“One of my friends said, 'If God loves you, He’ll take you to a desert,'” Brittani McLeod says in an LDS Living This Is the Gospel podcast.
McLeod left her job working with migrants and refugees in Salt Lake City after eight years for an international humanitarian job in Morocco—which borders the Sahara Desert.
After some basic training in Morrocco, supervisors began assigning workers to different areas around the country. McLeod had just three wishes:
- She wanted to be near a Latter-day Saint church
- She wanted to work with migrants and immigrants
- She wanted to live near a big city so she could buy groceries
God had prompted her to take the job and instead of granting any of her geographical desires, He instead shipped her 10 hours away to a small village with not a church or immigrant in sight.
“I was like, 'God, you didn’t keep your promise. Why are you sending me away from the Church? Like, you know I need Church,'” she said. “What am I going to do out there? There are no refugees or migrants out there, and I’m not going to get peanut butter!”
After writing her supervisor asking for a switch and subsequently getting denied, McLeod started hoping that she would break her leg or that somebody would steal her purse.
“My whole life changed,” she said. “The first year how I dealt with that was I would leave every three months to go to Casablanca. . . . Every time God would say, ‘You need to go back to your village.’”
After months of trying to reconcile God’s will with her own, she received a distinct impression from Heavenly Father:
“He's like, 'I love you so much,'" McLeod says. "'I need you to help me. I need you to do this work. Will you do this work?'"
And after giving her will to God, McLeod witnessed Heavenly Father's plan unfolding in the lives of His children, including her own.
To hear the rest of Brittani McLeod's story, listen to the full This is the Gospel podcast here: