My Favorite Family Home Evening

Many years ago, my daughter and adopted son were still little children.
I was a newly divorced Dad and my nonmember ex-wife had moved over 450 miles away from me and took our children with her to Maryland.
Following the inspired counsel of my young Indianapolis area Bishop, I telephoned and wrote to my children every Monday night, and visited with them at least once a month - driving all night on Fridays to visit with them on Saturdays and then driving back home immediately thereafter.
But my favorite and most special "Family Home Evening" of all was a couple of years later, when my children and I took a special Saturday mini-vacation trip together to the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, New York.
It was chilly and rainy night, and, as I held my four year old daughter in my lap and my seven year old son shivered and huddled under my arm, I remember lamenting that what I had hoped to be a spiritual and fun feast for my children had become a miserable disaster.
Years later in 1991, however, my teenage daughter was helping me stake out the boundaries of a homestead that I had purchased in the West Virginia Eastern Panhandle.
I had moved to West Virginia in order to be closer to the home of my children, who now were living with their Mom in Southern Pennsylvania, close to the Maryland border.
It was then that my daughter said to me that the woods surrounding my home reminded her of the "Sacred Grove".
Since then, both my son David and daughter Sarah have joined the Church, and I have learned that Our Father in Heaven does answer the anxious and persistent prayers of an anxious and worried father.

The Best Testimony Ever

This morning, during the Fast & Testimony meeting of our Hedgesville, West Virginia Ward, a very young boy proudly stood up to the pulpit.
Standing beside his father, he then loudly declared, "Jesus Loves Everybody!".
He and his father immediately thereafter returned to their seats in the congregation.
It was the best testimony ever.