Another elder entered the mission just after I arrived in San Antonio. He came from a large family. The father found that he needed to pick up a part-time job to help support his son. This was not quite enough, and so the sweet mother went to work in the school lunch program so that she could be home when her children were home. Even with this additional money, the elder fell a little further behind each month. A choice friend occasionally gives me several $100 bills to share where they are needed. When I interviewed this elder, I asked him how he was doing financially. His eyes clouded up, and he said was really trying, but his folks weren’t sending him quite enough. He said, “President, I haven’t been wasting. I haven’t eaten anything for three days, trying to cut back.” Then he said, “Even my little sister is helping. She received a one-dollar bill for her birthday, and she put it in an envelope and sent it to me because she thought I needed it more than she did.” Then he wept openly. I reached into my shirt pocket, and extracted two crisp $100 bills, and said, “A choice friend of mine asked me to give these to you.” He put his head down in his hands and was overcome.

Elder Daniel Gifford was promised in his patriarchal blessing that he would serve closely with a General Authority while he was on his mission. He wondered how this would be when he received his mission call to Texas, where the mission president had only served two or three months. While he was in the Missionary Training Center listening to the final session of October general conference, he heard President Tanner announce that the next speaker would be Elder Vaughn J. Featherstone, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy and newly called president of the Texas San Antonio Mission. When Elder Gifford was later called to be an assistant to the president, he shared his patriarchal blessing promise with us. Do you think he has any question about whose work this is?

One elder who was transferred from another mission wanted to go home. He knew his parents and bishop wanted him to stay and complete his mission. In one of the many interviews we had, he said that five previous elders in his ward had abandoned their missions and had returned home early. I thought what a great disservice the first elder did to the other young men who followed his poor example. I made a solemn vow that this elder would not go home until his mission was completed successfully. Every week for thirteen to fifteen weeks he would write in his letter to the president all the reasons he should be released from his mission. Each week I wrote a letter of response.

After all these weeks I received a letter which appeared the same as the others—until I got to the P.S. He said, “President, you are winning and you know it.” I sat in my office, and tears filled my eyes.

Vince Lombardi said, “The harder you fight for something, the harder it is to surrender.” This elder completed his mission as a great presiding zone leader. He has a great warmth and a great talent to teach; he loves and cares for people; and he is extremely spiritual. He returned home with an honorable release from a very successful mission, married a beautiful girl in the temple, and now they live near the temple where they visit regularly. This elder set a great example for all prospective missionaries from his ward.

Elder Sheffield has been under the knife eleven times in major surgery and many more times in surgery lasting less than an hour. The greatest desire of his life was that the surgery would make him acceptable for a mission. A year before he entered the mission field, he had his final operation. Since he has been on his mission, he has averaged seventy to eighty hours a week in proselyting. He is greatly loved by all.

He has been a great blessing to missionaries who thought they had problems. In one interview his companion told me that Elder Sheffield’s shoulder separates and falls out of place quite often. When this happens he is in severe pain. It happens most often during the night. When I interviewed Elder Sheffield, I suggested that we put him in a local hospital here and have the doctors do what needed to be done to correct this problem. He looked me in the eye, and with a sternness seldom seen he said, “President, I have spent most of my life in hospitals, and when I complete my mission I am returning to several more major surgical operations. I promised the Lord that if he would let me serve a mission, I would not spend one day in the hospital during the two years no matter how sick I was or how much I suffered.”

What are the blessings of a mission? “Can ye tell?” (Alma 26:2).

Maybe Brother and Sister William Keith Clark can. “Dear President Featherstone,” they wrote, “we were happy to receive your letter. I’m sure we love you already.” (Bless them, they didn’t even know me, and yet they could love me.) They continued: “We are not too young anymore. William Keith Clark is eighty-one years old. He has been a bishop’s counselor, a bishop, and a patriarch for thirty-one years. I, Ellen Clark, am seventy-six years of age. I have been a music director and a teacher in all the organizations of the Church, ward and stake. We have had an abundant life and love to teach the gospel. We have ten children, all married in the temple and working in the Church. We had our reunion recently—fifty-six grandchildren and twenty-six great-grandchildren! This is four missions for my husband and three for me. Our happiest moments are teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Every missionary is a story of love and sacrifice. I love them so much. Their great devotion to the cause, their love for the Lord, and their willingness to serve him, whose work this is, will bless their lives and their posterity forever.

You see, my beloved brothers and sisters, every soul should have the privilege of hearing about the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Those who respond to the call to be a missionary shall “not be weary in mind, neither darkened, neither in body, limb, nor joint; and a hair of [their] head[s] shall not fall to the ground unnoticed. And they shall not go hungry, neither athirst.” (D&C 84:80.)

We must seek out every soul and do it with the pure love of Christ.

We must not judge the people. We do not know who God has prepared, but we do know as the Prophet Joseph Smith stated: “The Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done” (History of the Church, 4:540).

God bless that all—all—who may be able to serve will make themselves available for a mission call. The blessings are sure, I know, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Ensign, Nov 1978, p. 26