President Henry B. Eyring was recently called to serve as counselor to a fourth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He’s well known to Latter-day Saints, having served in the First Presidency since October 2007. Yet through interviews, decades of journal entries, general conference addresses and more than 1,000 small-scale watercolor paintings, President Eyring — nicknamed “Hal” — is also know as a man who, like most, has been “proved” by the Lord, time and time again.
“Long ago I sought to learn physics and mathematics in my college years,” the 92-year-old apostle said in his most recent general conference address.
“I felt overwhelmed,” he continued, adding that “the more I felt overwhelmed, the less I felt the strength to keep trying.”
Still, he demonstrated faith.
“As I prayed, I felt the quiet assurance of the Lord,” he said. “I felt Him say to my mind, ‘I am proving you, but I am also with you.’”
President Eyring has learned that striving to align his will with God’s has opened the door to heaven’s blessings.
“I’ve had a lifetime of having a feeling like, ‘If things are tough, find out what the Lord wants, line yourself up with that,’” the apostle said in a Church News podcast interview conducted by Sarah Jane Weaver in 2023.
“Every time that I got a little nudge to do something the Lord would have me do, then he seemed to take care of everything that was over my capacity.”
President Eyring’s love for art and capturing tender memories
It was a beach day in 1979 when President Eyring first picked up a brush to blend water and pigment, and put it on paper.
He had just hurt his back surfing in Hawaii, so he bought a set of water colors to entertain himself. They were “my first paints,” he said in 2018 as he toured a temporary exhibit of his paintings in the Church History Museum. “And I painted as I waited in a van, watching the boys surf.”
His first painting was of that beach. From then on, President Eyring began using his watercolors to augment his written journal, which he has kept daily for nearly six decades.
Art is “a search,” he told the Church News in 2023. It is a search for inspiration, but also a search for a feeling or a memory he yearns to capture.
“These paintings are not a message so much as a memory, something to take me or the people I love back to a time, a sweet time," President Eyring said in 2018. “I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m a guy who likes art and memories.”
Of the more than 1,000 small-scale watercolor paintings President Eyring has created since 1979, most are tied to memories or feelings associated with his now-late wife, Sister Kathleen Johnson Eyring.
In fact, the 2018 exhibit’s art curator, Laura Allred Hurtado, said that of all his paintings, roughly 40% are ocean and sailing scenes. And President Eyring explained that each is tied to his wife.
“I’m in a boat phase right now,” the apostle said in 2018. “That’s again because I sailed with Kathy, (and) the ones I’m doing now are not memories so much as general feelings of what it was like on sailboats with Kathy.”
President Eyring’s wife had lost much of her memory in her later years. Thus, the apostle’s paintings represented efforts to capture memories with her, both past and present, and strengthen his hope in what the afterlife would look like for them together.
“I don’t know if there will be boats over there, don’t get me wrong,” he said, laughing, in 2018. But he expressed hope that through their covenants and temple sealing, he could relive these feelings with her.
“That’s why it’s a little emotional to look at it because it’s memories, but it’s also the hope that the kinds of feelings you had in these things can go on again.”
What President Eyring has learned from a lifetime of service
From the time he was baptized at 8 years old, President Eyring has understood the weight of his covenant responsibilities, he told the Church News in 2023.
In fact, riding home from his baptism, President Eyring said he stood in the back seat of his parents’ ’37 Ford and thought to himself: “Uh oh, the free ride is over.”
“I knew that baptism was real. But essentially, it had the effect of saying, ‘Now you better be careful, because now you are responsible.’”
This early understanding of his covenant responsibilities later translated into a great sense of humility and a willingness to accept any assignment to serve the Lord — including as president of Ricks College (now BYU–Idaho), church commissioner of education, General Authority Seventy, member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and counselor to four church presidents.
“Hal, you have a great mind and a gift for perceiving risks,” President Eyring recalled Elder Neal A. Maxwell telling him just weeks before the late apostle died of cancer in 2004.
“But if you’re going to reach your full potential to contribute in the kingdom, you’re going to have to become as good at seeing possibilities as you are at seeing pitfalls. We need you to be a problem solver, not just a problem spotter.”
President Eyring recorded and reflected on this counsel in a journal entry that was later published in his biography, which was co-authored by his son Henry J. Eyring and Robert J. Eaton.
In the biography, the authors noted President Eyring could have objected, saying he had been a problem solver in all of his previous experiences. Instead, they wrote, President Eyring chose to take Elder Maxwell’s counsel to heart.
“Trained as I was, at the Harvard Business School and around the dinner table at my home,” President Eyring said in a quote included in his biography, “I almost always shot holes in things — not trying to destroy, but to identify imperfections.”
Serving as an apostle for now more than three decades, President Eyring said he’s found joy seeing the “remarkable” faith of the “average Latter-day Saint” and learned that “prophets of God really do get revelation.”
“God is real,” he said. “He is loving. He answers prayers. He talks through his prophets and the Holy Ghost, when you have not even asked. He is sending messages all the time. … Jesus is the Christ.”