President (Boyd K.) Packer, President of the Quorum of the Twelve, recalled a time years ago when he met a young, disrespectful missionary.  The young man had been referred by the Missionary Training Center to President Packer as a member of the Church's Missionary Committee to determine if he should be sent home from his mission.

The young man was a smart aleck and impudent and rude, President Packer thought.  He took the young man to lunch.

"There could only be one verdict," President Packer said.  "This young man could not go on a mission."

As the pair returned to the Church Office Building, they saw the Missionary Training Center director waiting for them at the top of the stairs.

"I thought, 'When we get up to the top I will have to send him home,' but I thought, 'I can't do that.'  About half way up the steps I took hold of this young man and pulled him around so I was looking him right in the eyes.  I said, 'You have been disrespectful and impudent and don't deserve much.  But there is one thing you have got to know.'

"Then I bore my testimony to him, clear and pure testimony.

"Then I said, 'Now, don't you ever say you don't know or that you haven't been told, because you have been told.  I will bear testimony against you at the judgment seat of Christ that you were told.'

"I have never done anything like that before or since."

When President Packer and the missionary got to the top of the stairs, President Packer simply said, "Take him back and try again."

Some months later President Packer heard a report of President Marion G. Romney's weekend visit to Mexico, where he met a missionary who embodied all that is ideal in a missionary.  To President Packer's great surprise, it was the missionary he had sent back to the Missionary Training Center.

"And I had learned a lesson.  The single most important thing that can be done is to bear testimony to them so that they will know," he said.

 

—From Church News, June 28, 2008, pg. 6.