Hank Smith: 00:02 Hello, my friends. Welcome to FollowHIM Favorites. My name’s Hank Smith. I’m here with the incredible John Bytheway. Last year, for FollowHIM Favorites, we answered a single question. This year, Book of Mormon, Come, Follow Me, we are going to tell a single story. So John, we’re opening up our first lesson in the Book of Mormon. What is the single story we’re going to tell this week?

John Bytheway: 00:24 We talked about this, because we had lots. But one that I love was from a movie the church made years ago called How Rare A Possession, and I think you can still find it. There’s a man named Vincenzo Di Francesca, which is, I think, something I had at Olive Garden once. But he was born in Sicily. He was a pastor, and he was in New York. This is 1910, and he’s walking down Broadway in New York and he finds this book on top of a barrel of ashes and he doesn’t know what it is. The front pages are torn off. He doesn’t know the title, but he’s like, “This is a religious book.” He sees the name Isaiah, but he also sees names like Alma and Mosiah and Mormon. And he’s like, “Who are these people? I have no idea.”

  01:07 There was a lot of ashes on the book, and it was burnt. He gets some rubbing alcohol and he’s able to clean some of the soot off the pages. He spends the whole day with this. And one of the things that impressed me was he said, “I read the declaration of the witnesses.”

Hank Smith: 01:23 A lot of us just skip those parts. We flip through those, we’re like, “Hey, let’s get to the beginning.”

John Bytheway: 01:28 Yeah. And he said he was impressed with their declaration of what they said, that they knew it was true. And he doesn’t even know what the book is. He reads it all day, and he gets to Moroni’s promise and kneels down, and he gets a witness that the book is true and it changes his life. And the fun part, and you’ve got to watch the movie, is he starts using it in his preaching, but he doesn’t know what the book is.

Hank Smith: 01:55 So he’s quoting it in church to his congregation.

John Bytheway: 02:00 He’s in New Zealand, I think. And there’s a couple of guys in the back that are in priestly robes and they’re listening to this sermon when he quotes King Benjamin. And one of them says to the other, “Angelo, where is that scripture found?” And he’s like, “It’s in the Old Testament somewhere.” They just kind of nodded, and he keeps going. His congregations start growing, and his colleagues are getting smaller. Lines that we think are so commonplace to us, like, “When you’re in the service of your fellow beings, you’re only in the service of your God.” And people in the congregation are like, “Yeah.”

Hank Smith: 02:36 That’s beautiful.

John Bytheway: 02:37 It’s King Benjamin, and nobody’s ever heard it before. Well, in the story, he’s censured, he’s brought before disciplinary councils, like, “What’s this book?” He doesn’t even know what it is. “I found it in New York.” And they tell him he can’t use the book anymore. They tell him he has to burn the book. And he says, “I will not burn the book.”

Hank Smith: 02:56 Francisco, you must burn the book. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 02:59 There’s an article in the Ensign, the January ’88 Ensign called “I Will Not Burn the Book,” if you want to read about it. Well, finally, he is reading in a French dictionary, of all things, and he’s skimming it for something and he sees the word Mormon. And he’s like, “That’s from the book.”

Hank Smith: 03:18 That’s in my book. My strange book that I found on the street.

John Bytheway: 03:22 “That’s in the book. Yeah, I’ve seen that name before.” And there it references that there was a university in Provo, Utah. Perhaps you’ve heard about it, Hank. Have you heard about that place?

Hank Smith: 03:32 It’s a small little university at the base of the mountains.

John Bytheway: 03:35 Right. And he starts writing to people saying, “Tell me more about this.” And they send him a Book of Mormon in Italian, because his was in English. And he keeps requesting baptism, and World War I comes up, World War II comes up. And eventually, I mean, I want people to go watch the movie, but the thing that is so powerful to me about it is, book with no name, he doesn’t even know where it came from. But the book by itself, the words of the book, the message of the book has a spiritual power to it. And it impacts him to the point that it’s a lifetime quest for him to figure out, how do I join with these people that know about this book?

Hank Smith: 04:17 He found the book in 1910. I think he’s baptized in ’51. 41 years.

John Bytheway: 04:24 A lot of that not knowing the name of the book. So the very last paragraph in the January ’88 Ensign article I mentioned, it says this, “On April 1956, I entered the temple at Bern and received my endowment. At last, to be in the presence of my Heavenly Father. I felt that God’s promise had been fully fulfilled. The day had come indeed when the book would be no more unknown to me, and I would be able to enjoy the effects of my faith.” Kind of a quest just to find out the title of the book. It’s a great story. I guess that’s the message, wouldn’t you say, Hank? There is a power in these words and this testimony from these people in the past that is palpable and it changes people.

Hank Smith: 05:04 John, what a perfect story to start FollowHIM Favorite Stories this year. Come back next week, we’ll tell you another FollowHIM story to go with the lesson.