From Terryl and Fiona Givens. . . .
. . .Sometimes prayer expectations are too grandiose rather than too modest. A friend of ours, caught in the agony of unrelenting depression, discovered that answers can come through surprising, unanticipated avenues. One day, immobilized within the confines of her bedroom, she noticed a dog penned up in the garden opposite. She realized she had seen him there day after day, confined physically as well as emotionally. She gathered up what courage she had and asked the owners if she could walk their dog. They agreed—and as she strolled the neighborhood day after day, passersby stopped to pet the dog and engage her in conversation. Slowly, imperceptibly, simple human interactions and laughter of the children restored her to the daybreak of mental health. Her despair had opened her heart to forms of revelation she would not have considered earlier.16
Another friend recalls years of praying into a void, through adolescence and into his mission. Finally, in a spirit of agony, he wrote home, complaining of his own feeling of fraudulence. An unexpected rebuke came back from his mother. “Enough of this nonsense. This is pure foolishness. Stop this at once. Stop praying with your knees, start praying with your feet.” And that was a sweet relief for me. It was complete and total liberation. I took her advice and decided “I’m going to stop doing this thing. I’m going to stop holding a gun to the Lord’s head and insisting on a sign. I’m just going to live my life as if the gospel is true.” So you must understand: what I did upon reading that letter, was that I made a wager. I decided to bet my entire life that the gospel was true. I decided I would wager my life that the Church is everything that it claims it is and live out my life accordingly. So that is what I have done and what I continue to do. . . . The kicker is that in the course of serving and fulfilling priesthood duty, knowledge does in fact come. But for me it comes in ways that were unbidden. Knowledge for me has not arrived because it was beckoned, or because I said “give me revelation.” For me it has come in ways I can barely describe, and never on command, and I’m not even sure that they’re sensory or palpable. But I can tell you . . . that I somehow crossed a threshold into an area that I think we can call something more approaching knowledge. That I can tell you. But it’s never come on my terms and never come to me on my timetable.17
Terryl Givens, Fiona Givens The Crucible of Doubt (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014) 127-29
16. See M. Sue Bergin, Am I a Saint Yet? (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2012), 65-66
17. Russell Hancock, remarks transcribed by Geoff Nelson, “On Praying with Your Feet,” Dialogue 45.4 (Winter 2012): 173-74
