Prophecies do come true

I served the last eight months of my mission in the port city of Maceió, the capital of the state of Alagoas, in northeastern Brazil. I was president of the Maceió Branch, a small congregation of the Church that had maybe fifty or sixty members, about twenty of them active.

One Sunday evening while I was speaking in sacrament meeting, I felt impressed to tell the branch members that someday they would have a stake in Maceió. As soon as I said it, I thought to myself, "What in the world are you saying, Elder Cleverly? That could never possibly happen."

And there was every reason it couldn't happen. The elders were taken out of Maceió and the branch was closed when I left Brazil in December 1970 to come home. During much of my earlier mission, down in Rio de Janeiro, I had labored in branches where every month my companion and I baptized and confirmed an individual or an entire family. That did not occur in Maceió. I sometimes felt in Maceió like the missionaries in the Book of Mormon: "And, as it happened, it was their lot to have fallen into the hands of a more hardened and a more stiffnecked people" (Alma 20:30).

And a final reason: Perhaps as high as 90 percent of the city's 200,000 people were either blacks or of mixed lineage, and the gospel was not being actively preached to them at that time. That situation happily changed in June 1978 when the First Presidency announced President Spencer W. Kimball's revelation extending the priesthood to all worthy male members.

Just over eleven years after I returned home from Brazil, I read in the Church News that in January 1982 a stake had been organized in Maceió. I cannot describe the joy I felt at learning that happy news. A miracle. And yet, why not? We still believe in miracles. We believe that God moves in His mysterious ways His wonders to perform. We believe that He will hasten his work in His own time. We are simply grateful to be a small part of it and to see it happening.

When Claudia and I attended church in the Farol Ward of the Maceió Brazil Stake on April 28, 1996, there were then three stakes in Maceió.