President Monson: A Missionary Felt Prompted to Keep Wartime Photos for 40 Years — Then Delivered Them on the Right Plane

“Brother Edwin Q. Cannon Jr., we call him Ted, was a missionary to Germany in 1938. He loved the people and served faithfully. At the conclusion of his mission, he returned home to Salt Lake City. He married and commenced his own business. Forty years passed by. One day Brother Cannon came to my office and said he had been pruning his missionary photographs. Among those photographs he had kept since his mission were several which he could not specifically identify. Every time he had planned to discard them, he had been impressed to keep them, although he was at a loss as to why. They were photographs taken by Brother Cannon during his mission when he served in Stettin, Germany, and were of a family—a mother, a father, a small girl, and a small boy. He knew their surname was Berndt but could remember nothing more about them. I was about to travel to Berlin, where I expected to meet Dieter Berndt, a Church leader in Germany. I told Brother Cannon I would take the photographs with me and see if there was any connection. The Lord didn’t even let me get to Berlin before His purposes were accomplished. I was in Zurich, Switzerland, boarding the flight to Berlin, when who should also board the plane but Dieter Berndt. He sat next to me, and I told him I had some old photos of people named Berndt from Stettin. I handed them to him and asked if he could identify those shown in the photographs. As he looked at them carefully, he began to weep. He said, “Our family lived in Stettin during the war. My father was killed when an Allied bomb struck the plant where he worked. The Russians invaded. My mother took my sister and me and fled, leaving everything behind—including any photographs we had. Brother Monson, I am the little boy pictured in these photographs, and my sister is the little girl. The man and woman are our dear parents. Until today, I had no photographs of our childhood in Stettin or of my father.” Wiping away my own tears, I told Brother Berndt the photographs were his. He placed them carefully and lovingly in his briefcase. At the next general conference, when Dieter Berndt visited Salt Lake City, he paid a visit to Brother and Sister Edwin Cannon Jr. so that he might express in person his gratitude for the inspiration that came to Brother Cannon to retain these precious photographs and for the fact that he followed that inspiration in keeping them for 40 years.”

— Thomas S. Monson, 'Great Expectations' BYU Devotional