Author Archives: Rebekah Richards

About Rebekah Richards

Born before the internet age, I recall reading my way through the set of encyclopedias in my parents home. In addition to non fiction, I also enjoy a good novel and love the written word. Music was a staple in my childhood home, I love to sing and often sing too loud. When I was 11 years old I went with my grandma and dad to visit Grandma's family in West Virginia where they had lived for generations. I fell in love with "my" people and have spent a lifetime learning their stories. I graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in History and am passionate about people and their stories, those who have paved the way for the life we live, those who impact our lives daily and those whose lives our decisions will affect. I am the sister to six wonderful siblings, the wife of my best friend and the mother to four very above average children. Most of all I find deep hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ and want to follow Him.

When I look at the Savior

For nearly fifty years, Elder M. Russell Ballard has served as a general authority in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  In August of 2013, he visited our stake conference.  During one of his talks, he stood at the pulpit, opened his scriptures, paused, and then shared that just like everyone else in the congregation, he had days when the demands of his life were overwhelming and he wondered if he could do it.  Then he pulled a small picture of the Savior from the pages of his scriptures, observed it for a moment and related that when he felt overwhelmed, he stopped, looked at the Savior and found the strength to continue. 

While I have forgotten the topic of the remainder of his talk, I have remembered his tender and personal witness that strength is gained when we “Look at the Savior.”  His life was a witness of the power of Jesus Christ in the lives of the children of God.  “Wherever you are in this world, may God bless you…I leave you my witness and testimony that I know that Jesus is the Christ.  He is our Savior, our Redeemer.  He is our best friend.” (President M. Russell Ballard, October 2023)

 

A Name

Twenty one years ago today, my husband and I gazed at the face of our newborn son and knew that the name we had intended to give him was not his name.  We didn’t have a backup name so that was the topic for the days following his birth.  We combed over our family trees, suggested our favorite people and places and were surprised to find ourselves coming back to a name we had not considered.  
 
Willard Richards is my husband’s fourth great grandfather.  We were newly engaged and at a Richards family event when someone asked great grandfather if he had anything to say.  He did.  In his deep, powerful voice, he said he wanted to bear his testimony and the testimony of his great grandfather, Willard Richards, that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, he translated the Book of Mormon and restored the Church of Jesus Christ and it was true.
 
At great grandfather’s funeral, President Gordon B. Hinckley gave this charge, “The greatest responsibility resting upon the posterity of Lynn Richards is fidelity to the testimony of their illustrious ancestor, Dr. Willard Richards, who was with the Prophet at Carthage Jail that sultry afternoon of June 27, 1844 when Dr. Richards offered to give his life in place of the Prophet.  His knowledge, his conviction, his certainty concerning the validity of the Prophet’s calling as a man of God, as a leader brought forth in this last dispensation was the hallmark of his life.  It guided everything which happened to him for the remainder of his life.  And he has passed that inheritance down to his family.” (June 1, 2001).  Though the name of Willard Richards carried so much weight and expectation, it seemed to us that this little boy wanted that name.  
 
There is another name far more illustrious that we are given, an inheritance passed to us from our Father.  “I would that ye should take upon you the name of Christ…And I would that ye should remember also, that this is the name that I said I should give unto you that never should be blotted out, except it be through transgression; therefore, take heed that ye do not transgress, that the name be not blotted out of your hearts” (Mosiah 5:8, 11).  

“Do we realize how blessed we are to take upon us the name of God’s Beloved and Only Begotten Son? Do we understand how significant that is? The Savior’s name is the only name under heaven by which man can be saved.”  (Elder M. Russell Ballard, October 2011). He wants to save us, reedem us, and enable us as we choose to be called by His name and carry it in our hearts.  

Send Me

Just days after my great grandfather, Lyman Holmes Rich, returned from serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Northwest States Mission, the United States of America declared war on Germany and entered WWI.  After a few months on his father’s ranch in Paris, Idaho, Lyman decided his place was in the service of his country.

Not waiting to be drafted, Lyman traveled to Salt Lake City and enlisted in the 145th Field Artillery at Fort Douglas.  He was sent to Camp Kearney, just outside of San Diego, California where his unit trained and trained and trained for almost a year before they received orders to travel to Camp Mills in New York to prepare to move overseas.   The soldiers were loaded onto a former Canadian mail ship, sailed for England with a naval convoy and after a few days in Liverpool, were transported to Le Havre, France.  

While the fighting raged in the northwest, Lyman’s unit was sent south, near Bordeaux, to train with French guns and artillery.  They completed their six week course on November 9, 1918 and were ordered to the Western Front to assist in the assault on the city of Metz.  The armistice that ended the fighting was signed two days later.  

Many were disappointed that they had spent so much time honing their skills and never had a chance to use them.  I believe their mothers, wives and families felt differently. Of the 1400 men serving in the 145th, thirteen were lost to influenza, the rest returned home.

The 145th Field Artillery put away their guns and began working at the docks near Bordeaux, unloading supplies from the United States and preparing for and assisting troops, those from the army hospital near Bordeaux and those from the front, embarking home.  On December 24th, the 145th  began their return, docking in New York on January 4, 1919.

The soldiers spent two weeks in New Jersey being “re-Americanized”.  They were deloused, all their clothing steamed to kill any germs that might have tagged along and cleared of illness.  After a year and a half in the army, Lyman was discharged in Logan, Utah. 

Three quarters of the men serving in the 145th were from Utah and in spite of a pandemic, they were met by large crowds.  Though they never fought a battle, Chaplain B.H. Roberts defined their service, “The heroism of the soldier consists in the fact that he offers his life to his country, with full interest to meet whatever fate may befall him….He does his part when in response to his country’s call for service he says, “Here am I, send me.”

Like He who first offered to stand in our defense, we gratefully honor those who have stood in our defense at home and abroad in any capacity.  

Perfect

Last week we watched our daughter play in a golf tournament at Stonebridge Golf Club in Rome, Georgia.  The ninth hole of the golf course is a par 5 where a water hazard protects a peninsula green.  After a layup drive, the shortest distance to the green is a direct carry over the water.  The yardage to the point of the peninsula is tempting.  Many of the golfers have carried the ball that distance before.  They have all seen it done and some have done it.  However, the water is also on both sides of the green so it leaves a very narrow window to place the perfect shot, a couple of yards to the left or right of the target leaves the ball in the water.  

There is another alternative that doesn’t require a perfect shot.  Instead of going straight for the green, there is a large landing area to the right of the green that requires two good shots to get to the green.  Both shots will have to carry a part of the water, but with more manageable distance and accuracy requirements.  As we watched, those who were able to exercise the restraint to take the longer route to the green found more opportunities for birdie than those who attempted the shot over the water.

We can often find ourselves zooming in on one perfect option, blinding us to other possibilities available to us. We may feel that only perfect shots will suffice but perhaps our good efforts may be more perfect than we think.  As a child, I remember my mother having “bad days” when she was not the mother or person she wanted to be.  Though I know those days were discouraging for her, with resolve and faith she tried again the next day.  

None of us are who we want to be all the time and as I grew and began to increasingly feel my own weakness, I realized that her efforts in striving and repenting and coming back to try again were the lessons I needed most.  While she wanted to be “perfect”, the best option for teaching me about the grace of Jesus Christ and how to grow myself came from her more imperfect days.

“Ours is not a religion of perfectionism but a religion of redemption- redemption through Jesus Christ.  If we are among the penitent, with His Atonement our sins are nailed to His cross and ‘with His stripes we are healed.’” (Elder D. Todd Christofferson, October 2021)  We don’t need to make perfect shots.  We don’t need perfect days.  We need striving, repenting and coming back to try again, relying on the grace and merits of our Savior.  We need to be redeemed.  That is His perfect plan.  

Ordinary Days

I am grateful for angels, those who walk among us as mortal angels strengthening and helping us and those who we cannot see but who love us nonetheless.  “From the beginning down through the dispensations, God has used angels as His emissaries in conveying love and concern for His children… In the course of life all of us spend time in ‘dark and dreary’ places, wildernesses, circumstances of sorrow or fear or discouragement… Even the Son of God, a God Himself had need for heavenly comfort during his sojourn in mortality…” (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, October 2008)

A few years ago on an early spring bike ride, a friend and I collided resulting in a broken left collarbone for me and a broken right collarbone for her, a matched pair.  Seven screws and a plate put it back together.  One night I awoke in pain.  I went to the bathroom for the prescription ibuprofen but soon found that it is very difficult to open “child proof” lids with one hand.  I didn’t want to wake anyone to open the bottle but didn’t know how to do it myself.  Then a faint memory came into my mind.

I was a little girl, sitting in my grandma’s kitchen.  Grandma had broken her arm and was showing me how she took the lid off the jam jar by sitting on a chair, holding it between her knees and twisting with her good arm.  I sat down, put the ibuprofen bottle between my knees and twisted with my good arm.  The lid came off, I got the ibuprofen and even more, I felt the love of my grandma and her nearness wash over me.  Her presence brought more peace perhaps than her help. There is no way as we sat in her kitchen so many years ago that she could have known that she was sharing wisdom that could be brought back to me in the middle of a dark night.  She was simply spending time with her granddaughter, making me a peanut butter sandwich, an ordinary moment, an ordinary day.
 
Life is full of ordinary moments, ordinary days and ordinary time spent with those we love and those we simply come in contact with who are unknown to us.  These moments, days, and time may not be as ordinary as we think.  For every kind word, listening ear, gentle touch, hopeful encouragement, meal served, heart lifted and need met, the love of God is conveyed to His children, the impact of which we may never know.  Your ordinary days are the days of  “emissaries sent from God”. 

Always in Heaven

Years ago, as residents of Farmington, we had the benefit of entering through the back gate of Lagoon free of charge.   We held our annual ward Pioneer Day breakfast there and enjoyed the evening entertainment on summer nights.  Now, however, decades later, I regularly use the walking trail that has been built on the exterior of the fence of Lagoon.  There is no back gate entrance and I would be hard pressed to identify the location of the old back gate or what it looked like exactly.  With the fragility of human memory, it seems as if it has always appeared as it does now.

A home in our neighborhood was bought last year and we have all watched its transformation marveling at the possibilities the new owner sees that we had never seen. The interior was gutted, exterior walls were knocked out to expand doorways, the brick has been painted, a new driveway and basketball court poured.  Landscaping has been ripped out, rocks brought in and we await the finished product.  Though the home has been there for more than thirty years, I am already beginning to forget its previous appearance.  It is a new house created from the old one.

 
Just like our physical surroundings change and the new becomes familiar, the Lord promises that covenants kept and nurtured with the atonement of Jesus Christ will change and heal our hearts, our lives and our families.  “God, in His infinite capacity, seals and heals individuals and families despite tragedy, loss, and hardship….. ‘[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.… The Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.’  God will strengthen, help, and uphold us; and He will sanctify to us our deepest distress.” (Elder Dale G. Renlund also quoting C.S. Lewis, April 2018).  
 
In the messy, sometimes excruciating renovation phase, we may feel that we will never be whole again, but He who makes “beauty from ashes” is the Builder here.  Like a house made new, we will find that “we have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.”

As we are

Richard Bunderson 1941-2016

I had Mr. Bunderson for ninth grade civics.  He was such a good teacher that I still remember many of his lessons.  One day as we were in class, a boy came running in, a desk was tipped over, there was a bit of an altercation and the boy ran back out of the class.  Immediately, before anyone could say a word, Mr. Bunderson had us each take a few minutes to write down our “eyewitness” account of what happened and hand them in.  As he began to read the accounts, they varied widely.  Some who were further away from the “incident” paid more attention to the boy’s entrance into the classroom, some near the desk that was tipped over missed the altercation after it.  As the accounts were read, some changed their minds about what had happened.  Mr. Bunderson helped us understand that what we see is influenced by our own position, biases and experiences.

We see as we are or where we are.  Satan, the father of lies, knows this and wants us to see the Lord as we are but the Lord is not like us.  He is so much better.  He is not repulsed by our weakness, He sees beyond our immediate circumstances and He never tires in the work of healing you and me, His sheep.

“…It is reasonable to ask, ‘How does Jesus Christ react when faced with our metaphorical diseases-our sins?’  After all, the Savior said that He ‘cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance’; so how can He look at us, imperfect as we are, without recoiling in horror and disgust?  The answer is simple and clear.  As the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ views disease in His sheep as a condition that needs treatment, care and compassion.  This shepherd, our Good Shepherd, finds joy in seeing His diseased sheep progress toward healing.” (Elder Dale G. Renlund, April 2017)

The Savior sees us perfectly.  He knows who we are and where we are and wants us all to come, over and over and over again so He can turn us from our weaknesss, turn us from our sin, turn us from incorrect judgements, turn us from our ignorance and make us like Him.  We just need to keep coming.

Pattern of Faith

Graham W. Doxey 1927-2013

My husband’s Grandpa Doxey holds a special status in our home. He unknowingly helped name me when as a stake president in my parents’ married student stake he gave a talk on Rebekah of the Old Testament.  After meeting him in my early twenties, he introduced me to my husband and was the sealer at our temple wedding. Ten years ago this month, his family gathered to share the many ways he contributed to all of our lives as he passed from this life to the next.

Near the end of Grandpa Doxey’s life, he was diagnosed with cancer. His body was not strong enough to endure treatment. We all knew his days on earth were limited and so there was time to share experiences and memories. During that interval, his children took the opportunity to ask him questions. One asked, “When did you gain a testimony of the gospel?” They expected that he would have a specific experience to tell, a turning point in his life, but his answer was simple, “I just followed the pattern set by my parents and kept following it.”

 He began each day with prayer, he went to work, filled his priesthood responsibilities and callings and each night he read the scriptures with his wife and family.  It was the quiet acts of daily faith.  In a quote shared at his funeral, Grandpa said, “I may not be a scriptorian, I may not be the most talented or the brightest, but I can be where I am supposed to be, when I am supposed to be there, doing what I am supposed to do.”  That was the pattern, a pattern of holy habits and righteous routines, a pattern of faith in the Lord, Jesus Christ, a pattern of repentance and change, a pattern of diligence and service, a pattern of obedience and hope.

Paul testified “…for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting.” (1 Timothy 1:16). We can trust His pattern.  He has the power, the mercy and the longsuffering to work His plan in our lives as we come to Him and follow Him.  

By Design

In February of 2019, our oldest son was sitting in a sacrament meeting in Australia where he was serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  A sister stood to speak and began to share a story about a man who had had not attended church for many years when he received a letter from his stake president inviting him to come back to church and to faith.  He didn’t respond to the invitation but mulled it over in his mind for more than a year.  

Anticipating a trip to Virginia to visit his daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren and knowing that they would be going to church, he determined that whatever meetings they went to, he would also attend. 

As my son listened, he recognized the story being related.  It was the story of my Grandpa Frischknecht, an article published in the Ensign in 1975 from a talk he had given at a stake conference the previous year.  My son pondered the chances that a woman in this chapel on this day would choose a story published 44 years ago to share Grandpa’s words and testimony with his great grandson who was half a world away from home trying to share his own testimony.   

“What may appear to be a random chance is, in fact, overseen by a loving Father in Heaven, who can number the hairs of every head. Not even a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father’s notice. The Lord is in the small details of our lives, and those incidents and opportunities are to prepare us to lift our families and others as we build the kingdom of God on earth. Remember, as the Lord said to Abraham, ‘I know the end from the beginning; therefore my hand shall be over thee.’

Grandpa Frischknecht and Rebekah 1974

“The Lord’s hand is guiding you. By “divine design,” He is in the small details of your life as well as the major milestones. As it says in Proverbs, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; … and he shall direct thy paths.”  I testify that He will bless you, sustain you, and bring you peace.” (Elder Ronald A. Rasband, October 2017)

From a stake president’s letter, to a quiet decision, and down through years and generations, the Lord is weaving the tapestry of our lives.  No moment goes unseen, no prayer goes unheard and occasionally we get a glimpse and see His hand as He walks with us on our mortal journey.  Each glimpse testifies that we can be at peace, His hand is over us.

God be Thanked

Yesterday, a newly released bishopric counselor recounted his service and shared his testimony that he had always known that God loved His children but as he had been set apart and served in his ward he had felt that love.  He bore his witness that God loves His children.
 
This morning I attended the celebration of life of a young wife and mother who died just a week short of her 23rd birthday.  I arrived a few minutes early and watched as her young husband was given last minute instructions by the funeral director.  Her father held her little girl and her friend behind me whispered, “This can’t be real.”  Their grief reflected their love.
 
 
 
A similar pain was spoken by Mary, “Lord if thou had been here, my brother had not died….Lord, come and see. [And] Jesus wept.  Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:32-36). His tears were not the beginning or the end of the Savior’s love. He lived His love.  For Lazarus and the rest of humankind, He willingly suffered humiliation, false accusations, scourging, pressure so intense blood came from every pore and in the end, He was nailed to a cross and gave His life for His friends.   On the third day, He rose promising that with His power we will all rise from the grave.  Still, His love did not end there.  From that day to this, He lives to bring hope to the hopeless, light in our darkness, mercy for our weakness and joy even in our sorrow.  
 
The life of Jesus Christ is a testament of His love and the love of our Father, a love we can only begin to comprehend.  “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” (John 3:16) “God be thanked for the matchless gift of His divine Son.” (The Living Christ-The Testimony of the Apostles)