Steven Wayne Roper
AI Summary And Interpretation
Archived AI-written recap preserved as a separate reference layer.
Note To The Reader
This draft preserves the earlier AI-written recap and interpretation layer instead of mixing it into the two Steve-led editions. It is not the primary reading version. Use the raw unabridged for Steve in bracket-corrected form, the readable unabridged for mostly Steve with normalized grammar and punctuation, and the cited-source pages if you need to trace specific wording back to a source file.
Chapter 1: Early Years
Steve starts here young, restless, funny, homesick, and not yet cleaned up for anybody.
1970 - Trout Farm
He had been away from home only a short time, but the letters got raw fast. He wrote that he had "nothing else to do but write," so he started around five in the afternoon and kept going. By page three he was already complaining that it was only Thursday and no answer had come back yet. He had written home every day since he got there.
In the middle of that same letter he tried to make homesickness sound lighter than it was. He wrote a little message and then translated it himself: he had everything he needed, except the people he wanted most. Then he admitted what the long letter really was. He was lonely, homesick, and close to tears. He did not want to go through that feeling.
The surviving pages from the other trout-farm letter show the same pull in a harder form. He had been fitting rocks into a hole, was exhausted, could hardly stand up, and said his stomach was growling because it had not had his mother's cooking in three days. He wanted to come home very badly. Even there, though, he was already worrying about other people's feelings. He did not want to hurt Smithy by leaving, and he wanted his family to help him come home in a way that would not make Smithy feel like a failure.
That is early Steve in one place: tired, homesick, dramatic, affectionate, and already thinking about how to leave without wounding somebody.
1970-07-29 - Green Valley Camp
Sometimes all that survives is a scrap. From Green Valley camp he sent almost nothing:
Dear Mom and Dad, Camp is up by the Green Valley sign. I'll draw a map.
Then the map, then:
I have to go. Bye for now. No time. Love, Steven Roper
Even when there was no time, he still wrote home.
Early 1970s - "This Is Me In Three Years"
The scrapbook keeps one of the better little self-portraits. He drew himself older, bearded, and wearing a Batman shirt, then wrote, "This is me in three years." It is a teenage joke, but it belongs here because it is one of the few places where he simply stopped and pictured himself.
1972 - "P.S. I'll Try"
He also left behind a school apology that is too plain to cut. Writing to Mr. Holms and Mr. Hunnex, he admitted he had not acted the way he should have in French. He promised to be more respectful, to stop talking unless asked, to raise his grades, and to quit getting up without permission. Then, at the end, came the line that matters most:
P.S. I'll try...
It is not polished repentance. It is a young guy writing down what he knows he should do and hoping that effort might still count.
1975 - Ricks
By the Ricks period he still sounded young, but the shape of a different life was still mixed up with ordinary college life. In one surviving letter he wrote quickly about family news, a new baby girl, joked that he almost bought cigars, and apologized for the short note because some girl had invited him to go out to eat. Then the postscript turns sharper:
Guess what. I'm going to be interviewed to become an elder this Tuesday. He's going to call the bishop tonight. I'm so happy.
The letter is casual and half sideways, which is exactly why it matters. He was still writing like a young guy in the middle of whatever came next. But becoming an elder clearly mattered to him, and he was happy enough to tack it on at the end like the real news.
Chapter 2: First Mission And Testimony
This is the first big turn in his life. He leaves home, gets moved across islands, keeps writing about family, keeps running into his own limits, and slowly stops borrowing belief from other people.
1975-12-15 - First Letter From The Mission
He opened his first surviving mission letter with apology and logistics:
Aloha Mom and Dad. I'm sorry I didn't write you sooner, but I've been pretty busy, and we're not supposed to write on any other day except Monday. Today is P-day. Not fun day, but work day: laundry, shopping, cleaning, washing the car, and so on.
He was already practical about the place. It was "like paradise over here." Everything was green. The beach was half a block from the house. Four elders were sleeping there. The bathroom flushed. He was already noticing people, calling some of them rude, calling his senior companion lazy, and planning to push harder.
The affection matters most in the first letter. He thanked his parents for coming to the airport because it had made his day. Later, after the houses, wards, dinner appointments, budgets, and checking-account instructions, he cut to the line that belonged there all along:
P.S. I really do love you.
Before The Mission Was Settled - It Had To Become His
front reflection near 00019 / 00020
One of the most important seams in the whole mission arc was preserved near the front of the handwritten diary. Before Guam, before the later cliff story, he was already being forced to answer whether the mission was actually his.
The reflection says a doctor marked him as not recommended because he thought Steve was going for his parents and should go to medical school instead. Steve went back, told the doctor off, got the recommendation changed, and later took the Hawaii call as the place the Lord wanted him to go. In the same reflection he says that when he finally gave his talk, he got up and talked his mouth off.
The important thing is not polish. It is ownership. He had to decide before he could defend anything.
Early Mission Months - Family And Faith In The Same Breath
Distance sharpened his love for home almost immediately. In one early letter he wrote:
I never knew how much I loved you until I'd been gone for a while.
He called the mission one of the happiest times of his life, said he now knew Joseph Smith had not written the Book of Mormon but had translated it through the gift and power of God, and promised to start sending tapes because he was tired of writing.
Another letter carries one of the clearest family lines in the whole archive:
Mom, I do love you, and I love the Church, but my family comes before the Church.
That line was not written after decades of reflection. It was written while he was already in the field, already spending all his time on church work.
The same mission letters also show him starting to watch himself change. After wanting to "beat the living tar out of" a man who disrupted a baptismal situation, he wrote:
But I held my temper, and I'm still letting it go. I guess I'm beginning to control my temper.
That is the early mission in miniature: testimony, affection, anger, effort, and self-correction all jammed together in the same few pages.
1976-02-11 - The Spirit Kept Him Standing On The Ground
By February he had one of the first clear mission highs he ever described. A family they were teaching had started smoking again, and he thought they were goners. Then he started bearing testimony:
I felt the Spirit so strongly that I had to see if I was still standing on the ground.
He said they came home late, but that did not matter because the Spirit had guided them to stay. He nearly cried inside from happiness and did not want to come down from that kind of high. Then he gave the line that ties the whole thing back to home:
If it wasn't for you, Mom and Dad, I wouldn't have these sensation.
He loved the work. He said it directly.
1976-03-01 - Guam
Guam came with its own shock. He arrived at four in the morning after an eight-hour flight, said the air felt thick when he stepped off the plane, and sat in a laundromat trying to describe the place. He reached first for the word "jungle," then pulled back and kept looking.
He had a hard time leaving Hawaii because so many people stayed up to see him off. He wrote that he really did love the Hawaiian people and hoped he would soon feel the same way about the Chamorro people. Even the baggage search got recorded: they opened his bag, flipped through his books, and could hardly get it shut again.
The longer Guam family letter is one of the richest in the mission run because he let everything into it. He asked about Dark Canyon, camping, hunting, family friends, Grandma's reactions, tropical storms, earthquakes, and bowling. In the middle of all that he wrote:
I'm going to have about ten to twelve children when I get a wife. I love children to death. I'm seriously thinking about adopting some foreign children when I get home.
Then, a page later:
I love you very much, and I love the Lord.
And in the postscript he asked for another missionary journal because his pages were already full.
1976-10-15 - Called To Saipan
By October the mission moved him again, this time to Saipan. The transfer form is dry, but it fixes the line of the story. The assignment was to work the new area and "develop the potential of the area." He kept getting moved farther into the island work instead of back toward anything easier.
1976-12 - The Diary Starts Talking Back
pages 00021, 00023, 00031, 00033, 00037, 00041, 00047
The late-1976 mission-journal pages are where the field stopped being only letters home and became something more immediate.
On the Dec 6 page he said the first day felt "real weird." The elders looked to him to say family prayer. After talking to President Johnson he felt "100 percent better," then wrote the line that matters:
The Spirit in this mission is overwhelming.
Two days later he had finished his first twenty-five-hour fast, argued with a man who said the Book of Mormon had been written by the devil, and gone to the Salt Lake temple. He called it the most spiritual place he had ever seen.
The middle of December got even stronger. In one house he felt the Spirit so strongly that he could not stop bearing his testimony for hours. He said he was "high on the Spirit that night." In another discussion he bore testimony and again had to check whether he was still standing on the ground.
Then Christmas week showed a different register. One day was all delays, buses, and frustration until the elders sang Christmas songs to old people at a hospital. He wrote that he felt he was really helping those people just by singing. On Christmas Day itself he said he felt the Spirit so strongly you could cut it with a knife, and he cried inside because he wanted to be close to Heavenly Father.
At the end of the month came one of the best belonging lines in the whole first mission archive. After a discussion with the Melkonians he wrote that for once he did not feel like just another object. He felt part of the discussion. He felt the warmth of it. He wanted that kind of gift again.
January And February 1977 - He Kept Getting Remade In Public
pages 00053, 00055, 00057, 00063, 00071, 00073, 00081, 00087, 00097, 00107, 00109 manual-1977-cindy-letter-guam-pages-1-2.txt
Early 1977 kept moving between embarrassment, stubbornness, prayer, and small spiritual shocks.
On January 4 he admitted that he kept feeling like he was the one being taught instead of the one doing the teaching. On January 5, after jumping a fence toward a wild boar and getting corrected, he wrote:
My reasoning took over my temper.
And ended the lesson bluntly:
I have to think before I act.
January 6 is one of the key pages. After answering a man's questions and giving the prayer, he said the words kept coming even though he did not know what to say:
It felt like someone was talking over me.
He wondered if he was getting a revelation of some kind. He had not cleaned the experience up yet. He was still just trying to name it.
On January 10 and 11 he said he felt the Spirit guiding each one of them, then had to pray his way through a public class when the film projector was going wrong and the Lord seemed to him to be working overtime. On January 18 he got up scared to give a talk, then spoke so long he thought five minutes had passed when it had really been twenty. On January 20 he blessed a jaundiced baby, admitted he was scared, but did it anyway and felt a little sensation of the Spirit.
By January 28 the pattern had become familiar enough for him to notice it in his body. He had been sick. Then in the middle of teaching he was sick but not anymore, and from then on he was talking "with the Spirit." On February 3 his companion told him he felt the Spirit come out of Steve while he was speaking. Steve said he knew it too.
Not all of it was uplift. One of the strongest endurance lines came on a rough day when he and Elder Johnson were tired and angry. Steve said:
Let's not let this be a bad day.
So they went back out.
By February 22 he was writing that he loved teaching children and wanted to "touch the hearts of young people." The mission had become more than a duty run. It was working on him from the inside.
A mission-period letter to Cindy carries the same mix of work, frustration, and conviction. He says he is teaching an awful lot but still worries that he is not spiritual enough to bring people to repentance. After describing a hostile church meeting where he was denied the chance to explain what he believed, he comes back to the line underneath all the irritation: he is glad he has the gospel and has not been led astray. The mission was still working on his temper, but it was also hardening his testimony.
1977 - Other People Saw It Too
The outside letters matter because they keep this chapter from sounding like memory alone.
Jean Nago wrote his mother from Saipan to say Steve was always in a good mood, smiling, joking, and working hard to spread the gospel. Her boys adored him and rolled around the living room floor with him whenever he came over.
The next transfer letter moved him again, this time to Majuro, with the stated objective to "Learn the area and find, teach and baptize families. Get to know the Native people of the area."
By July, Bro. and Sis. Fewkes wrote that four more people had been baptized and that Steve had labored many hours with them. Their line is worth keeping:
You can be grateful to have a son who puts all he has into his calling.
They called him humble. They said the Marshallese people loved him very much.
Later Retellings - Guam Stayed With Him
Years later, when he told the story cleanly, the center of it was Guam.
In the 2003-2004 journal he said that on his first mission he finally realized he did not actually have his own testimony. A minister asked whether he knew the gospel was true. Steve answered that he did not know. His companion was in shock and told him he had better find out.
That night he went to the cliff in Guam. He thought through the churches he knew. He decided the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the best one because of family. It cared where family would be after death. So he stayed there and prayed. He felt fear first. He wanted to get up. Then came the answer:
You have always known it was true.
And if he wanted to know whether God lived, he only had to look around him.
In the 2015 blog version he made the emotional part even plainer. He asked, "Can God actually love me?" He said he had always felt like an outsider in the Church, tried to be somebody else to fit in, and finally went alone to pray because the Church taught that families can be together forever. He stayed by the cliff until he knew. After that, he wrote, he did not have to worry about fitting in anymore because he knew the truth.
The prayer talk gives the broader frame around the same life. He said prayer had been good to him since he was about eighteen. He called himself a result of the prayer of a mother or friend when he got the chance to go to Ricks College. Then he told the Rigby / Fillmore truck story, the leaking carburetor, the flat tire, the green gas station he never saw again, and the moment when a forced prayer turned into an answer. His conclusion was simple:
I had a testimony of prayer.
That bridge language came later. The foundation under it was the first mission. He left home one way and came back another.
Chapter 3: Marriage And Young Family
Marriage did not make Steve polished. It made him more exposed. Money was thin, children were coming, home kept pulling at him, and he still struggled to say plainly what he felt. The record is better for that.
1979-01-15 - Waiting For The Baby And Missing California
The first strong young-family letter opens from Orem with homesickness again:
Business is slow as usual. Today I wish I were in California. Homesick, I guess, for you guys.
He was already writing on stationery that said Steve and Cynthia Roper, but he still sounded like the same son writing home from away. He told his parents they were the greatest parents a son could have had. He said that if all went well he would be back in California in a year and maybe headed toward chiropractic school. He was going to pray about that "to make sure it's all right with the Big Boss."
At the same time he was about a month away from becoming a father:
It's about one month before little Roper will be born, and I'm scared to death. I can't wait to show off the little bugger.
He had bought Cindy a washer. She was overjoyed about it. He was in a grouchy day himself. Then, like always, he turned back toward home and started telling his father to cut down on salt, lose weight, pray, and do it now.
That is early married Steve exactly right: anxious, affectionate, bossy, hopeful, and already carrying family in two directions at once.
1980-08-11 - Writing To His Mother While Sitting Beside Her
One of the cleanest short family notes in the whole archive starts with the line:
This is funny, and you're sitting right next to me, but I'll try to say what I feel right now.
He said he loved her very much and that it was easy to say and hard to show. He thanked her for patience, for understanding, and for trusting him when he had "doubts of living" and was going through a hard period. He closed by saying that many times he did not understand himself.
The note matters because it is adult gratitude without any performance around it. He was still awkward. He wrote it anyway.
Early 1980s - He Wrote Down The Love He Struggled To Say Aloud
The undated Cindy letter is rough and direct in a way a polished anniversary note never would have been.
He started by saying he was not a card man and that no writer could say for him how much he cared about her. He admitted that they had their ups and downs, but that getting through them kept telling him she loved him. Then he tried to explain how his love worked when it did not come out cleanly:
When you are away I worry about you and pray that you will come home safe. Is that love?
And:
When I come home from school, I try to help with the kids in my own little way, play with them, and give them baths. Is that love?
He said he had wanted many times to buy the whole store out for her, picked things up, then put them back because there was not enough money.
The strongest part is where he stops pretending certainty:
Is that called love? I don't know.
Then he answered in the only way he knew how. If she were gone, he would be terribly hurt. He was a quiet guy when it came to his feelings. He had lived with her for four years and thought she was great. There was nobody he would trade places with, now or at any time.
Early 1980s - He Wanted To Be A Better Husband, Not Just Say The Words
The Valentine note is shorter, but it says the same thing with less room to hide:
My writing sucks, but I did look at cards for you, and none of them would be as funny as me.
Then:
I do think about you a lot and care about you more than you might think. I love you very much, and I don't show it much.
He said he wished he could be a better husband, one she would be happy with every day of her life. He knew she did more for him than he did for her. He said he would try to be more loving. At the end he made it plain again:
Most of all, you are my number one Valentine.
The note is ordinary. That is why it belongs.
1991-09-27 - He Already Regretted Leaving His Family
By 1991 family had moved even more toward the center of how he measured a trip, a duty, or an absence.
Writing from a plane in Hawaii, he did not open with scenery or adventure. He opened with regret:
I feel bad that I am gone, leaving my family for this. I wish I had never gone.
He asked about his mother's leg, asked whether a mission was in sight for his parents, said he would love to see them go, and apologized for not spending more time with them in the hospital before he left.
It is a small postcard, but it shows how much the center of gravity had moved. Mission and church still mattered to him. Leaving family had become harder to justify emotionally, even when he did it anyway.
2004-12 - Their Poorest Early Christmas Still Became One Of The Best
Years later, when he looked back on one of the poorest Christmases of his married life, he did not clean it up or pretend it had been comfortable.
He wrote that the first Christmas with his wife after his mission was in Orem, Utah. They did not have much money. He remembered getting a Christmas tree from an apartment complex where somebody was leaving for the holidays. He was painting the building and the tree had been left in the hallway, so he brought it home and they decorated it as best they could.
Then he cut the memory down to what it actually was:
Life was simple-just me and my wife with no money, but we had each other.
And then:
It was one of the best Christmases I ever had.
He said later that what matters is not the gifts or the food, but who you share Christmas with. Families get together. Friends show up. People spend time together. It is a season for being kind and loving to the people you love most.
The poverty matters. The washer matters. The apartment tree matters. That is what makes the affection believable. They did not have much. He never forgot that they had each other.
The written record thins sharply after this point. Between these scattered letters and the journals that begin speaking regularly again in the early 2000s, most of the surviving trail goes quiet. What comes next is not a full record of those missing years. It is the voice that survives when the archive begins talking steadily again.
Chapter 4: Fatherhood And Family Theology
Fatherhood in Steve's papers is not mostly soft or ceremonial. It is practical, urgent, repetitive, affectionate, and usually tied to repentance. He kept coming back to the same cluster of ideas: keep moving, stay close to the Lord, do not wait until later, forgive people, and remember that what one person does never stays with just one person. In these notes and letters he sounds less like a polished teacher than like a father who believed eternity was already pressing on the family every day.
2002-02-21 - He Loved The People Who Kept Finding A Way Forward
Writing to Charity after she got home safely, he praised not perfection but staying in motion:
You are such a survivor. I love you for that.
Then he explained what he meant:
You make things happen and are willing to find ways to get things to work. That is your talent: to see a situation and find a solution.
What he admired was not ease. It was willingness. He said people learn and make mistakes, but that she was willing to continue, and that was what happiness was about. He folded Rock into the family in the same note, said they honestly loved him too, and ended with one of his recurring lines:
Pray about it and we can always work things out. Give me a plan, as I always say.
It was not just a joke or a catch phrase. It was part of his theology. Keep going. Find the next step. Ask the Lord. Make a plan.
2002-03-26 - The Key To Family Life Was Staying Close To The Lord
A month later he reduced family life to a single priority:
The key to family life is to stay close to the Lord. All else will fall into place if that is your first priority.
He admitted this had not always been his own first priority, but said it was now. That admission matters. He did not write as someone pretending he had always lived his own formula cleanly. He wrote as someone who believed he had learned the order the hard way.
The note then turns toward forever. He hoped the family could always get along and be together forever. He tells Charity he is proud of the love in her heart for the family and says that love for family is "a great thing to have." In Steve's papers, family was not an alternative to faith. Family was one of the main reasons faith mattered at all.
2002-04-09 - Later Never Comes
He could sound gentle in one sentence and severe in the next. In a birthday note to one of his daughters, he writes about conference, eternal families, and the need to keep trying to do what the Lord wants. Then he cuts down to the point:
Time is running out for some of us, and it is never too late, but it gets harder to come back as we let the idea of "we will do it later" enter our minds. Because later never comes true. We only have today.
That is one of the clearest lines in the whole fatherhood seam. He did not believe in indefinite future repentance. He believed delay hardened people. Even when he said it is never too late, he immediately warned that later gets harder. For Steve, love often sounded like trying to push the people he loved toward action while there was still time.
2002-09-06 - He Would Not Give Up Trying To Do What Was Right
One short September note holds apology, obedience, and persistence in the same breath. He says there are believers who obey and believers who do not obey. Then he puts himself among the unfinished:
I am still trying to obey.
And then:
I make mistakes every day, and I will not give up until I die trying to do what is right.
He followed that by saying he loved her, wanted her with the family "if I make it," and apologized for any hurt he had caused.
That cluster matters. He was not writing as a man who thought himself above the problem. He still saw himself as a man making mistakes every day. What made him Steve was the refusal to make that an excuse to quit.
2003-02-14 - A Family Gathering Only Mattered If Forgiveness Came With It
When family conflict pressed on an anniversary gathering, Steve did not pretend that just getting people in one room would solve anything. He said that if the family was going to gather, everyone should be invited:
If we are going to have a family gathering, everyone is invited. Period.
But he did not stop there. Invitation without forgiveness was not enough:
Forgive our fellow men and women. Maybe not be their friends, but forgive them.
Then he asked the real question:
Would Mom want this party? Yes, but only if the feeling of hate were not there.
In family conflict, he was not asking for fake harmony. He was asking whether the point of family had survived the bitterness. If it had not, the event itself could turn into a sham.
2003-02-27 - Peace Was Not The End; It Had To Keep Becoming Love
Later that month he wrote one of the clearest short statements of how he thought change worked. After praising family growth and faith, he describes a conversation about peace:
She told me about her finding peace. I listened to her, and when she was done I explained that it doesn't stop there. It's not like you found it and that is the end.
Then he pushes it forward:
You have to continue each day, looking for things to do to have love. If she never stops looking for truth in her life, and I never stop, then we will be able to go back to our Heavenly Father together.
Peace, for him, was not a resting place. It had to become a daily practice of truth and love. Even in a private family note he could not leave peace alone as mere relief. He wanted it turned into direction.
2003-03-05 - Family Was The Most Important Thing Besides The Lord
Within a week he says the hierarchy as directly as he ever would:
My family is the most important thing I have besides the Lord.
This was not sentimental language for him. He immediately ties it to temple prayer, urgency, and consequence. He says he has done everything he can think of to help, says "time is running out," and insists:
We need to act now.
Then he widens the moral radius:
Anything we do affects everyone we are around, and even future generations we cannot even comprehend.
That line is one of the strongest statements in the archive of how he thought family consequence worked. Nobody was acting alone. Nobody was falling alone. Nobody was being faithful alone either.
2003-08-19 - He Had Started Loving Ryan In A Way That Felt Eternal
Steve could be intense about doctrine and repentance, but he was also very plain when affection deepened. Writing about Ryan, he says:
I am beginning to have a love for Ryan that will last through the eternities.
The sentence shows the same theology in a different register. Eternity was not only warning. It was attachment. He wanted people back. He wanted relationships to last. He wanted love to survive death, time, distance, mistakes, and unfinished lives.
2015-09-15 - He Wanted His Grandchildren Close To Their Parents And Close To Family
More than a decade later the same father logic is still there, only gentler. Writing to Mikailo and Teo, he tells them to choose friends wisely, meaning friends who do good things and not bad things. Then he gives one of the clearest late-family instructions in the archive:
Always make sure your mom and dad are your best friends.
He wanted children to be able to tell their parents everything, "no matter how old you are." Then he turns to family belonging itself. He tells Mikailo he has noticed how much he loves being around family, not only his parents and brother but cousins, grandparents, uncles, and aunts too.
The voice is softer here, but the conviction is the same. Steve still thought love had structure. It needed loyalty, honesty, nearness, and repeated good choices. The theology never really changed. It just sounded more grandfatherly at the end than it had in the harder father letters of 2002 and 2003.
Chapter 5: Jake, Missions, And What Lasts
Steve did not think of a mission as a sealed-off youth accomplishment. In his letters it keeps turning up as a pattern, a test, a measuring line, and then a second life that has to be carried home. Jake's mission gave him a second way to say that out loud. Sometimes he was speaking about his son. Sometimes he was speaking about himself through his son. Usually it was both.
Late 2001 Or Early 2002 - He Finally Saw What His Son's Mission Had Left Behind
When Steve traveled into Jake's mission area in Mexico, one of the strongest things he brought back was not scenery but aftermath. He met a family Jake had taught and baptized:
Jake had baptized this family.
What impressed him was not just that they remembered Jake. It was what they said about why so many converted families fail to stay:
They said it was the members' fault because they don't fellowship them. The missionaries do their job and the members don't.
Then came the line that stayed with him:
They told me Jake was not the typical missionary, and that is why he will do well in the gospel after his mission.
That is one of the clearest moments in the whole mission-and-family seam. Steve was not just proud that Jake had worked hard. He was trying to understand what actually remains after a missionary leaves. The answer, in this scene, was not numbers. It was the kind of man the work had formed.
2002-07-29 - Coming Home Was The Real Test
Writing to Elder Phipps near the end of a mission, Steve says something that explains almost every Jake passage that follows:
You will find it easy while you are on a mission, and when you come home it will change. The real test will begin.
That line matters because he was not romantic about missionary structure. He knew the field gave a man rules, companions, schedules, and constant work. Coming home removed those walls. What lasted after that was the real question.
2002-09-06 - His Mission Still Governed How He Chose To Live
In a note to Elder Phipps he ties school, mission, service, and adult life into one sentence:
My mission changed my whole life too. There are not too many days that go by when I don't think of my mission. I make decisions in life based on the way my mission was served.
He immediately says he was not a perfect missionary, but that he cared about the people and that was what really mattered. Then he gives the lesson he wanted a younger missionary to carry home:
Serving others is what the Lord wants you to learn on your mission.
And finally:
Josh said a mission is not two years, but your whole life. The two years are a good start on your mission.
This is one of the strongest interpretive keys in the whole archive. Steve did not look back on his mission as one noble period among others. He treated it as the place that kept correcting the rest of his life.
2002-10-02 - Having Jake Home Was A Blessing That Could Not Be Replaced
Not long after Jake came home, Steve wrote that it was "a marvelous feeling" to have his son back after two years away. In the same note he says the family was starting to feel together again and closes with the line:
Having Jake home is a blessing that cannot be replaced.
The chapter needs that line because his view of missions was never abstract. He believed a mission could shape a life, but he also felt the absence while it was happening and the relief when the missionary came home.
2003-07-11 - Jake Came Home Pulled In Two Directions
Months later Steve gave the clearest father-son mission passage in the whole archive. He says Jake loved the mission so much that:
When he came off the plane, he was looking up to see if he could go back.
Then he explains the conflict:
He loves us so much that he was pulled in two directions.
Steve says that was hard for him because it had also been hard for him to leave his own mission. But he insists the blessing waiting after the mission is greater than the mission itself if the man can carry the work forward.
He told Jake directly:
A mission is not two years, but your whole life. Those two years are a jump start on the rest of your life.
Then comes the exchange that explains what Steve valued most:
I asked him if he was the best. He said no. But I tried to be the best, and that is what really matters.
When President Hunter released Jake, Steve says Jake sat there and cried, and that he cried too because Jake knew it was done. What mattered next was not the mission memory by itself. It was whether the mission would stay with him.
2006-06-09 - His Own Mission Had Set The Pattern
Writing years later to Elder Tate, one of his old companions, Steve says quietly what had been sitting underneath the whole chapter:
My mission was one of the greatest times of my life at that time.
Then he corrects the sentence toward its real point:
I would not have had those family experiences without my mission. It set the pattern of my life, and even though I screwed up so many times, it was my mission that got me back on track.
That is as direct as he ever gets. The mission was not just a source of stories or nostalgia. It became the form of conscience he kept returning to whenever he needed to get back in line.
He adds one more sentence that belongs beside all the father letters:
It's not what we have done, but what we are doing now, that makes us who we are.
That line is not only about him. It is also the logic underneath the way he kept talking to Jake.
2015-03-02 - He Kept Pointing Jake Toward The Next Step
By 2015 the mission language is still there, but now it has become father-son language. Steve is trying to keep Jake pointed toward the next step instead of letting regret swallow the whole future.
He tells Jake to use his time wisely and make the most of where he is. Then he cuts to the sentence that matters:
Being forgiven by your Heavenly Father is all that matters.
Then he tells him he can still move forward and make something with his life if he truly wants to.
This is the same mission theology after decades of wear. Effort still matters. Repentance still matters. The next step still matters. A hard stretch of life does not have to become the whole story.
2015-12-19 - Today Was What He Wanted Jake To Work On
Later that same year Steve wrote one of his clearest one-step-at-a-time letters to Jake. The setting is Christmas, but the note is really about attention, speech, and presence.
He says:
It's not the future that is the problem, but today.
Then he turns that into ordinary discipline: learn to speak better, listen better, and stop living so far ahead of the moment that the present gets wasted. He says he wants to become more proactive in talking to people and wants to be able to love the people he is with.
He closes simply:
I love you, son.
That is what lasts in this chapter. A mission for Steve was never only the place where testimony got stronger. It was where he learned the pattern he kept handing to his children: serve, care about people, come home changed, and then prove the change in ordinary life.
Chapter 6: Endurance, Temple, And Forgiveness
Steve's religious writing was rarely polished enough to hide what it was really about. He did not trust easy peace, static testimony, or clean spiritual self-images. He kept coming back to effort, to getting up again, to temple work for family, and to forgiveness as something that had to become action before it meant anything.
2002-09-10 - Do Some Good Instead Of Staying Down
In one note to Jared, Steve says plainly that life has real highs and real lows, but that people still have some agency over what they do next with them. He writes:
If we feel like crap, we need to get hold of ourselves and take our feet and kick ourselves in the butt to get going.
Then he pushes the thought outward:
Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do some good in this world.
He tells Jared to think of people who are worse off, people who are hungry, people carrying heavier burdens, and then move toward something worthwhile instead of staying folded in on himself.
This is Steve's anti-perfectionist spirituality in one of its bluntest forms. He did not deny discouragement. He denied its right to become a home.
2003-04-20 - The Church Felt Truer Even When He Did Not Understand Every Word
Temple meaning in Steve's papers is often tied to movement, family, and surprise rather than to polished doctrine. During Easter week he and the family got lost trying to find church and ended up in a Spanish branch. They did not understand every word, but they still felt the Spirit.
He says Cindy felt the Spirit even though she did not understand all the words. Then the week kept going toward the temple pageant in Mesa and a temple visit that left him feeling spiritually enlarged rather than merely reassured.
His summary point is that the Church felt truer to him that day than it had the day before because he had learned more about it.
For him, truth was not a static possession. It could become truer as he learned more, felt more, and let new experience work on him.
2004-11 - A Testimony Was Either Increasing Or Decreasing
In a ward Sunday School piece he gives one of the cleanest compact statements of his whole view of discipleship:
A testimony never stands still. It either increases or decreases.
Then he says how it grows:
The way it increases is to share it and live it.
Around that line he insists there is "no going back, only going forward," and that trials are experiences meant to teach rather than proof that faith has failed.
The importance of the passage is that he does not allow for neutral drift. Faith is active or it is dying. That idea runs through almost every later chapter.
2005-02 - God Kept Reaching People Years After The First Prompting
The next year he wrote a Sunday School reflection about Linda Blaquera, Danielle Blaquera, and a grieving woman named Rose. What interested him was the way the Lord kept working on people long after a first impression.
He says Linda once drove by the church and felt she needed to go inside. She heard the missionaries, was baptized, became inactive for years, and yet the old feeling never entirely left. When she came back, he says:
It was like she never left.
At Danielle's baptism another woman, Rose, walked in under grief and confusion, and the same pattern repeated. Steve says Rose felt loved there. He ends by calling the whole thing an experience:
To know that God answers prayers.
The seam matters because it shows how he thought change often worked. Not all at once. Not on schedule. Sometimes years later.
June 2006 - Temple Day With Grandma And Grandpa Bovert
Steve's temple pages are strongest when they stay attached to actual family names and actual acts instead of general church language. In the 2006 temple account he says it had been months since he got Grandma Bovert's and Grandpa Bovert's names ready. Then the day opened up almost unexpectedly and the work started moving.
Later, while the ordinances were being done, he says:
Grandpa was there, and he was happy this was done and that he had been waiting for this to happen.
He also says:
I feel he will help Grandma Bovert understand the truth.
In the sealing account he adds that his mother and father stood in proxy for Grandma and Grandpa Bovert, that he and Ryan were witnesses, and that he felt like Grandma approved of what he was doing.
This is one of the clearest places where temple work for him becomes active family labor instead of abstraction. The dead are still family. The work is still work.
2006 - Forgiveness Had To Become Something You Did
One of the strongest practical repentance passages in the archive comes when he realizes he is not willing to forgive someone who had hurt the family, even while standing close to priesthood and temple language.
He says he walked up, stuck out his hand, and said:
I forgive you, and I hope you can forgive me.
Then:
It was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
And then the result:
It was like a burden lifted off of me that I had been carrying with me for ten years.
He says he no longer felt animosity toward the man and adds:
Forgiveness is a wonderful thing when we do our part, and I can testify that the Holy Ghost will give you the blessing of letting go.
His forgiveness doctrine stays concrete. Not niceness. Not pretending nothing happened. Action first. Relief after.
2006 - You Had To Know Why You Were Doing The Right Thing
In the Why Do You Do The Things You Do? and Have You Ever Been On The Fence, Waiting? pieces, Steve presses against passive religion as hard as he ever does in writing.
He starts by asking why people are at church at all and warns that inherited churchgoing is not enough:
It's very important to know why we do the things we do.
Then he says one of the real reasons to come is:
To gain or strengthen your testimony.
The second piece pushes the same theme further. Using Nephi wanting the same vision his father had, he says people cannot just borrow conviction from leaders:
We have to get our own vision, and then we will act in any capacity to get it done.
Steve did not think obedience lasted unless a person understood it from the inside.
2006-2007 - We Can Never Start Over, But We Can Always Start Again
After temple work for family, he writes one of the clearest endurance lines in the whole archive:
We never give up trying, and we always pick ourselves up and try again. We can never start over, but we can always start again.
Then he admits:
I am not perfect, and I have so much to repent for, but I do not want to give up trying.
That may be the cleanest single summary of Steve's mature spiritual voice. Repentance was not a dramatic reset button. It was repeated reentry into the work.
2007-02 - Start Today And Make A Change To Have Love In Your Home
The A Pleasant Retreat piece brings the chapter back into the home. He says charity is first learned from mothers and fathers who care for children without thinking of themselves, and that family life changes when people stop reacting and choose a better action instead.
He gives the homely line:
You can always get more done with sugar than with pepper.
Then the command:
Start today and make a change to have love in your home. Be the one to make it happen.
The chapter lands there. Endurance for Steve was not just surviving pain or staying technically active. It was choosing again, forgiving again, learning again, and making the home a little better on purpose.
Chapter 7: Honduras And Second-Service Years
The Honduras mission does not read like the first mission. Steve is older, tired, physically limited, and often frustrated by systems, language, and people. But the second mission also shows what had survived. He was still trying to serve, still correcting himself in motion, still tying everything back to family and eternity, and still reading daily setbacks as part of the Lord's work rather than proof that the work was pointless.
2011-03-06 - His Faith Had Been Hit With A Torpedo
One of the bluntest Honduras letters opens with exhaustion and damage:
My faith has been hit with a torpedo, and there is a big hole where I thought there was hope.
He says the only one who can plug the hole is the Lord. Then, in the same letter, he refuses to reduce the work to personalities or local style:
This is the Lord's church. Not the Honduran way or the gringo way, but the Lord's way.
He says they do not want to be "another missionary that came and left" only to watch everything go back to the same pattern. And then he turns the criticism back on himself:
I need to forgive and I need to forgive and I need to forgive.
And:
I first need to change myself before I can ever think about changing others.
That is the Honduras register at its clearest. Discouragement is real, but he keeps dragging the work back toward self-correction and persistence.
2011-05-11 - If You Want To Give Up, Do It For A Day
A little later he writes one of the clearest older-man versions of his never-give-up ethic:
If you want to give up, go ahead, but only for a day. Mope around, complain, and give it all you've got, but when you get up the next day, get back on track.
He says he has preached that rule his whole life and now feels haunted by it because he has to live it. The body is older. He says he still gets up, but it is harder now. Even so, he feels a genuine responsibility to give the people in Honduras his best effort whether or not he can see immediate results.
That is important for the chapter. His persistence by then is no longer young missionary intensity. It is older endurance with less energy and the same obligation.
2011-07 - He Gave Away The Shoes He Was Wearing
One of the best small Honduras scenes starts with a contradiction Steve catches in himself. A man asked him for his shoes. Steve first said no and then recognized the hypocrisy immediately:
I would give the shirt off my back if someone really needed it, but not the shoes I was wearing. Kind of a hypocrite.
So he ran after the man and handed them over. He says the look on the man's face was like he had been given a million dollars. Then Steve makes the lesson harder on himself rather than easier:
I gave, but I don't know if I had the right attitude about it. I am trying to have a better attitude about serving and giving.
The passage captures Honduras-era Steve cleanly. The good act is not the end of the story. He still wants the inside corrected too.
2011-07-15 - Standing In Holy Places Meant Becoming Still Enough To Listen
In the Honduras sacrament talk on reverence, Steve translates holy ground into something active and inward:
We remove who we are for a moment and become quiet and still, so that the still small voice of the Holy Ghost can talk to us.
He uses Jake at age three whispering that they did not need sacrament bread because they had brought their own treats. Then he ties reverence to the strain of being on a mission in Spanish:
Being here on a mission has really been tough at times, not being able to say the things that I would like to say.
Because of that weakness, he says much of their work had become quiet attentiveness rather than fluent speech.
The talk ends with one of his best late compassion stories. On a plane he judged a loud boy and his father, then overheard that the boy's mother had just died and the father was taking her body home. Steve says:
My perspective had changed, and I went back to my seat and asked if I could help.
That scene matters because it shows what reverence meant to him by then. Not just church quiet. A way of becoming still enough to stop misreading people.
2011-09 - The Lord's Work And The Flat Tire
The Honduras work was not glamorous. A lot of it was jobs, workshops, local coordination, and trying to get leaders to treat employment help as real church work. In one address he says it as directly as possible:
I know this work is of God.
He adds:
I have prayed earnestly this past week, and the Lord has given us a direction to follow.
That conviction sits next to one of the clearest Honduras providence stories. After a flat tire delayed him, he later learned that a shooting had happened on the same road during the same stretch of time. His conclusion is simple:
Maybe that flat tire was a blessing.
The whole second mission runs on that pairing. Administrative labor on one side. Interpreted preservation on the other.
2012-04-16 - The Young Men Needed Leadership And Someone To Love Them
By Roatan, Steve had poured a lot of his strength into youth work. One of the clearest reasons comes when he describes catching a boy who jumped from a pier without being able to swim:
I sometimes cannot keep away the tears of knowing how much they need leadership and how much they yearn for someone to love them.
He says that is why he keeps building some kind of young men's program for them. The boys bug him to go places and do things. At first there were two, then five, then ten.
This is older Steve carrying father energy beyond the walls of his own house. He was not only trying to preach to them. He was trying to love them into a different future.
2012-06-02 - The Orphan Children Made Him Glimpse The Savior's Love
During a dental-clinic week, a group of orphan children came from the mainland. Steve says they wrote in chalk, thanking the dentists for taking care of their teeth, and that:
It brought tears to my eyes.
He says he could still see their smiles and their love as they got on the bus. Then he gives the line that matters:
I just had a glimpse of what the Savior taught about the innocence of little children.
He was exhausted by then, physically spent enough that he had to come home and rest each day. Even so, he reads the week as a glimpse rather than merely as labor. Service had become one of the places where theology felt most real to him.
2012-06-25 - His Ultimate Goal Was To Be With His Family For The Eternities
The clearest late-mission family aim comes in a hard Sunday letter. After describing branch discouragement and the constant strain of the work, Steve asks the question straight:
What is our ultimate goal in life?
Then answers it:
My ultimate goal is to be with my family for the eternities.
Then he asks the question that haunted a lot of his late writing:
Does my family want the same goal?
The line shows what the whole second mission was being measured against. Not comfort. Not productivity alone. Not even mission success by itself. Family for the eternities.
2012-07 To 2012-08 - He Left Roatan Wanting Temple Family Life To Hold, And Others Said The Work Would Last
When Steve left Roatan, his farewell notes stayed focused on fidelity, repentance, and family life. He tells one young man that his children count on him to make life better than his own and says weekly church attendance and keeping covenants are part of the answer. To another he says the branch will grow only through the dedication of faithful members. To another he says he should prepare to serve a mission and put his life in order now.
The key point is that Steve did not leave behind a vague message to be nice. He left behind a demand for faithfulness strong enough to hold families and branches together.
Then an outside witness arrived from the senior couple who came after them:
Roatan will be blessed forever because you gave your heart and soul to the work.
Steve answered that by saying missionary work can feel thankless and that people often do not know what effect they had until they leave. Looking back, he says, he and Cindy had begun to realize what effect even their "little service" had on some people.
That is a fitting end to the Honduras chapter. The second mission wore him down, stretched him, and kept exposing his limits. It also proved that the old work in him was still alive.
Chapter 8: Late Voice And Legacy
By the late material, Steve is less interested in sounding impressive than in saying what he thinks people can actually use. The tone gets plainer. The sentences get more direct. What remains is not polish but repeated counsel about family, self-command, light, attitude, generosity, and the little things that keep a life from drifting away.
2011-01-28 - The Little Things Mattered More Than The Work
One of the clearest Honduras-era posterity letters begins with his question about what really matters in life and then cuts toward the family:
He put us on the earth to make a difference in the lives we love most.
He says sometimes that takes eating our words, saying "I am sorry," and backing that up with action. Then he defines the "little things" in his own way:
What are the little things that matter? They are the I-love-you's that you don't feel like saying.
The strongest line in the letter is the corrective one:
This work here is important, but it is not more important than those that I love most.
It belongs near the start of the closing chapter because it is Steve talking without performance about what he knew he had neglected and what he still wanted to repair.
2011-12-03 - His Father's Heart Was Part Of What He Wanted To Inherit
Late in the Honduras period he reflects on his father in one of the cleanest inheritance lines in the archive:
My dad's heart was the greatest thing about him.
Then:
He would do anything for anyone if he could.
And finally:
Oh how I can just be like my dad. I pray he is proud of what I do and how I lead my life.
This is legacy speaking backward and forward at once. He is not only thinking about what he received. He is judging his own life by whether he is becoming the kind of man he admired.
2015-01-11 - He Stopped Worrying About Fitting In Once He Knew The Truth
One of the strongest late-life reflections begins with a question that had apparently stayed with him for years:
Can God actually love me?
He says he always felt like an outsider in the Church and had tried to be someone else in order to fit in. Then he retells the Guam cliff prayer with one late addition that matters a great deal:
First I asked myself what was true in my life and came to the conclusion that the Mormon Church was true because it taught families can be together forever.
After the answer came, he says:
I have changed, and since that day I don't have to worry anymore about scriptures or whether I fit in, because I know the truth.
The legacy point here is not style. It is the final reason he gives for why the Church became true to him: family forever.
2015-03-08 - He Trusted His Son's Warning Immediately
In one small later family story he describes looking for a hotel with his sons. At one stop, his young son told him:
Dad, don't go in there.
The boy said he had a feeling they should leave right then. Steve says:
I didn't even think about it. I said okay.
He says he kept thinking about that moment and came to trust his son's ability to follow the Spirit. Then he broadens the lesson:
The Spirit will guide us to higher ground if we listen to that prompting and follow it.
It is a small memory, but it earns a place near the close because it shows how willing he remained to take spiritual impressions seriously, even when they came through his children.
2015-05-30 - Choose Not To Be Offended
Theater discounts, rude employees, a bad tone, and a spoiled night out do not sound like major spiritual material. Steve thought they were.
After nearly ruining a night over a rude manager, he says the real issue is how to love people who use us or are rude to us. He says he has learned to look at the person in front of him and consider that he or she may just be having a bad day. Then he gives the practical rule:
Just smile more often and choose not to be offended.
And:
Your life will be so much better when your attitude is good.
This is late Steve in one of his most usable forms. Not theory. Household discipline.
2015-10-29 - Keep Your Light Lit
Another late blog entry turns a home-teaching candle demonstration into one of his clearest short posterity images. He asks whether people are too busy to notice the light in their lives and whether they run faster than they are able.
Then he gives the line:
The Lord's light stays lit for us. He is always ready to help us relight our own light any time we are ready.
He admits that people get discouraged, overwhelmed with work and family, and buried in "just stuff." His answer is not dramatic:
Stop what you are doing and ask yourself, "Do I have the light?"
It is a strong closing-era Steve metaphor because it stays practical. Watch the light. Do not outrun it.
2020-03-24 - Better Choices Began With Changing His Own Attitude
Near the end of the surviving material, Steve states his vision directly:
My vision is to reach people in my audience and help them make better choices in their lives.
Then he immediately turns the question back on himself:
Do I make better choices in my life?
And answers with the first required change:
Change my attitude. Be generous, kind, loving, and respectful.
He goes on about generosity of time, money, and self, about gratitude, thank-you notes, free favors, and being a helping hand without expecting anything in return. What matters is that the late Steve close is not self-congratulatory. He is still asking whether he himself is the example he wants to offer.
That is the right final register for this edition. Not perfection. Not certainty about himself. Better choices. A corrected attitude. Love that has to keep becoming visible.
This is where the surviving written record ends. The 2020 talk is the last clear piece of Steve's own writing in the archive we have now. After the letters, journals, and talks, this is where his voice stops on the page.