President John R. Winder's Childhood Protection from Angels
Published October 13, 2026 at 5:55 AM
Contributed by
Millennial Star Research
President John R. Winder recalls an incident from his childhood, seventy-five years prior to 1903, where he was sent into fields to protect grain from birds. Being alone and afraid in the woods, he knelt and prayed for God to send angels to protect him. From that moment, all his fear vanished and he felt a shield of protection around him for the rest of his life.
Fuller account of this event (the complete account as preserved in The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star, Vol. 66, No. 2, 14 January 1904):
When a boy of seven years, he was sent into the fields to keep the birds from the grain. Being alone and afraid in the woods, he knelt and prayed for God to send angels to protect him. From that moment, all his fear vanished, and he felt a shield of protection around him for the rest of his life.
In Their Own Words
“When I think of that event, and it is constantly uppermost in my mind, I am led to wonder how it was possible that a person, uneducated, and, in my own estimation, so unfitted for the position, could have been chosen, and when I look back seventy-five years and remember a poor little boy who was sent out into the fields to keep the birds from destroying the grain in a lonely spot surrounded with forests, he became afraid at being alone, and I so well remember he knelt down in the brush and in childlike simplicity asked the Lord to send His angels to protect him, and from that time all fear left him, and a shield of protection has been thrown around him all his life long. — Millennial Star 66:2”
Sources & References
The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star (Manchester, later Liverpool, England, May 1840–1970), 14 January 1904 (Vol. 66, No. 2). https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_the-latter-day-saints-millennial-star_1904-01-14_66_2 (account extracted verbatim from the issue's Internet Archive OCR text; research confidence: high) Complete account: The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star, Vol. 66, No. 2, 14 January 1904 https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_the-latter-day-saints-millennial-star_1904-01-14_66_2
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