By Elder Hans T. Boom
Of the Seventy

While I was visiting the Nashville Tennessee Temple for a temple review, I was privileged to do a walk-through as part of this assignment, reviewing this beautiful house of the Lord. I was especially impressed with the painting of Mary Wanlass called Carry On hanging on the wall in the office of the matron.

This is the story behind the painting:

“In Missouri in 1862, the 14-year-old Mary Wanlass promised her dying stepmother that she would see to it that her disabled father [and her four much younger siblings would all make] it to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. … Mary drove the oxen and milk cows that pulled the wagon, in which her father [was bedridden, and] she cared for her … siblings. After each day’s journey, she fed the family by foraging edible plants, flowers, and berries. Her only compass was the instruction she had received to keep traveling west ‘until the clouds become mountains.’

“They reached [the] Utah Valley in September, having traveled all spring and summer. Her father died not long after the family settled in Utah County, where Mary later married and raised her [own] family.”

This is an amazing story of the faith and strength of a 14-year-old young woman that can help each one of us today to “just carry on.”

“Just carry on”—or freely translated in my native Dutch language, Gewoon doorgaan—is also my mom and dad’s lifelong slogan.

My parents and in-laws are the pioneers in our family. They have crossed their own “plains,” just like all those who are coming into the Church, the Lord’s fold, every day. Their stories have little to do with oxen and wagons but have the same effect on future generations.

They embraced the gospel and were baptized in their young adult years. Both my parents had a difficult childhood. My father grew up on the island of Java in Indonesia. During World War II, he was forcefully separated from his family and interned in a concentration camp, where he suffered unspeakable hardships at a young age.

My mother was raised in a broken home and also suffered from hunger and the hardships of World War II. At times she even had to resort to eating tulip bulbs. Due to her father’s actions and his subsequent divorce from her mother, it was sometimes difficult for her to see Heavenly Father as a loving Father.

My parents met at a Church activity and shortly after decided to get married and sealed in the Bern Switzerland Temple. Waiting at the railway station, having spent the last of their little savings for the trip to the temple, they wondered how they would make ends meet but were confident that it would all work out. And it did!

They started to raise their family from a very humble single attic-room apartment in the heart of Amsterdam. After several years of washing their clothes by hand, they had finally saved up enough money to purchase a washing machine. Just before they would make the purchase, the bishop visited them, asking for a contribution to build the meetinghouse in Amsterdam. They decided to give all they had saved for the washing machine and continued to do the laundry by hand.

As a family we went through some hardships, just like any other family. These have only made us stronger and have deepened our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, just like when Alma was sharing his story with his son Helaman, where he told him that he had been “supported under trials and troubles of every kind” because he had put his trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

How did two people who experienced so many trials in their younger years become the very best parents I could ever wish for? The answer is simple: they fully embraced the gospel and live by their covenants to this very day!

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2025/04/26boom?lang=eng

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