Stake Conference Talk

Highlight from talk - Be the Miracle 
Brother Taylor Stockwell / Cloverhill Ward

   
          The opening line from the book “Be the Miracle” by Regina Brett goes like this:
“There’s an old saying, `if you think you’re too small to make a difference, think of a mosquito in a tent.’”

I want to tell you a story about a miracle.

  President Ricardo Aban is the Stake President of the Philippines Tacloban Stake. At the end of my trip, we visited his home, still standing and in relatively good condition. A few weeks earlier, on one of my first days in the Philippines, he told me a story that I could hardly believe and that I will never forget. President Aban has a makeshift storage closet below the stairs of his home leading to the second floor. It is here that he keeps some of his most precious Stake papers and documents. Just prior to the storm, the Stake Patriarch had delivered many of the most recent Patriarchial Blessing transcripts, which were to be sent to Salt Lake City for permanent recording. These were the only records of the sacred blessing.

The storm hit before those papers could be sent. With the storm came massive flooding caused by the storm surge. As soon as the surge subsided, one of the first things President Aban did was to race home to check the Patriarchial Blessings. After worrying about them all night, he opened the storage closet and out poured buckets of trapped flood water. The entire stack of papers were soaked and disintegrating. With a heavy heart, President Aban carefully leafed through the papers starting from the bottom of the stack. They were all damaged or destroyed. At last, he came to the blessings. He said a silent prayer and opened the binder. To his amazement, the stack of sacred blessings were perfectly dry. He flipped through page after page of dry papers. After saying a prayer of gratitude, he checked the papers that were above the blessings, thinking the water only came up to the blessings and stopped there. To his surprise, those papers were also damaged and destroyed. Those sacred blessings were the only dry papers in the entire stack of documents and folders.

We count such events as these, miracles of a kind, loving God who moves his purposes forward.