Over 27 years ago, Heavenly Father touched my heart in a very pedestrian place. I was walking on a sidewalk in Seoul, South Korea. A convert of just two years, I was a missionary, and my companion and I served in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods on earth. Hundreds of looming apartment buildings cast everything in shadow, their thousands of residents darting past me to whatever their daily life demanded. In a flash of inspiration, a realization burst into my mind, an idea I’d never considered before, even for a second.

I turned to my companion and said: “You know, I can do anything with my life!” To him, the realization was unremarkable. But to me this was a moment I would never forget. It changed everything.

For years, I’d believed the opposite. I had been trapped in a prison of my own mind and felt my life would amount to nothing. I’m not sure how I developed that deep-seated belief. I have loving parents who raised me well. We lived in the deserts of central New Mexico and used to drive to the top of the nearby mountain peaks. From there I could see into eternity, across vast high plains, dormant volcanoes, the slithering cottonwood-lined Rio Grande, and on into burning orange sunrises and sunsets. On moonless nights, from those lofty heights, I would peer into skies so bursting with stars and constellations they screamed of mystery and endless possibility. But I never had a sense that such possibilities applied to me.

By my senior year of high school, for reasons I can’t fully explain, one dominant mindset had lodged itself firmly into the essence of my being: I was nothing and could achieve nothing. I also had no sense of what “achievement”—whether in career, family, or spirituality—meant. I drifted wherever the winds of life blew me, and to that point, they were blowing me nowhere. In my mind, it was a background reality that I was less intelligent, with no potential. My beliefs left me trapped, without the slightest idea how to get free. What’s worse, I didn’t even know I was in this mental prison or that I should try to escape from it.

How many of us are trapped in these prisons of our minds, living in mental poverty? My companion in Korea was not impoverished by the same mentality that captured me, but I have learned in the years since that he was facing his own incarcerating walls. For each of us, those walls come from different sources: childhood trauma, abuse, genetics, thought distortions borne of the culture in which we are raised, insecurities, lack of opportunity, physical and mental health challenges, bigotry, drugs, the need for the praise of others—the list is as long as the number of humans on this planet, but the items on it are the bricks that form the prisons of our minds.

What is truly and utterly remarkable is that Christ and Heavenly Father can help us identify our unique prisons, then set us free.

This is what Sister Sharon Eubank was referencing recently when she described temple building as the “greatest poverty alleviation system in the world.”¹ Giving people the opportunity to connect through covenants with Christ provides them the opening to let Him free them from mental poverty. Online commentators mocked her for her message, but they misperceived her point. Temples alleviate worldly poverty in lasting ways only spiritual eyes can see. They connect men and women to God, who frees them from mental prisons, which allows them to rise above even the most challenging travails of this life. I have seen this again and again and again.

And it is precisely what happened with me.

I discovered The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during my junior year of high school and studied it most of my senior year and through graduation. Following a fast to know if what I’d been learning was true, I had a powerful moment where I could see clearly what my life would be like with and without striving to live gospel covenants.

This is what lay before me: If I spent my time on earth striving to keep my covenants, my life successes would be in family, the loving embrace of warm relationships, the joy of eternal families and loving bonds, a joyful marriage and children, service, and a lifetime of growing into what God intended me to be. If I didn’t and instead walked away from what I had learned, I saw temporal success: academic, financial, career. But my life was cold, with tense relationships, a struggling family life, and the chilled existence that comes from the self-centered pursuit of prestige above all else.

What I saw was personal to me. The two competing paths of my life are where I would have gone, with my personality and unique circumstances, with and without the Church of Jesus Christ. I don’t suggest those trails would necessarily apply to anyone else.²

I decided to be baptized and committed to give myself, my will, and my heart to following Jesus Christ wherever He might take me. Shortly afterward, I was called to serve in Korea. I still had no vision for my life and a debilitating lack of self-worth—baptism alone didn’t “fix” that for me—but I was willing to go where asked. And it was that willingness that eventually led to my life-altering moment on the sidewalk.

It was as if God had caused the bricks in the walls that kept me in shadow to tear away. For the first time, I stepped forward from my prison. I remembered the vast mountain vistas and the eternity of the night sky and the endless possibilities I saw as a child and realized I had a path among them. I, an unremarkable young man from an unremarkable small town, was remarkable to the Almighty.

Amid literally millions, God had whispered singularly to me that He saw me, and He had a path for me to find. It would be a journey unique to me, as much spiritual as tangible, but it would be laden with meaning and eternal significance.

I cannot express how grateful I am for that moment. God gave me an understanding that would alter everything, and He had bestowed it upon me at a time when it could still make a difference. This was not a realization that dawned so late in life I could do nothing about it, but a powerful, palpable North Star that could orient me as I navigated mortality. It changed not just how I saw myself, but how I saw everyone. We all have limitless potential.

If we know our worth before God and our divine potential, how do we pursue it? First, we need to maintain that perspective—which can be hard to do.

After my mission, a very real possibility of sliding back into my old mindset loomed. I remember the drive back to my hometown. After an hour along a dark stretch of desert interstate, we crested a hill. The familiar sight of my town’s few twinkling lights appeared in the distance.

A sinking feeling descended upon me. It was involuntary. I felt as if I should turn around, that if I were to keep going, the prison from which I had broken free would build around me again. The feeling was as real as if a heavy, suffocating blanket had been draped around me by some unseen traveling companion. To this day, I can recall that dejection with perfect clarity.

But it was a fleeting moment. After what God had allowed me to experience in Korea, what were these past limitations to control me now? They were nothing, just a reminder of who I had been and a perceived reality I no longer needed to accept. The moment of profound freedom I experienced in Korea was only the beginning. I now realized that the next step in my journey needed to include the same mindset, wherever it might lead.

As my life went on, I never abandoned reason or evidence; far too many embrace the false belief that reason and faith cannot coexist in the same person. Instead, I combined my capacity for logic and my ability to assess evidence with inspiration. Through that inspiration, I learned what had been an unknowable mystery to me as a youth: that achievement means placing ourselves on the path God would have us travel, whether or not it includes financial or worldly success (beyond providing for our families). It may include wealth and prestige, and to those on the outside looking in, it may even appear as if we have sought them, but they are a byproduct, never the goal. Achievement includes being where we need to be, when we need to be there—regardless of what others may say or think about our choices—so that God can make of our lives far more than what we could make of them on our own. President Ezra Taft Benson explained it this way (and President Russell M. Nelson quoted this passage in his teachings as prophet):

That is true “achievement.” It leads to the spiritual rest most of us seek in this life, and no other worldly pursuit can ever match it.⁴

Living by that idea would trouble many of my colleagues. I am an academic, and many (certainly not all!) in modern academia are as hostile to religious faith as people think they are. Another professor once told me that religious people were “nuts, incapable of rational thought.” The obvious rebuttal to that sentiment lies in the thousands of scientists and researchers across the globe, in every field, who are also people of deep faith. Regardless, such criticisms do not trouble me. I’ve committed to allow God’s will to swallow my appetites, passions, and desires, even in the face of deep skepticism.

For me at least, putting President Benson’s words into practice means doing what God asks, rather than what we think we want to do, or what others think we should do. It includes striving to:

And—perhaps most importantly—it means we pick ourselves up when we fail, repent, and strive again.

Viewing life this way is to live by the great Christian paradox: By losing ourselves we find ourselves. But what we lose is minuscule compared with what He promises. Our potential is so endless that upon viewing it, Moses remarked that “man is nothing.”⁵ Because he saw not just the infinity of God’s creations, but his own potential as God’s child, Moses knew his future included worlds without end.

Considering what can lie ahead for us, I can’t help but wonder what we must look like to Heavenly Father when we compare our worldly accomplishments with those of others. I often imagine watching ants squabbling over who found the largest bread crumb, unaware of all else that is out there and available. We are glancing sideways; God would have us peer up.

From the time I returned home from my mission, the last quarter of a century has involved following routes through life that, at times, made no sense to others. That has been challenging. My wife and I have turned down lucrative opportunities when others deemed us insane for saying no.

We’ve pursued one path when loved ones or colleagues felt we should chase another. We’ve turned down prestigious offers for less respected positions and been ignored by people whose attention I would’ve preferred to receive. This is not to say we’ve followed illogical or irresponsible paths—as I said, we have not abandoned reason or evidence. But we have also followed inspiration, and Heavenly Father has led us to places and opportunities we never could have imagined on our own.

We have strayed at times, lured by temptations or false competition with others. I am grateful that God has given us a way back through faith on His Son Jesus Christ, repentance, and trying once again to yield our hearts to Him.

Recently, I returned with two of my sons to the mountains of my youth, and I reflected on where God has led me: to situations and profound love and understanding that I never could have imagined when my approach to life was purely secular, to the life He showed me the night I decided to be baptized. Some of that “accomplishment” other people recognize; much, they don’t. It is known to me, to my family, and to my Heavenly Father. And that is enough.

How do we free ourselves from the prisons of our own minds? We can’t. Only God can. He has done it for millions. He did it for me, as He does for all who truly give their hearts and spirits to Him.

Note: This article first appeared in the September/October 2026 issue of LDS Living magazine.

Notes
1. Sharon Eubank, “The Sacred Life of Trees” (Brigham Young University-Idaho devotional, Feb. 15, 2024), byui.edu.
2. The three preceding paragraphs were adapted from Stephen J. Collis, “My First Experience with Religious Freedom,” ldsliving. com, May 15, 2019.
3. Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Ezra Taft Benson (2014), 42-43, as quoted in Russell M. Nelson, “Overcome the World and Find Rest,” Liahona, November 2022, 97.
4. See Nelson, “Overcome the World and Find Rest.”
5. Moses 1:10.

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