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A sacred experience of my brother’s

A sacred experience of my brother’s

Last updated on: August 2, 2026 at 2:35 pm by Dan Peterson

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A sacred experience of my brother’s 2026-08-02T14:35:49-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A view of Rose Hills Memorial Park, in Whittier, California, where my parents and paternal grandparents and many other of my relatives are buried. It’s sacred ground for me. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Today, I’ve chosen to record an experience that was related to me many years ago by my late (and still sorely missed) brother, Kenneth. He and now his widow are both gone, and I don’t know how widely he related what had happened to others. So I’ll record it here. First, though, a bit of background:

My brother took over the family construction business in Southern California after our father stepped away from it. Fairly commonly, the business used subcontractors to perform certain tasks that we didn’t choose to handle “in house.”

One of the occasional subcontractors — I think that I may have met him myself once or twice, but I certainly didn’t know him well — was a man whom my brother described to me as socially isolated, with a wife but otherwise apparently without many friends. Yet, although their interactions were purely business-related, he and my brother got along reasonably well.

This is not yet the story that I intend to tell, but it will help set the stage: When the man’s wife died, my brother decided to attend her funeral, which was to be held (I believe) at Rose Hills Memorial Park, in Whittier, California. As the time for the funeral drew near, however, he felt strongly impelled, even though it was a grossly inefficient move, financially speaking, to shut the company office down and take the secretaries and the office manager and the two or three other office staff with him to the funeral service, which was to be held only about half an hour away at the cemetery. Upon arrival, he was very grateful that he had brought others with him, because there was essentially nobody else there for the funeral in the mortuary chapel. (Maybe — my memory isn’t precise on this — they were altogether the only guests at the service.)

My brother Kenneth, gone far too soon.

Now, though, on to the specific story that I want to relate here. My brother called me in the afternoon from California to tell me about it, I think on the very day that it happened:

One morning, months after the passing of the man’s wife, the subcontractor called my brother in his office to discuss an upcoming construction job. My brother thought that he sounded a bit odd, even a little weak, and it seemed that the call was coming from some sort of public place. Kenneth asked him if he was alright, and finally elicited the information from him that he had evidently suffered several mini-strokes and that he was calling from a hospital bed. The call ended with Kenneth wishing him a speedy recovery.

Then, though, my brother felt urged — by the Spirit, we would say — to go and actually visit the man at the hospital. Kenneth resisted the urging. He had an unusually busy day ahead of him, he reminded himself. A crowded schedule. There were many things to do and to oversee, and he couldn’t afford the time for a hospital visit. Maybe that evening, or the next day. Or something. He wasn’t even sure that he needed to pay the man a visit. They weren’t that close, after all. But the urging was powerful and persistent.

So, reluctantly, he drove to the hospital, determined the room number of the subcontractor, and paid him a visit. In fact, they visited for a fairly long time, and my brother felt good about it. He had, he thought, done some good.

As he left the hospital, though, and began walking through the parking lot to his car, he felt a strong prompting to return and to offer the man a priesthood blessing. Again, he resisted. He had already spent more time with the man than he could possibly afford. He had offered a gesture of goodness and kindness. But he had business to that urgently needed his attention. And, anyway, the man wasn’t a Latter-day Saint. He didn’t expect a priesthood blessing and, for that matter, probably didn’t even know what a priesthood blessing was.

So he continued to walk toward his car. As he drew closer to it, though, he was shocked by a loud, commanding voice — later, he told me, he couldn’t tell whether it was internal or external to him — that said “How dare you! I told you to go back to the hospital and to offer him a blessing!” And, Kenneth told me, he had the distinct impression that, had he reached out to the door handle of his car, it might have burned and blistered his hand.

He turned around, returned to the man’s hospital room, explained the basic idea of a priesthood blessing to him, and asked if he would like such a blessing. The man said that, yes, he would. Very much. My brother gave the blessing, although there was no second priesthood holder there to assist him, and then he returned to his car and to the remainder of the day’s obligations.

He sobbed as he told me of what had happened. Even during his tenure as a bishop, he said, he had never received a prompting that was as powerful and distinct as this one.

But he was puzzled as to its significance. Why was it so important to return and offer the man a blessing? The following day, though, the subcontractor called the company office and, speaking to our office manager, commented that Kenneth was his best friend. (Which was a rather sad thing, if true, because they had never really been socially close.) Perhaps, my brother later reflected to me, that simple thought was the point of it: It was a way of letting the man know that he wasn’t really wholly alone, that there was someone who cared about him.

I don’t know. I suspect that we’ll only understand such things after this life is through. I think it very important, though, to try to listen for such promptings and to act upon them — even if we don’t know the reason and perhaps never learn it in mortality. I’m not especially good at this, but I value and admire the ability in other people that I know. (President Thomas S. Monson was a model in this respect.)

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