The Story Behind A Walk with the Master

As I mentioned earlier, I am a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The summer that I was 15, the missionaries came to our house. My mom let them in and listened to their message. She talked my dad into listening. Pretty soon, she wanted the whole family to participate in the missionary discussions. I wasn’t interested, but Mom said it was a family thing, and so I sat in, sort of on the periphery. 

The missionaries asked the whole family to start reading the Book of Mormon and pray about it. I didn’t touched it, and I certainly didn’t pray about it. 

In fact, the only time I remember praying in my whole life up to that point was when I was in third grade. I wanted God to give me the ability to fly like Peter Pan. One night, I prayed really hard that God would make me fly, and I promised if He did, I would do anything He wanted me to do. The next morning, gravity was still in force, and I didn’t sprout any wings, so I figured that was that. 

At the end of the second discussion, one of the missionaries asked me to say the closing prayer. He taught me the four steps, and then said, “Go ahead.” I felt totally self-conscious and embarrassed to say a prayer I didn’t mean to a God I didn’t believe in, in front of my family. I managed to mumble something and got it over with. I don’t think the missionaries were impressed.

But funny things started happening to me during the weeks and months that the missionaries came to our house. For instance, when they told me in the first discussion about a prophet in the 1800s, I envisioned an old man wearing a cowboy hat, riding a horse, holding a six-shooter in one hand and the reins in the other, and a long white beard flowing out behind him as he galloped across the plains spouting prophecy. That was my idea of a frontier prophet. The next time they came, however, they showed me a picture of the young Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees. And I thought, “Huh, there’s a kid my age talking to God. I think, if anybody could talk to God, it would be a boy like that.” Joseph Smith became a real person to me. 

Another example. In one of the discussions, the missionaries taught us that God had a body like a human. And I thought, “Nah, if there is a god, he would have to be a giant cloud of energy like would show up sometimes in the Star Trek TV show.” I dismissed the idea of a god of flesh and bones. But a few days later, I was riding in the car with my mom, and this weird thought came into my head that if God created people in His image, He must look like a human. It just made sense. I suddenly believed what the missionaries had said. 

And so it went with the other doctrines and principles the missionaries taught. I rejected each one at first but then found myself believing what the missionaries taught by the next time they came for another lesson. 

The missionaries invited us to attend a Sunday school meeting. I didn’t want to go, but my folks insisted we all had to go. I got there and found out that I knew most of the kids in my Sunday school class from regular school. Some of them I had gone to school with since kindergarten. I had no idea they were Mormons. But, I fit right in, and they were welcoming, and the Sunday school teacher was cool. So, I started going to church. 

Eventually, the missionaries challenged all of us to be baptized. I said okay, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. They set a date for my mom, and brother and sister, but I held off. My dad held off, too. He had a Word of Wisdom issue he hadn’t overcome yet, so he had a good reason. I didn’t have a good reason, I just didn’t want to do it. 

The evening arrived for my mom and siblings to be baptized. I went and watched. During that event, as I watched the rest of my family being baptized and confirmed, I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to be baptized, too. I kicked myself for postponing it. I talked to the missionaries right then and told them I was ready. We set a date for the following Saturday afternoon, and I was baptized by Elder Bloomfield and confirmed by Elder Hampton. 

I was now in the church, but I was a long way from being converted to Christ. I finally read the Book of Mormon. I accepted it as true, although I didn’t receive a witness from the Holy Ghost. I started to pray privately, but always silently, and not regularly. I became very involved with the youth group in my ward. When I was in high school, we had 120 teenagers on the roles, of which 80% were active.

I began attending early morning seminary. Diane Nelson was the teacher, and she was phenomenal. 

Shortly before my 19th birthday, I submitted my application to serve a two-year mission, because that was what all my friends were doing. I received my call to serve in Germany. My mission is a whole other story, but because of my mission, I received a steadfast testimony from the Holy Ghost of the Book of Mormon and the Prophet Joseph Smith. 

Somewhere behind all of this learning and growing and activity was a faint image of Jesus Christ. I knew intellectually that the Church of Jesus Christ was His church and He stood at the head of it. Christmas and Easter were sacred holidays because they celebrated Jesus’s birth and resurrection. People referred to Him as the Savior and the Redeemer in talks and lessons. But I didn’t get it. I didn’t need saving. I had been baptized to wash away all my past sins. I hadn’t committed any serious sins since my baptism. I hadn’t killed anyone, stolen anything, or cheated on a test. I was a good kid. What more did I need from Jesus? 

Fifteen years went by. I got married to the love of my life, graduated from BYU, found my career in computer programming, had three children, moved into a house that we thought would be our forever home in the very ward where I had joined the church and grew up. Life was hectic but good. I was active in church, serving in the bishopric, and raising my family. My wife had herniated two discs and had had back surgery, but she had recovered and was doing well. 

Things began to change, however, when Evelyn first was injured at work and went on short-term disability; and then two months later was injured in a car accident and graduated to long-term disability, which eventually turned into permanent disability. Depression set in on her. Around the same time, our adorable children became teenagers. Life shifted gears for us with an ear-splitting, grinding sound that set my teeth on edge. The world had become a serious place full of jagged edges, deep pits, and stormy clouds.

I prayed harder, read the scriptures daily, and served in my church callings, but bad stuff kept happening. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but I was in the equivalent of Lehi’s dream in the Book of Mormon of the lone and dreary waste, the wilderness of darkness. Lehi in his dream prayed for deliverance from the frightening darkness, and a man in a white robe appeared and beckoned Lehi to follow him. 

In my case, the man wore a business suit and spoke in a sacrament meeting. His name was Randy Jones. No one has ever heard of him. He was just an ordinary guy, no extraordinary callings in the church, not what I would consider a powerful teacher, and certainly not a spiritual giant from outward appearances. 

I remember clearly exactly where I was sitting with my family near the front of the chapel when Randy stood to deliver his talk. His topic was “Jesus Christ Is the Redeemer.” I don’t remember the words of his talk. I know he read some scriptures and quoted some general authorities. And he bore his testimony of Christ. But what I do remember, is that his talk changed me. Or rather, the Holy Ghost awakened something in me while Randy spoke. 

I began to think of Jesus not as the baby in the manger and the glowing, resurrected hero of the Easter story, but as a compassionate, loving, powerful Being who cared about me and wanted to help me. I felt the sore need of divine help, and I recognized that Jesus was offering to rescue me. Like the man in white who appeared in Lehi’s dream to show him the way out of the lone and dreary waste, Jesus appeared in my life to lead me through my own wilderness experience.

He was no longer a stick figure of history, a flat, one-dimensional character in the Bible. He was not just the Savior of the world, He was my Savior, my personal Redeemer. He knew me as an individual and not simply as a member of a group of church people. 

Now, this change in my perception of Jesus as my Savior and my need for daily redemption didn’t happen overnight. But I was definitely on a different track. 

At about the same time, I noticed a shift in the talks and teachings coming from the leading brethren of the Church. The name of Jesus Christ was featured more prominently in the Church’s logo. George Pace and Robert Millet gave devotional talks at BYU about the need for a personal relationship with the Savior. The focus began to shift away from the Great Apostasy of the Dark Ages, Joseph Smith, the Word of Wisdom, and food storage. The notion that we save ourselves by our obedience and good works began to soften. 

“Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling” took on a new interpretation. The word “grace” began to appear in General Conference talks. We had long quoted Nephi in the Book of Mormon, “We are saved by grace after all we can do.” We stopped pounding on the second phrase, “after all we can do” and started focusing on the first half of that verse, “We are saved by grace.” 

The Brethren started sounding like a bunch of evangelical protestants. They emphasized our need to get to know Jesus and lean on His grace. This was an important transformation in the way Latter-day Saints perceived the doctrine of Christ. Not because we were trying to win over the stubborn baptists and methodists, but because we were gaining a more balanced perspective. 

And interestingly, we were gaining this new perspective from the Book of Mormon and the words of the Prophet Joseph Smith. It turns out, the Book of Mormon is full of teachings about the role of Christ not just as the Savior of the world but as our individual Redeemer, Mediator, and Advocate. Grace is all over the place in the Book of Mormon. We simply weren’t focused on these things that had always been there. A wise man once said that the best kept secret in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the gospel.  

I want to make a clear distinction between my understanding of the role of Christ in my salvation and exaltation and the view of His role in mainstream Christianity and Evangelical Christianity in particular. My ulitmate goal is to return to my Heavenly Father, the Supreme Being and Creator in the universe, who snatched my intelligence from the emptyness of space and clothed me in a spirit body. When the Father had assembled His family, He called a grand council and put forth the plan of salvation. In this plan, we, His spirit children, could obtain physical bodies, undergo a series of tests of our faith and faithfulness in mortality, learn to repent, and then die a physical death. 

Given that we would all give into temptation and sin while on earth, it wasn’t a very promising plan until the Father introduced the promise of a Savior, who would have the power to pay the price of justice for all our mortal sins and who could bring about the resurrection of the dead. The Father chose His first-born son amoung His spirit children, Jehovah, to be that Savior. His mission would be to pay our debts, wash away our sins, change us from natural beings to disciples, and present us worthy to the Father in resurrected and perfected bodies.

For Jesus’s great sacrifice and preeminent role among mankind, He is to be honored and venerated above all others who have walked the face of the earth. I need Him. Without His atonement, I would be lost forever, cast off from God, and doomed to hell. Hallowed be His name for His power, grace, and mercy to enable me, as imperfect as I am, to stand before the Father with a clean slate, thanks entirely to what Jesus has done for me. 

Being with Jesus, kneeling in His presence, feeling the prints of the nails in His hands and feet, which he bore for me, is a marvelous goal worthy of a lifetime of effort. But it is not the end goal. Many obedient and well-meaning souls will enjoy the presence of the Savior as He ministers to them in the terrestrial kingdom.

My goal, however, is to be in the celestial kingdom, where I can dwell in the presence of the both the Father and the Son. Therefore, my goal to come to Jesus and hear Him is an intermediate step to the ultimate goal of having Him present me to the Father.

So, why did I write this book? When I was baptized, I made a covenant to stand as a witness of God “at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life.” I didn’t know at the time that was the covenant I made, but I know it now. And now that I am in my later years, when the event of death is not some shadowy possibility in the distant future, but a reality close at hand, I want to keep my covenant. 

I want the promise of the Father and the Son to redeem me. I want to share what I have learned and come to know is true. I am a worthless sinner, doomed to eternal destruction, except for the redemption of Jesus Christ. His atonement is a totally unfair bargain. He paid the whole price for my stupidity, and I get the whole benefit as if I had been as sinless and righteous as Jesus. I truly stand all amazed, and this book stands as my witness to my family, my children and grandchildren, and my posterity through all time that Jesus is the Christ, my Savior, my Redeemer, and my Friend. When I stand before the Father and the Son on the day of judgment, I will point to this book and say, “I did my best.”

#WalkWithTheMaster