"How Do People Live Without God in the World?"

That's the question my friend and employer, Gaylon Ball, asked me one day when we were driving around on the many errands we had to run to maintain his 28 acres of ground. I assured him that I didn't know. Certainly I can't imagine living without God in this world. I fear for those who have not yet confronted their own mortality and the important questions of this life.

What comfort does one find in knowing all about the building blocks of the universe but not knowing why it exists? What satisfaction is there in knowing people - working and playing alongside them, teaching and being taught by them, arguing and thinking and studying and loving and striving with them - if we don't know why they are here, where we all came from, and where we are going after this brief, bitter life?

Joseph Smith taught us that the witness of the Spirit is more powerful than the witness of our eyes! Think of that! We believe that an eye witness statement is as sure as testimony can get. It holds great sway in the courts, unless, of course, some clever attorney can convince others that we didn't see what we saw. But there are some things that we know at a level that is even more basic than that of our physical senses.

I recall teaching a family in the city of Monza back in 1972. As the discussion progressed, the Holy Ghost came into the room. You know Him, right? That third member of the Godhead whose job it is to testify to our hearts and minds of what is true and to comfort us when no other source of comfort will suffice. The Spirit came into that Monzese apartment, I say, and it was as if we could have communicated without speech. I felt that I was not quite in contact with my own body, my suit, or the chair in which I sat. I knew that my companion and the young couple we were teaching felt the same way. It was common knowledge among us, commonly received and commonly held.

I felt that same Spirit after my mission when, nearly eleven months into constant dating and working at unimportant little jobs, I was almost crazy with desire to know where I was supposed to go and what I was supposed to do when I got there. My first companion, a friend from Ricks before my mission, Michael Hall, was now a married man. He had married lovely Martha. He called me one night to tell me how excited he was about the fact that he was about to go to Texas for Air Force basic training. I smiled to myself. "That's fine for you, buddy," I thought to myself, "but I promised myself long ago that I'd never go through basic military training." Getting shot at might be bad, but I could imagine no scenario worse than having someone shout in my face when I could do nothing about it. And that was the way basic military training had always been represented to me in films and by word of mouth. No way would I ever do that.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the Spirit contacted me even as Michael Hall continued to wax rhapsodic about all the opportunities he'd receive in the United States Air Force. The Spirit told me that I had nothing to fear from those things I had always feared. The program that Mike was describing to me was the answer to all the fasting and praying I had been doing for weeks and months. I was calm in the knowledge. I was overjoyed. After we said goodbye, I put down my old red table-top model phone and walked down the hall to my parents room, glowing with happiness that I finally knew what I was supposed to do. I told them. I didn't ask them. I told them about my experience and what I was going to do. If they had doubts, the never expressed them. I think He contacted them, too.

That doesn't mean that the Lord dispatched the Holy Ghost to tell me everything. There were still lots of questions. For instance, the recruiter and I thought I'd go through the Russian Language program at the Army's Presidio of Monterey, one of the oldest military establishments on the continent. But that's not what I learned in Monterey. I washed out of the Russian language program. I lost all interest in it, especially after I found the main thing I'd been sent there to find. Shayne. My eternal sweetheart. She who would be the mother of my children. Russian, even with its Cyrillic alphabet, wasn't all that hard to learn. But when I realized that I was being trained to sit there with a headset on for several hours per day monitoring radio traffic and writing down what I heard, something in me said, "No way! Call me ungrateful and uncooperative, but I just can't make myself cooperate in condemning myself to such a life." And sure enough, a U.S. Army Major who was raised as a Russian strongly implied that I was those negative things. He gave me the opportunity to fall back a few weeks to an earlier class and continue to study. But that wasn't what I wanted to do any more. I didn't really care what I did except to spend time with Shayne. And so he let me go and a few days later I got orders to George AFB, CA, 7 1/2 hours south in the Mojave Desert where the temperature can reach 115 degrees in the shade and there is no shade.

I destroyed my little car, a 1968 Volvo Model 1800S, in my constant trips up the coast and back to stay in touch with Shayne. And finally we were married in the Salt Lake Temple. I felt the Spirit powerfully again at the births of my children. The day we brought Hyrum home from the hospital, I rocked him all alone for several hours, never moving from the chair and making no move to lighten the room when it got dark outside. We just stayed there together for hours. And at the end of those hours I knew that, no matter what he did or became, I would always feel great love for him. And I have.

The next really powerful spiritual revelation I had was in 1983, as I was doing my student teaching at a junior high in Boise. I had been miserable in trying everything from Air Force clerk to potato warehouse worker to bank teller (before the service) to county jailer. I had no real aptitude for any of these things. But neither did I want to be a teacher. I didn't really like teenagers when I was in my early thirties. The idea of being confined with thirty or more of them at a time, all day long, for 9 months out of every year, sounded pretty horrible to me. But I went through with the required "education" courses just the same, because I could think of nothing else to do with my Bachelor's degree in History. This was a 60 credit major with no minor. History I was beginning to know. Other stuff, not so much, as today's saying goes.

About two, maybe three weeks into my 9 weeks of student teaching, Mr. Thomas, my cooperating teacher, told me that the cooperating professor from Boise State, Zeph Foster, was going to watch me for a whole hour with some seventh grade geography students. By this time I was nearing 33 and still didn't know what I was good for. I'd been a missionary for two years, a bum for a year, and a member of USAF for six years. But what was I made to do? I still didn't have a clue.

On the day that Prof. Foster came, Mr. Thomas introduced the class, maybe took roll, or maybe not; I can't recall. Then he turned the time over to me. I started explaining things about the lesson to the kids. I just relaxed and dumped my load, employing not only what the manual for the class said I should teach but a lot of stuff I'd just picked up in three decades of reading and asking questions and listening and observing. A couple of minutes before the bell, I turned the class back over to Mr. Thomas. Zeph Foster, a big old Saint Bernard of a guy, hooked a finger at me to follow him into the hallway. Well, I thought, here it comes. I've never been any good at anything and now I'll get to add to that list.

The hallway was very quiet after we closed the door behind us. He stared at me (down at me) for a long time. It was evident that he had something weighty that he wanted to say. I steeled myself for what it might be. But still I had to wait. He just kept looking into my eyes, almost as if he hadn't seen a specimen like me before. (I should be used to that my now. Lots of people look at me like that. And who can blame them?)

He lowered his chin a little as he began to speak, but his eye contact with me was never broken. He said, "You are a natural-born teacher." He then went on to thrill and embarrass me for several minutes, telling me about everything that I had done and how it was all done right. He rhapsodized about some little behaviors, like my saying "Excuse me, did I miss a hand over here?" He went on and on and never once tempered all this praise with the slightest criticism. And as he spoke, it happened again. The Holy Ghost contacted me. Again, I was not quite touching the floor or my clothing. Again, I was receiving knowledge straight into my heart. This was the answer for which I'd searched since my teens. This was the answer to the question, "What am I?" Now I knew and would know for the rest of my life. I am a teacher.

He informs us of truth. He is therefore called The Spirit of Truth as well as the Holy Ghost. His third name is the Comforter.

I had seen death and known of death for years. But as my wife drew closer to death, I prayed more fervently than I'd ever prayed for anything that she would be spared. I knew that I couldn't live without her. Her presence meant happiness. Her presence meant security. Her presence meant love and home and peace. Her presence made the house a refuge from the cold, care-filled and confusing world. Surely my Heavenly Father wouldn't take her. If someone else were lost, it would be horrible, but I might have a chance of getting through it only because Shaynie was there. But to lose HER?! It was unthinkable. Between Christmas Day, when the oncologist called me to say that he couldn't save her, and New Years Day when I began to be resigned to it and to the destruction I was sure would befall me along with her loss, I prayed and wept more powerfully, usually in the car, than I had ever realized a human could do. I was given moments and hours of comfort. But the horror of what was happening kept coming back. I just couldn't face it. I knew that I had to keep praying so she wouldn't leave her body.

I knew the right words. "Thy will be done." But this was Shayne, the sweet and the precious. The companion of my heart. On the night of the first of January, 1992, she opened her eyes for a few seconds. "Jimmy, am I dying?" Still I couldn't face it. I lied, I guess. I said, "Honey, we don't know." I looked her in the eye when I said it. How could I do that? Maybe because I still had hope that she'd be spared. But when I said that, she nodded as if the answer was satisfactory, and immediately surrendered to sleep again.

The next morning, I went over to the high school office and caught them up on what was happening. Then I drove to Flamm Funeral Home and purchased a casket. I also made a few other choices, like the verse for the back of the program, the third verse of Lead, Kindly Light. But still, having done all this, I couldn't say the words. Finally, that evening, I whispered them in one of my seemingly constant prayers. Then two ladies from the Church came in and essentially said goodbye to her sleeping form. She was swollen in the middle, her liver being hugely distended with cancer. She had gone from a normal color a week before to being visibly jaundiced to being the color of a dark pumpkin. She whimpered in her sleep which was maintained by a morphine drip which had to be more than was legal but just right for morality. The two ladies left. A nurse came in and looked at her. She said it wouldn't be long now. I jogged down the hall to the nurse's station and borrowed their phone. I called Egin and got Jane. While I was explaining things to Jane, the nurse came out into the hall and said, "She's not breathing." I said goodbye and walked back into the room.

"Is this it, then?" Another nurse was using the back of her hand to feel for a pulse under her chin. She nodded. This was the moment. I waited a moment for my life to end, but it didn't happen. Instead, I was propped up by a substance that filled the room. It was the Holy Ghost again, this time in His capacity as The Comforter. And I was comforted. I breathed more easily. I looked at her and muttered something about her being "the finest person I've ever known." What a strange thing to say about your wife! I looked up into the corners of the ceiling, hoping to have enough spiritual vision to see Shaynie looking down at me as I'd heard others tell such stories, but I was a bit disappointed there. Her throat continued to make a clicking sound, opening and closing for breaths that weren't being drawn. That did get me to leave the room for a while and talk with Barbra Mann in the nurse's lounge. Still, I remained propped up then and for days thereafter until, finally, in His wisdom, the Lord pulled the Spirit back and let me feel it and experience it and be immersed in all the pain and the grief. But by then, He'd gotten me through the first shocks. Other shocks continued to come for years as I realized again and again that she was gone. Looking at photos of her even now can bring back the pain in my chest. But the Holy Ghost had worked a miracle I would never have thought anyone could accomplish. He had propped me up and held me in my body when my chief reason for living was taken away and I didn't want to live. No other accomplishment has ever amazed me more.