Hank Smith: 00:02 Hello, my friends. Welcome to followHIM Favorites. You know the drill. John and I are sharing a single lesson to go with each week’s lesson. John, we’re in Mosiah 1-3 today, King Benjamin, you’ve told me you have a great story.

John Bytheway: 00:14 Yeah, I do. We all love Mosiah 2:17, “When you’re in the service of your fellow beings, you’re only in the service of your God.”

  00:21 There’s a President Spencer W. Kimball quotation that fits nicely with this, and you know it, Hank, I know you do, and we’ve heard it on the podcast. “God does notice us and he watches over us, but it is usually through another person that he meets our needs.”

  00:37 Right. It’s usually not through thunder and lightning or an angel or a visitation or something. It’s usually another person. Here I was, Hank, I was serving in my mission in the Philippines. I was excited because as a teenager I had, shall we say, an active complexion. I had a lot of acne. I don’t see it now as much. It was hard and it was, it made me self-conscious. Hank, there were days I stayed home from school. I didn’t want to go to school as a sixteen-year-old.

  01:04 Anyway, I was excited to go to the Philippines because I thought, oh, it’ll probably be really sunny and for some reason having a bit of a tan seemed to help. I got there and it actually got worse. There’s a condition I’ve heard of called Tropical Acne. I think maybe I had that.

Hank Smith: 01:21 That’d be a terrible drink, Tropical Acne.

John Bytheway: 01:24 Yeah, it sounds horrible. I’d never buy Shasta Tropical Acne flavor.

  01:28 One day I remember it was getting bad to the point that I could tell people weren’t looking me in the eye. They were looking at my face and-

Hank Smith: 01:38 They’re scanning.

John Bytheway: 01:39 Looks kind of like a constellation right there. I was already kind of self-conscious. That’s just the truth. I remember one night just, “Heavenly Father, maybe this isn’t that important to you, but this is bad. People aren’t listening to me. We get done with the lesson and they want to talk about something for my face instead of the lesson.” Literally happened. Take these leaves and smash them up, and they’re giving me home remedies.

Hank Smith: 02:06 Thank you.

John Bytheway: 02:07 Yeah, thanks so much. “What did you think about the Book of Mormon?”

  02:10 “It’s affecting the work and I need this to clear up and it would help me, everything.” It was amazing, Hank because true story, next Zone conference, my memory is very soon after, I’ve got to go check my mission journal. Sister Strohmeier walks up to me at Zone conference.

  02:28 The first thing she said was, “Elder Bytheway, I want you to take these pills, break up the powder and some rubbing alcohol, rub it on your skin the morning and the evening. Just do this. Okay?”

Hank Smith: 02:41 Just do this.

John Bytheway: 02:43 Okay, and so I did. Hank, when you watch my movie in heaven, you’ll see this event cleared up my face in three days. To this day, I think of Sister Strohmeier as somebody that just had the courage to walk up and say, “I want to help you with this,” and she did.

Hank Smith: 03:03 Yup, I love it.

John Bytheway: 03:05 It is usually through another person, and one day I’ll rise up and call Sister Strohmeier blessed because she helped me through that very self-conscious time on my mission.

Hank Smith: 03:16 You got sent your own acne angel there.

John Bytheway: 03:19 I mean, I don’t think she’d ever been to medical school, but she just wanted to help me.

Hank Smith: 03:25 That’s awesome. When you’re in the service of your fellow beings, you are in the service of God.

  03:31 We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM, you can get it wherever you get your podcasts and then come back next week. We’ll do another followHIM Favorites.