Vai's View: Finding one's way through faith

Bryan didn't serve a mission and had never had a church calling until the bishop asked him to teach the teacher's quorum on Sundays. He had played in packed stadiums from Laramie to Lincoln but standing in front of teenage boys was more nerve-wracking than he expected. So, whenever Temecia was in town on a Saturday, he asked her if he could practice his lessons on her. She listened and asked questions, sometimes even stumping him. They spent their Saturday nights poring over the teacher's manual, scriptures and lesson ideas so Bryan could feel confident teaching kids who knew the material inside-out.

Temecia occasionally stayed with us in our guest room. Sometimes, she'd be accompanied by her little boy, 4-year-old Rogan. Bryan and Temecia were frequent dinner guests — especially on Sundays — which led to wonderful discussions about faith and religion. We learned Temecia grew up in a small central-Pennsylvania town where she and her family were church-going, evangelical Christians. Like many young adults, her church attendance waned when she left home for college, continuing into marriage. Her relationship with Bryan elicited questions she had long harbored but never found adequate answers for. This past spring, we invited the Elders to teach Temecia the missionary discussions in our home.

Temecia is a college-educated woman with a management job, so we should not have been surprised that she always read more than the simple reading assignments given her by the Elders from the Book of Mormon. Yet she pleasantly surprised us. She consistently read four or five chapters more than she was given, sometimes reading it twice for comprehension. Temecia typically started lessons with a list of questions from her reading. Elders Corey Daley of Forrestville, Calif., and Paul Bezas from Twin Falls, Idaho, learned to come prepared for the unexpected.

Among the many questions Temecia had was, "Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?" All four of her missionaries, Elders Daley, Bezas, then Elders Steven Anderson of Apple Valley, Calif., and Stephan Phelps of Orem, Utah, offered some wonderful thoughts, scriptures and I even weighed in with some ideas. To no avail. Nothing satisfied that particular question.

Then, while watching October General Conference with us in our home, Elder Robert Hales of the Twelve opened his remarks by saying, "I have often pondered, Why is it that the Son of God and His holy prophets and all the faithful Saints have trials and tribulations, even when they are trying to do Heavenly Father's will? Why is it so hard, especially for them?" Temecia turned to look at me and I just smiled and shrugged my shoulders at her. As she listened, her eyes moistened and I sensed her question was being answered in a very personal way, by an Apostle speaking from Salt Lake City to millions world-wide.

I counseled Temecia that her many questions about the Church, the gospel and life in general won't all be answered in one fell swoop. I told her I grew up in the Church and I still have unanswered questions. By now she was familiar with the story of the Brother of Jared so I used that to illustrate my point. The Lord answered some things about their trans-Atlantic trip in the eight barges — make a hole at the bottom and top and use plugs; only open the top for air for obvious reasons and you can't use fire or have windows for light. The Lord left the lighting problem to the Brother of Jared, given those parameters. He came up with the idea of 16 stones that the Lord would touch and illuminate the darkened barges, presumably two per barge.

This is just how my mind works, but I always wondered how in such close quarters, how they dealt with toilet facilities? To me, that would've been important in small, submarine-like barges because of the threat of cholera or other sanitary diseases, to say nothing of privacy.

In the end — no pun intended — I think those issues were solved using ingenuity or other methods, but they must've figured something out because they did arrive in the New World.

I suggested to Temecia that my own personal questions, like hers, will be answered along the way, in time, with patience, as we seek to improve, just as the Jaredites travel-related issues were thousands of years ago. Sometimes it comes while listening to a General Conference talk, as we did that day, or from scripture study, or an experience or during deep contemplation.

So many of our conversations with Temecia led to enlightened moments like this.

As their relationship deepened, Bryan took Temecia to Orem to meet his family, her first time in Utah. They hiked Timpanogos, ate lunch with Elder Larry W. Gibbons of the Seventy and spent a day touring Temple Square.