“I saw the goodness in his heart early on in high school,” she said. In his last month of high school, he and Michelle “Shelly” Brown met and started dating. “When I saw him,” he said, “the Spirit bore witness to me that he was the prophet of God.” In that meeting, for the first time he was in the same room as the prophet, who at the time was President Joseph Fielding Smith. He remembers when he was around 11 years old attending a session of general conference in the Salt Lake Tabernacle with his father. “At that moment I knew God was real, I felt it.” “I felt stirrings in my heart - and not because I was physically warm,” he said. He had a feeling of warmth he had not recognized before. He was approximately 7 years old and noticed a light coming into the room through a window. He remembers the first time he recognized feeling the Spirit as a young boy sitting in junior Primary. He is the youngest of the couple’s eight children and grew up in a “believing home” with five older sisters and two older brothers.

21, 1959, to Leone Erekson and Robert Allred Carpenter. Matthew Leslie Carpenter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Oct. “Because I feel the Spirit come through me to teach and answer somebody else’s prayer.” Elder Carpenter stated he looks forward to sharing his witness of the Savior with the world. “It was service to others - focusing on them instead of internally - that has helped me to overcome that speaking anxiety,” he said.Īs a newly called General Authority Seventy, speaking to large groups of Church members will be a large part of his call. Monson.īut, in that moment of speaking about his mission, something had changed, and he became anxious speaking to more than a couple of people at a time.Īfter several years of wrestling with this speaking anxiety, he was able to overcome it by focusing on those he served in the Church. In that role he spoke with no anxiety to large groups, and shared the stand in the Salt Lake Tabernacle with the prophet at the time, President Spencer W. Prior to his mission, he had served as the Salt Lake Valley North student seminary president over seven schools. “I remember standing up in sacrament meeting to report on my mission and something changed - the mantle of the missionary had left, and I had difficulty speaking.” Yet, finding the words to share his experience suddenly became difficult. He had learned much, had found success in finding people to teach the gospel, and had served in many leadership capacities. Carpenter looked over the congregation of people in his ward. As a young man just returned from serving in the Switzerland Geneva Mission, Matthew L.

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