Saints then, like Saints now, came in all sorts. Some knew from the beginning the dimension of the commitment that they were making, others recognized only the sweet, strong taste of the truth and, hungering for more, followed where the search led them, step by step.
One of these people was David Lewis, a neighbor boy not yet twelve, who remembered the meeting at which the Church was organized, including the fact that the room they met in “had no floor except dirt.” He asked if he could be baptized, and the Prophet sent him home to talk it over with his parents and “if possible get their consent.”
He wrote, “I went home and asked my mother if she was willing that I join the Church.” (There’s a little humor in the account: She asked, “What church?”) Her answer was: “Yes, David, you can do so if you please, but David, the whole world is against them, including all the good ministers.” Stubbornly David gave his reasons: “I like the way Joseph speaks, he preaches baptism for the remission of sins, the laying on of hands for the reception of the Holy Ghost, etc.”
He was baptized—twenty-nine days after the organization of the Church, on his twelfth birthday, in a stream two miles down a road and two miles over a “cow trail.” Joseph performed the ordinance and then tried to persuade David not to go home yet, since a violent thunderstorm had broken as soon as the baptism was completed. David insisted on going straight home—he’d promised his mother he would. The Prophet pressed no further but instead “promised me that the Lord would be with me, and would take me safely home to my mother.”
Lost and frightened on the way home through the woods, he remembered the Prophet’s promise and knelt to pray that the Lord would “take me safely to my home and to be a lamp to my feet and a guide to my pathway.” The answer came as specifically as his prayer. A light, resembling the illumination from a coal-oil lamp, appeared and moved ahead of him down the path to his house, circled around to the back door, and went out as soon as his mother, who had seen it pass the window, opened the door. When David told the Prophet about it later, Joseph answered, “David, I knew that you would get lost in the woods and that the Lord would guide you home.”
Lavina Fielding Anderson, “Ensign,” Sept. 1978, 26; Reminiscence of David Lewis, dictated to Andrew Jensen, Sept. 10, 1908, LDS Archives.