It was a Sunday, just like today. I was serving in Rialto California as a full-time missionary. That night we had a stake missionary activity. All the missionaries in the zone had gathered at the stake center and the youth of the stake were traveling from one breakout session to another learning about how they could share their testimony of the restored gospel.
As we cleaned up we were all in pretty good moods. Everything had gone well and the day was over. Then the Samoan elders started to get a bunch of texts. They told us that they had received messages from their members telling them that President Gordon B. Hinckley had passed away.
I didn’t believe it at first. It was so sudden. Two weeks earlier we had a regional conference that he had spoken at (via satellite from Salt Lake). He was certainly old but had spoken well. We had brought an investigator along.
We went home not thinking about it until the next morning when a text from the APs confirmed the rumors. Our prophet was dead.
Gordon B Hinckley was my prophet and my hero. His was the face I looked at all the years growing up. When I started at BYU I listened to dozens of his speeches and grew to respect, love and honor that man for who he was and not just what he was. I skipped class and waited 3 hours outside the Marriott center alone so I could sit close to the front when he came to speak to us. I took pictures of him standing at the same pulpit I would later speak at. As he walked from the building I dropped my camera in shock as he turned toward me and walked out the exit immediately next to where I stood. He waved his cane and paused a brief moment and looked at me before leaving the room. I was too stunned to do anything but stand at attention.
I wept more at his funeral than any other day of my mission. Full, open, dripping tears. That same night we went to visit our investigator who we had brought to the regional conference a few weeks before. Standing outside the broken motor home he rented he noticed our complexions and asked us what was wrong. Before we could say anything he said he knew, the man we had seen speak before was dead wasn’t he? He had a dream of us sitting in a chapel crying and new that whoever that man was had died.
I carried President Hinckley’s picture on my planner for most of my mission. Tracting in one area a man noticed the picture poking out of my pocket and said “I know that man, I saw him in the news, he died recently didn’t he?”
Each day my first year at college I walked passed the Gordon B Hinckley Building then under construction and watched the walls and towers reach to the sky. As I write this now there is a black and white copy of the painting of Gordon B. Hinckley hanging on my wall which I created a few months ago.
I continue to live in his shadow and listen to his counsel. I still follow and believe in the living prophet, but I treasure and remember the influence of a lifetime of service rendered by the man Gordon B Hinckley. I hope my own legacy can be of a similar tone to his.
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