The Question from My 5-Year-Old Son That Changed Our Lives Forever

Author and businesswoman Gail Miller is joining us for the 2018 Centered in Christ tour and we couldn't be more excited! To celebrate, we shared this touching excerpt from her upcoming book "Courage to Be You" about what it means to be "found" and how living like we believe can change our lives in ways we can't even imagine.

When my son Greg was five years old, he approached me in the kitchen with his typical curiosity and asked, “Mommy, where does God live?” He had no idea how the question would change our lives.

People I meet are sometimes surprised to hear that Larry and I both faded from the Church for a time. Certainly I never doubted that the faith of my ancestors was true and that Christ’s gospel had been restored in the latter days. But there was a disconnect between believing and living like I believed.

With young Greg still looking on and his question hanging in the air, I knew it was time to stop hiding. I had to go back to church. I immediately hunted for the phone book and began calling local chapel phone numbers. Eventually, I found the ward we lived in and learned that Primary met on Wednesday afternoons. It took courage I didn’t know I had, but I took the kids that very week, and everyone was eager to invite me to Sunday meetings, too. I will never forget the Primary president embracing and loving my kids as if they’d always been there. We weren’t treated as lost, we were treated as found.

I kept praying for Larry to have the same change of heart that I was experiencing, but he wasn’t ready yet. He was softening and growing supportive, but he kept getting more and more entrenched in work and softball. Before long, I was attending Relief Society, Sunday School, and sacrament meeting and taking the children by myself. It was a challenge to keep them all quiet and interested, but I did my best. Since we had to pass one on the way home, sometimes I would bribe them with a trip to McDonald’s if they behaved. It was a choice I probably wouldn’t make today, but it’s something I will never regret. I believe that when you’re doing all you can to rekindle the family’s faith, the Lord is willing to look past the Golden Arches and into your heart.

After what seemed like an eternity, Larry finally attended a Relief Society social with me and met many of the members of our ward. He didn’t change his mind overnight, but our wonderful home teachers were making inroads by their sheer consistency. I was praying like I never had for him, and I realized that the prayers weren’t just about him. They were about me. Despite his disinterest in returning, I was learning to love him more than ever. I knew I couldn’t personally will him back to church. Maybe more than anything, I realized I wasn’t so much praying for his mighty change of heart as I was praying for mine and hoping he would take notice.

Finally, one morning while Larry was at work, the bishop called him on his private line to ask him to come in for another interview. This time he wanted him to answer the questions. They were both very busy men and, remarkably, the only time they could find to meet was 10:30 p.m. When Larry got to Bishop Madsen’s home, the bishop told him that he’d had a dream the night before about Larry that was so vivid, he’d gotten up in the middle of the night to write himself a note to call the next day. What the bishop hadn’t known is that that very morning, Larry had said to me as he walked out the door for work, “Gail, I have put this off long enough. I need to call the bishop today.”

As they went through the questions again, Larry answered candidly. He told the bishop that there were only two issues that concerned him. “I have a problem with swearing,” he admitted. Larry added that he only swore around men, but he promised to work on controlling it. The second was more serious: “I don’t pay tithing.”

The bishop asked why, and I’ve always imagined that Larry’s simple reply must have caught him off guard. “I don’t know. I just never have.” The bishop invited him to begin paying immediately and promised things would change if he did. Late that night, when Larry returned, he told me he was ready to be ordained and that I was to start paying tithing without fail. “Pay it on my whole check on the next payday and never ask me about it again.” He did not want to be tempted to change his mind.

The next payday was January 5, 1979. I paid the tithing and hoped that things would start to get better for us. Larry was looking for peace of mind about work, and I was looking for him to be more involved with the family.

Our lives changed forever over the next few months. On a vacation to Utah, Larry had lunch with the owner of the dealership where he’d once worked. By the end of the lunch, they had an agreement written on a napkin. By the end of the day, they had a formal agreement, and Larry wasn’t just working for a dealership anymore. He owned one.

We weren’t naive about the source of the opportunity or the tremendous blessings that were soon to come. We believed that returning to church, paying our tithing, and doing our best in our callings had resulted in the Lord opening the windows of heaven. Our family was sealed one year later in the Salt Lake Temple.

No one who was in the sealing room that day will ever forget some very special counsel offered by the sealer. Remember that we owned just one dealership, Larry didn’t do his own advertising, and he wasn’t any more recognizable to the general public than I was. Still, the sealer looked at us both and said that he felt strongly impressed to tell us that Larry’s name would be known by thousands, even tens of thousands in the years to come.

Come hear more inspiring messages from Gail in person at a TOFW event near you!

All images courtesy Gail Miller