by Marc A. Schindler
Date:
Wed, 16 Feb 2000
From:
Farms Research <farms-research@email.byu.edu
Subject:
Fwd: Is it true??
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Date:
Wed, 16 Feb 2000
From: <name
and email address deleted for privacy purposes>
Subject:
Is it true??
To:
Farms Research <farms-research@email.byu.edu,LDSWORLD-GEMS@LISTS.LDSWORLD.COM,gems@LDSWORLD.COM
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I
have heard this for sometime now. Is it a true story!! What's the ladies
name?? I don't want to pass on anything that is fabricated!! Your help
would be appreciated, it's a great story,
if true!!
A
response would be appreciated!!
[see
account below]
This
was read to us by Graham Doxey, President
of the Manti temple. He added this note, "I wonder what her feelings will
be when she is served the dessert of the feast; the temple experience?"
As written by Scott Anderson in his journal.
We had an unexpected moment in the mission field.
We knocked on a door and a lady said something to us we had never heard,
"Come in". Now remember, I was a German missionary. This never happened
to us, not even the members would say that to us. At this point suddenly
this dear lady invited us in. My companion said, "Do you know who we are?"
"You want to talk religion, don't you?" she said. "Yes we do" explained
my companion.
"Oh, come in. I've watching you walk around the neighbourhood.
I'm so excited to have you here. Please come into my study." We went in
and seated ourselves and she sat down behind the desk.
She looked at us with a smile, then
pointed to three PhD's hanging over her head. one in theology, the study
of religion, one in Philosophy, the study of ideas, and one in European
History specializing in Christianity. She then kind of rubbed her hands
together and said, "Do you see this row of books here?" We looked at a
well arranged row of books. She then said, "I wrote them all. I’m the Theology
professor at the
"I don't know anything about the Book of Mormon."
He said, "I know". Twenty minutes later we walked out of the room. We had
handed her a Book of Mormon and this trade off that we had been on was
over. I didn't see this lady for another 8 1/2 weeks.
It was a small room filled with people, {when I saw
her again}, as she was standing in the front dressed in white. This Theology
professor at the
Then in her quiet, powerful way, she said, "After
those years of studying philosophy, I picked up the D & C and read
a few little verses that answered some of the greatest questions of Aristotle
and Socrates! When I read those verses, I wept for 4 hours." Then she said
again, "I don't think you members know what you have. Don't you understand
the world is in a famine? Don't you know we are starving for what you have?
I am like a starving person being led to a feast. And over these 8 1/2
weeks I have been able to feast in a way I have never known possible."
Her powerful message and her challenging question was
then ended with her favourite scripture, "For you don't see the truth can
make you free."
She said, "these missionaries
don't just carry membership in the church in their hands, they carry within
their hands the power to make the atonement of Jesus Christ full force
in my life. Today I'm going into the water and I'm going to make a covenant
with Christ for the first time with proper authority. I've wanted to do
this all my life." None of us will forget the day she was baptized. When
she got finished being baptized, she got back out and before she received
the Holy Ghost , she stood and said, "Now
I would like to talk about the Holy Ghost for awhile." She then gave a
wonderful talk about the gift of the Holy Ghost.
{Later in Elder Anderson's journal}
Two young missionaries, both relatively new, {one
had been out about 5 months, the other 3 weeks}, accidentally knocked of
the door of the seminary in
We drove her to the seminary, and as we went in, she
grabbed the 2 missionaries that had originally been invited, put her arms
around them and said, "you are wonderful young
men. Would each of you spend about 2 minutes bearing your testimony and
then sit down and be quiet please?"
They were grateful for their assignment. they
bore their testimony and then seated themselves. Then she got up and said,
"For the next 30 minutes I would like to talk to you about historical apostasy."
She knew every date and fact. She had a PhD in this. She talked abut everything
that had been taken away from the great teachings the Saviour had given,
mostly organizational, in the first part of her talk. the
next 45 minutes were doctrinal.
She gave every point of doctrinal changes, when it
happened and what had changed. By the time she was done, she looked at
them and said, "In 1820 a boy walked into a grove of trees. He had been
in a famine just like I have been. He knelt to pray, because he was hungry
just like I have been. He saw God the Father and His Son. I know this is
hard for you to believe that they could be two separate beings, but I know
they are." she shared scriptures that showed that they were and then said,
"I would like to talk about historical restoration of truth." she then,
point by point, date by date, from the Doctrine and Covenants, put back
the organizational structure of Christ's church. The last 20 minutes of
her talk were absolutely brilliant. For the first time we realized that
she had been their Theology professor. She continued by saying, "Last year
when I was teaching you, I told you that I was still in a famine.
I have been led to a feast. I invite you to come."
she finished with her testimony and sat down. What happened next was hard
for me to understand. These 125 sincere, wonderful men stood and for the
next 7 minutes, gave her a standing ovation. By the time 4 minutes had
gone by I was crying. I remember standing and looking into their eyes and
seeing the tears in their eyes too. I wondered why they were applauding
after the message she had given. I asked many of them later. They said,
"to hear someone so unashamed of the truth, to
hear someone teaching with such power, to hear someone who finally has
conviction."
The truth is what can set us free...Do we really know
what we have?
I first met Sister Specht,
who was retired from the
From November 1973 until I was called to a new assignment in July 1974, I, along with my various companions, served as her home teacher and met with her at least once a month. Her apartment was within walking distance of our own apartment in the Habsburgerstraße and we'd often end up spending an entire afternoon with her while she regaled us with mini-lectures on ancient history, archaeology and languages. As far as I can recall she was fluent in English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Greek and said she was "struggling with" learning Turkish. All this from a woman in her late 70s.
My new assignment, in July 1974, was as secretary
to the mission president, Professor Doktor
Hans-Wilhelm Kelling (originally from
Little did I know that 26 years later I would be thrilled
as my own son was called to serve in
In fact, on one occasion, Elder Hinckley and Sister Specht
arranged for an elderly woman from a town in the mountains of southern
Christmas 1973. We stopped
off to visit her on Stephenstag (Boxing
Day) and she added a greeting to my mother that I was taping, consisting
of "the sounds of
She took great pleasure in introducing missionaries
to culture of all kinds. Once she had bought tickets for two of the office
elders for the ballet, but they couldn't make it, so she offered them to
us. My companion wasn't impressed, but I loved it. It was "EugenOnegin"
by Tchaikovsky. Another time we went to see "Carmen" the popular opera
by Georges Bizet. I was in the office then,
and our mission president actively encouraged us to see art galleries and
go to the opera on Mondays. So Tuesday morning after we had seen "Carmen"
he asked us what we had seen. My companion said laconically, "oh, some
musical about a girl of ill repute who works in a cigarette factory and
stirs up all kinds of trouble."President Kelling
was understandably taken aback but behind him Sister Specht
was shaking with silent laughter, tears coming out of her eyes."Dear
President Kelling," she finally managed
to say, "I think they saw 'Carmen'!"On
my birthday in early 1975 she bought my companion and me very good tickets
(on the first balcony -- no cheap standing-room tickets this time!) to
see "Schwanensee" ("
Several times she took me to the Staatsbibliothek,
the Bavarian "National" Library, which was also the main library for the
When she found out I knew a little bit of New Testament Greek, which I had learned from an instructor at the LDS Institute of Religion in Calgary, before my mission, she insisted that I get an up-to-date edition of the Greek New Testament, a collection of original versions of Greek manuscripts used by scholars (known as the UBS, or the Nestlé-Aland-Black edition), so she took me to a bookstore nearby. It was clear from the deference shown her by the staff, all of whom she knew by their first names, that she was not only well-known here, but well-respected, too.
Sister Specht kept
up correspondence with many people, but not just VIPs. She was one of the
most intellectual people I've ever met, but had the common touch as well
-- an exceedingly rare combination. She also wrote to prisoners in a jail
near Regensburg in a beautiful part of Bavaria known as derBöhmerwald
(the Bohemian Woods) -- as Elder Anderson's journal indicates, there was
a Catholic seminary there, and she wrote to some of the priests there,
too.Once she asked if we would give her
a ride to
She also met President Spencer W. Kimball (who was
President of the Quorum of the Twelve at the time) and once,the
prophet himself, Harold B. Lee, when he was visiting the area in either
late 1972 or early 1973, as I recall (this was before my time and I only
heard about this). Pres. Lee died shortly afterwards, and in late 1974
Sister Specht arranged to go to
In sum, a remarkable woman, who I'm sure is still doing missionary work where she is now.
Bruder
Marc-Albert Schindler, den 20. Februar
2000