A missionary love story

It was 1946 and Thayle Nielsen was

just home two months from the European front, a major in the U. S. Army, 27

years old, and already a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and anti-aircraft

service in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Germany.His patriarchal

blessing had promised he would marry someone the Lord would find for

him, and he had just found her and fallen in love. Then the bishop approached

him about serving a mission and he was afraid to say no to the Lord's

call. Thayle had just met 18-year-old Renee Johnson at Utah

State Agricultural College. \"He fell hard,\" she recalls, \"and I did too.\" They

had had eight dates in three weeks, and on the night before he left for the

Mission Home with a call to Brazil, he told Renee, \"If you're around in 2 1/2

years, maybe we could get together.\" It was a hard thing. He would spend two

months in Houston awaiting a visa before sailing to South America. Once in Sao Paulo, Elder Nielsen served as the mission secretary. His mission president,

Harold M. Rex, who was not much older than Elder Nielsen, understood the

difficulty of the not-so-young elder's circumstances and came to support Elder

Nielsen's appeal to the church missionary committee for a very unusual request.

The committee said no to the request, but a persistent Elder Nielsen and

President Rex sent a letter to President David O. McKay, who agreed with the elder and signed a letter calling Renee Johnson to the Brazilian Mission. Renee was 19 when she went to the mission home, and then by train to

New Orleans, where she spent two weeks waiting for a visa. She and another

missionary sailed 10 days on the SS Del Monte, a freighter with 19 passengers to Santos, Brazil, where her favorite missionary found

them at the bus station. The plan approved by President McKay was that