Unnamed Missionary's Divine Guidance in Germany
Published October 24, 2026 at 7:11 AM
Contributed by
Millennial Star Research
While serving a mission in Germany, an elder was instructed by his conference president to tract a specific section of the city. As he went, he felt a clear, divine direction to go to a different place instead. When he followed this prompting and reported his actions to the president, the president was displeased and commanded him to follow official instructions. The elder responded with insubordination, stating he would do what the Lord told him to do. This moment marked the beginning of his apostasy, though he was later restored to the Church after sincere repentance.
In Their Own Words
“I called on him, and during the course of a lengthy conversation he told me that one morning, when he was on a mission in Germany, as he was about to go out tracting, his conference president said to him : ‘I want you to tract in to-day,’ naming a certain section of the city. Continuing, the man said : ‘I took my tracts and left. On the way to my field of labor I seemed to hear a voice saying to me : ‘Do not go to ; go to such and such a place.’ I went there. When I reported to the president what I had done he was displeased and told me to follow his instructions in the future. That nettled me, and turning to him I said sharply : ‘I will do what the Lord tells me to do, irrespective of what you say.’ — Millennial Star 84:39”
Sources & References
The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star (Manchester, later Liverpool, England, May 1840–1970), Vol. 84, No. 39 (1922). https://archive.org/details/millennialstar8439eng (account extracted verbatim from the issue's Internet Archive OCR text; research confidence: high)
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