Labors in the Vineyard: Twelfth Book of the Faith-Promoting Series. Designed for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-Day Saints. — John Shaqi
Labors in the Vineyard: Twelfth Book of the Faith-Promoting Series. Designed for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-Day Saints.Various
Religion
Labors in the Vineyard: Twelfth Book of the Faith-Promoting Series. Designed for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-Day Saints.
Various
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- Missions
During the time the cholera raged in England, in 1852, I never entered
a house where it was, or administered to a person who had it but what
it instantly left. One rainy night I was called to go and visit a lady
who had been taken with this terrible disease. It was mid-night when
I reached the house and was met at the door with the statement that
two doctors had just left who said that the afflicted one must die. I
entered the room, walked to the bedside and commanded the person in the
name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the Priesthood to rise
up sound and whole. In fifteen minutes she was eating supper and she
sang several songs before I left.
I wish here to bear testimony of the kindness, obedience and love of
the Saints at the Norwich conference. They were like my children and I
was their father. In their poverty they gave to me liberally, and what
I received I spent freely in helping the poor and the sick, and for the
work of God. Up to the time they presented me with means to return home
I had not saved five shillings. After my return home, the first two
hundred and seventy-five dollars I obtained I took to President Young
with the request that he send it to the poorest of the poor of Norwich
conference. He remarked as he took it, "Brother Spencer, you are the
first returned missionary that ever did the like."
Brother Neslen, who is now usually called "Father Neslen," was
president of the Lowestoft branch during my presidency of the Norwich
conference. He was in good circumstances and had a nice house, but
during my first visits to the branch he never invited me to his house,
and after late meetings used to take me away quite a distance to sleep.
On one of my visits, as we were walking on the "Esplanade," I turned to
him and said, "Brother Neslen, you may think it rather strange manners,
but I feel impressed to ask you the reason why you never invite me to
your house?" He replied that none of his family belonged to the Church
and he was afraid if he did my feelings would be hurt. (His family
consisted of a wife and nine children.)
I turned to him and said, "Brother Neslen, you are president of this
branch, and as foreign as it may be to Gentile manners I must do my
duty. I want you to invite me to your house; if you do so I promise you
in the name of the Lord that every one of your family shall embrace the
gospel, and everyone shall live to go to Zion; if you do not, and have
not faith to stand up in your place as the head of your own family you
are not fit to stand as president of the branch; and more than that,
you will apostatize and none of you be saved in the kingdom of God."
The next time I visited Lowestoft he took me to his home: his wife was
kind as a mother in her treatment and in a few months the ten souls
where baptized and all lived to reach Zion in safety.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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