I knew that indeed Jesus did love me and I must love Him too.īy the third grade, I haltingly began going to the Community Bible Church with my sisters Barbara and Cherry, and really enjoyed it. As he stood up again with tears he looked into my eyes and said, “Jesus Christ loves you and so do I.” I was totally convicted in my soul and instantly gave up being a bully. He got up off the ground and calmly said “Jesus Christ loves you and so do I.” So I pushed him down much harder. Once, during recess, when I was in second grade, a Seventh Day Adventist boy came around a corner of a building and ran into me and I shoved him down.

Brennan, in 1982, said that there must be a “ wall of separation” between Church and State.

This was before the ACLU and Supreme Court Justice Wm. That was the first I’d ever heard of the scriptures, for we had none in our home, and I believed everything she said. Then, in the first grade, a lady from a local Evangelical church came weekly to our public school with a flannel board and told Bible stories. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” While my mother was an agnostic she encouraged me to kneel down beside her rocking chair each night and pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. My second oldest brother, Bob, told me that there was a God in a heaven and that everything was going to be alright. I was crying one night after a funeral because I was afraid to die. How easy? Being passionate about the visual fine arts, when the missionaries showed me a Book of Mormon, all I had to do was look at its illustrations by Arnold Friberg and I instantly knew the book was true! My conversion story started when I was a very young child of four or five years. Unlike closet doubters, agnostics, unbelievers, and atheists that I have known, my faith in Jesus Christ and his Gospel plan always come easy for me. As Louis Pasteur cogently said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” While a Seventy and Branch Mission Leader in Auburn, Alabama, I saw that it took several preparatory events or crises before anyone was really ‘ready’ for the restored gospel in their lives. Spiritual preparation led to spiritual growth, which in turn led to spiritual opportunities of which I could then take advantage. Like most people, my conversion story and testimony came in bits and pieces, finally welding themselves into believing faith.

When Professor Daniel Peterson of the BYU Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages asked me to share my testimony from a scholar’s perspective, I was very pleased because I’ve never shared it in this manner before.

Mind song by Donna Swanson