A STORY ABOUT CHARITY

From the book entitled Discourses of President Gordon B. Hinckley, page 409 we read:

This boy, Normand, grew up in …southern Utah – he and his brother. (WWII) came along and they decided to join the service. They told the recruiting officer that they wanted to stay together as brothers throughout all of their time in the service. They were put in a tough outfit. They traveled through the battles of the Pacific. Both of them were on the initial landing barges that came into Leyte Gulf and landed there when the American forces came back to the Philippines.

They came in under terrible fire and they were climbing up a hill when a Japanese shell hit his brother, and pierced his spine. Normand held his dying brother in his arms and wept. There came into his heart a great bitterness, an intense hatred for those who had killed his brother and so many others. He vowed that he would fight with great viciousness if it meant that…He passed through the war and came home lonely and embittered.

He was called on a mission-I think to the Central States-and something happened to him. He became acquainted with the Savior. He read the New Testament. He read the Book of Mormon. He prayed. He brought those elements into his life. A great spirit of love (and charity) filled him. The hatred of the past disappeared. He became a changed man. He came home after honorably filling a mission and married a girl from that area. He got 80 acres of sage-covered ground, cleared it and planted it and became a very successful grower of alfalfa.

He cubed that alfalfa and there was a big market for it in Japan. He shipped it to Japan. Subsequently, the head man of the company that bought it in Japan invited him to come to Japan. They had established a relationship and he decided he would go, so he and his wife went. They were treated royally, beyond anything they could have imagined from those who had been his former enemies.

While he was in Japan, he decided to go back down to the Philippines. He did so and went down to Manila and from there down into the jungle where his brother had been killed. While there, they were met by a few of the native people who were very friendly. He struck up a correspondence with a woman, they wrote back and forth. He said, “I’m going to send you a book that will change your life if you will read it and pray about it.” So he sent the Book of Mormon.

This family read it and was converted to its truth; they were touched in their hearts. They went up to Tacloban, the nearest branch, 40 miles away through the jungle and became acquainted with the Church. Eventually they joined the Church. They established a little branch down in Jaro, on the Leyte Gulf. Normand went back there again ten years later and found this branch. He listened to the people and felt their spirit. I was curious when Normand died as to whether that branch was still functioning.

I had my secretary send an email to the Area President and we had a reply that indicated that this little branch has 165 members, that they have about 30 Melchizedek Priesthood holders, 95 percent of whom are active. There have been 14 missionaries go out from that branch, including five who are out today (2002). Now that is the fruit of the kind of work in which we are engaged. How wonderful and beautiful it is.