where I’ve seen so many miracles in my life.”
“There’s just been so many times where he has saved me. ... No matter what you are going through, Heavenly Father knows you and he loves you, and he’s giving that to you for a reason,” she continued. “He wants you to grow, and push past that trial.”
“There are some things that are so hard to get through. You’re gonna be so grateful that you went through that trial because it’s gonna give you something that no one else has. Our trials are there for a reason, and they are absolutely there to help us grow.”
Arnold joined the cast of “Dancing With the Stars” as a pro in 2023. A Provo, Utah native, she trained at Orem’s Center Stage Performing Arts, a studio that has also trained several other “Dancing With the Stars” pros, including Derek and Julianne Hough, Witney Carson, Lindsay Arnold and Ezra Sosa.
She has competed on the series with partners including reality television star Harry Jowsey, Olympic gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik and Pentatonix member Scott Hoying.
Since joining the hit competition series, Arnold has gained a much larger audience, but her faith continues to play guiding role in her life.
In a previous interview with the podcast “Weekly Trash,” Arnold said she “prayed all the time” and continued to “live the values” of her faith while competing on the series.
“Throughout the whole entire season, it was like, ‘Rylee, you’re so happy and you’re so fun, how are you like one of the nicest people? ... What is this light that I just see?’” Arnold recalled. “It’s Christ. That’s just genuinely what it is and that’s something that is so important to me and something I just always want to portray.”