The Story of Elizabeth Smart

02

Chapter Two-Sunday School

Two days before I was taken, I was sitting in my Sunday school class, surrounded by a group of other fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds. There were maybe seven or eight of us, a mix of boys and girls. Some of the kids were listening, but not everyone, for we were teenagers, you know. Looking around me, I was comfortable, for these kids were my friends. I had grown up with them, gone to school with them, eaten snacks at their houses, giggled with them on the playground. We knew one another well.

Though there was some horseplay among the class, for the most part I was quiet. I don’t know if I was shy, but I guess I was. I just didn’t feel a need to stand out. It surprises some people when I tell them that. Most of them picture me as an outgoing teenager. A cheerleader type, I think. But I wasn’t. I was kind of quiet. A very obedient child. A 4.0 student. I played the harp, for heaven’s sake! How un-cheerleader is that!

Some people say I’m pretty. Blond hair. Blue eyes. But I promise, I’ve never thought of myself that way. As a fourteen-year-old girl sitting in my Sunday school class, I certainly didn’t think of myself as beautiful. Honestly, I don’t think I ever thought about it at all. Some of the girls I knew were boy-crazy, but I never thought about those kinds of things. I didn’t wear makeup. I had never had a boyfriend. The thought had never even crossed my mind. My favorite things were talking to my mom and jumping on the trampoline with my best friend, Elizabeth Calder. We just liked to have fun together. But our idea of fun wasn’t chasing boys, or prank calling other kids in our class. In almost every way, I was still a little girl.

And one thing that I can say for certain is that I didn’t understand the world.

I remember pressing my white cotton dress—printed tulips with light-green edging—with my hands while listening to my teacher. To most of us kids, he seemed to be about a hundred years old, with his gray beard and white hair. But we liked him. I felt he cared about us, even if we didn’t listen to him all the time.

That morning, my teacher said something that hit me in a way that few things ever had before.

“If you will pray to do what God wants you to do, He will change your life,” he said.

I pressed my dress again, my head down. I was listening carefully to him now. I don’t know what it was, but there was something in the way he said it, the intensity of his voice, that made me realize that what he was saying was important.

“If you will lose your life in the service of God, He will direct you. He will help you. So I challenge you to do that. Commit to the Heavenly Father, and He will guide your way.”

But what can I do to serve God? I asked myself. I’m just a little girl. I don’t know anything. I can’t do anything. What path could He even guide me on?

I didn’t know the answers to these questions. But I felt that, whatever it might be, I had to do what my teacher had challenged me to do.

Later on that day, I went to the bedroom I shared with my little sister, Mary Katherine, and shut the door. I went into the bathroom and locked it. On the other side of the bathroom was a walk-in closet. I went into the closet and shut that door too. I have three younger brothers, a younger sister, and one brother who is a year and a half older than me. With six kids, our house was always chaotic. Full of life and voices. But there, in the closet, I was as alone as anyone could be in a home with eight people.

Kneeling down, I closed my eyes.

I didn’t know how to say it, but I did the best I could. “God, I’m here,” I said. “I’m only fourteen. I know I’m just a little girl. But I’ll do whatever it is that you want me to do. I really do want to serve you. But I’m not sure that I know how.”

I waited a moment. Maybe I was waiting for something to happen. A vision. A revelation. Some kind of sign from God.

But nothing happened.

So I got up and didn’t think about it again.

At least not until two days later, when Brian David Mitchell took me from my house and forced me to start climbing up the mountain in the middle of the night.

Struggling up the side of the hill, breathless and terrified, a bearded man behind me and a long knife to my back, with scratched arms and my silky red pajamas clinging to my legs, I couldn’t help but wonder, God, is this what you had in mind?

I was so confused and so afraid.

I don’t understand! I did what you have asked me! This can’t be what you wanted!

And it certainly wasn’t. I know that now. Being taken captive was not part of some great, eternal plan.

But the confusion was overwhelming. My mind tumbled in sheer terror: This doesn’t make any sense! I’ve never done anything wrong!

And though it would take a while, the answers to my confusion eventually settled in my mind.

I don’t think what happened to me was something that God intended. He surely would not have wished the anguish and torment that I was about to go through upon anyone, especially upon a child.

But since that time, I have learned an important lesson. Yes, God can make some good come from evil. But even He, in all His majesty, won’t make the evil go away. Men are free. He won’t control them. There is wickedness in this world.

Which left me with this: When faced with pain and evil, we have to make a choice.

We can choose to be taken by the evil.

Or we can try to embrace the good.