Thomas McConkie: Life Abundant

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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My conversion to the restored gospel didn’t initially come through a testimony of the Book of Mormon or of Joseph Smith as prophet. It didn’t come through a specific belief in my mind or a feeling in my heart. My conversion came unexpectedly and powerfully through the body. To this day my faith lives in me with increasing joy and potency. I’ll tell you how it began.

I remember it was a dank winter in Salt Lake City. I’d caught a nasty flu virus that had my body convulsing in waves of hot and cold. It was the first time in my short life of twelve years that I could vaguely sense my own mortality. My mom, with her typical brightness of hope, asked if I wanted her dad to come give me a blessing. Her faith in his gift to heal was absolute.

As my granddad stepped in from the cold, dark night, my parents greeted him with the care and deference one pays to a genuinely holy man. He took off his coat without fanfare, like it was just another late night at the office.

We moved in procession to the middle of the living room where my parents set out a folding chair. As my dad poured consecrated oil on my head—a cool drop into the fiery lake—I sat with great anticipation, almost delirious with fever, believing I could be healed.

The moment my granddad began to pronounce a blessing it was as if a portal had opened; pure light seemed to pour into me and illuminate every tissue, every cell in my entire body. I felt incandescent, though the flame did not consume me. As power coursed through my whole being, I could only melt and give myself over to it.

This was the Spirit in which “we live and move and have our being.” I felt connected to family, connected to power from on high, connected to all of the richness of Heaven. I had never been so sick and afraid in my whole life. A few breaths later, I felt only God’s grace infusing me. Like a burst of rain falling on hot summer pavement, the illness evaporated, leaving no trace.

Long after the blessing ended, the fire it left in me still crackled. I wasn’t the same being after. I could never be the same.

I remember my granddad seeming quite stoic—ordinary—as I stood up. By any objective account, it was a miraculous healing he had just mediated. And yet, he carried it out with all the plainness of a man balancing a ledger or mopping the floor before closing up shop.

When he disappeared back into the night I remained in the afterglow of God. Young and immature, I couldn’t contain all that energy in my small frame with the same dignity the patriarch did. I was giddily euphoric; a bubbling bliss floated up from my toes out through the crown of my head—effervescing away everything in me that felt solid and opaque. I remember bounding around the house that night like a gazelle on the open plains, overflowing with life. It was like I’d just been born, been given a new body to dance in.

I woke up the next morning with no memory of illness. That was a lifetime ago. There was no trace, no residue of anything but joy in my world now. I went skiing with my friends and floated through the mounds of freshly-fallen powder—weightless.

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The experience could hardly have been more dramatic: a bona fide faith healing at the hands of one of God’s elect witnesses. You might think that that single experience would be enough to infuse the rest of my life with an unwavering faith. And yet, not more than a year or so later, I found that my convictions, my identity as a Latter-day Saint all started to unravel, seemingly without warning.