Stacy Taniguchi grew up as a Buddhist in Hawaii and joined the Church so that he could marry his girlfriend who was a Latter-day Saint. He confesses that his testimony and knowledge of the gospel was minimal before a harrowing climb on Denali, the highest peak in North America, forced him to put his new faith to the test. SHOW NOTES To see pictures of Stacy on some of his many climbing adventures, go here. Special thanks to Joyce Madsen and Julianne Gray for helping us to make this episode happen. TRANSCRIPT Sarah: Welcome to This Is the Gospel, an LDS Living podcast where we feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day. I'm Sarah Blake filling in today for our regular host, KaRyn Lay. I will be forever grateful that I got to spend the first 30 years of my life in the Rocky Mountains, living in Colorado and Utah and Idaho and Montana. I've always loved the presence of the mountains around me, but I would say we never really got acquainted until I was in my 20s. I was living in Salt Lake City, and my sister Liz and I got hooked on hiking. And we started a tradition we called "Summit September: a peak a week." As the name implies, we would summit a mountain every weekend in September. And we carried on the tradition for four years before life took us in other directions. But now, I love to look back on those four amazing "Summit September's" where we spent our Saturday's walking and talking in the autumn glory of the Wasatch Mountains. I should also mention that because we thought it was funny and we were trying to prove a point about how you don't need a lot of fancy gear to go hiking, we climbed in wool skirts and tights that we got at the thrift store. So now you have a visual. Two sisters and raggedy skirts, climbing the Rockies. Now I live in Virginia. And although here there are many opportunities to walk through mosquito-infested forests that smell like rotten swamp water, I hardly ever hike. In case you can't tell, I am much less motivated to get out and hike in Virginia. I've been thinking lately about why that is. And I think that for me—although it's true I don't dig the bugs and humidity—what's really missing is summits. There is something so special about getting to the top of a peak. The sense of achievement is great for one, but most of all it's that view. There is nothing else like it. To stand on the top of the biggest thing you can see and look around you 360 degrees, everything spread out around you and beneath you, and you, a tiny speck at the top of this huge and rugged world. I could drink in that view and that feeling forever. And part of what's so powerful about a summit is knowing that there is no other way to get there, except to put in the effort step after step after step after step after step, until you have earned that moment of godlike perspective, with the exertion of every cell in your exhausted but exhilarated body. We know from the scriptures and from the fact that the temple is sometimes called the mountain of the Lord, that our Heavenly Father uses mountains as special places for sacred experiences. And today, we have a story of a personal moment on a mountain from a lifelong adventure who has experienced more of the dangers and glories of summit's than most of us will ever know. Here is Stacy. Stacy: God can convert me and anyone however He wants. But we always have to remember the eternal principle of agency is something that He will never disrupt. And it has to be our choice. He can put opportunities in front of us, He can put challenges in front of us, but we ultimately have to make the choice whether we accept those opportunities, which opportunities we choose. I think He knows me very well that for me, things have to kind of like explode in front of my face to really get what's going on. If He tries to do something subtly, I could easily pass over it—I guess it's just my personality. But this was one in which He had to Get me to be in a position where this is like in your face, it's happening now and the time to think through and pretend and whatever is over. I was born in Hawaii, on an island that most people probably never go to when they go visit Hawaii. It's called Molokai. It's probably most well-known because it's the place where the leper colony existed, but that was just a small peninsula on the island. My father was a rancher. He was the foreman of the Molokai ranch, and that's where our family was raised. So I could have just stayed on the island lived a very rural Hawaiian, tropical life, surfing and doing that all the time. But I had run across an article that came from a magazine. It was called Life Magazine and I just was always fascinated looking at the pictures. And in the very back, kind of the picture of the week, there was a gentleman holding up a piece of paper, and it just looked like it had an itemized list. And the caption at the bottom was "He completed his list." And basically what it was is he had created a list of the things that he wanted to do and learn and accomplish in his life. And he had finished the list. And I thought, "That's kind of interesting." And so I thought, "Yeah, I should probably make a list." And so I did, you know, as a young man. And over a period of probably 10 or 12 years, the list grew to 100 things. And one of the things on that list was to climb mountains because Hawaii doesn't have huge mountains and Molokai definitely doesn't have anything that's of any substance. But for some reason, I just thought climbing a mountain would give you a better view of things. And climbing has really made my life one in which I left the island of Molokai and I've been around the world several times. I moved from Hawaii to Japan, because my sister married a gentleman who was in the military and got stationed there. I lost my father when I was only a year old. But he became my father figure. And so we traveled a lot with my sister and my brother in law. And being in the military, we moved around a lot. So Japan was the first change, California, Illinois, Washington, and then eventually to Alaska where I got there when I was, you know, older teenage years. Then eventually, coming to Utah was because of opportunities that I had in Alaska that I took advantage of. One of my former coaches, when I was skier, invited me to help him do a study. But I needed to be close to Park City. I had never been to Utah before. And so he gave me several choices of universities that I could go to. Brigham Young University was one but you pretty much were a member of the church to have any interest in going there. So the U of U was definitely the ideal. And so that's where I applied and started my master's program there. And I met a young lady who was down in Provo at the time. I think when you live in Utah for any period of time, obviously, the exposure of the church is everywhere. I don't think you're going to find very many people that can't say that there's something about members of the church, that they are striving to do good in this world. I recognized that when I was a student at the U of U, but not a member of the church. So when I met my wife, obviously, I was very attracted to her. And she was the one that I felt like I wanted to live with for the rest of my life. And she's an active member of the church. And I'm thinking, "Okay, how bad is this to join an organization where they're really trying to do good?" And the thing that really caught my attention was, they're not wishy-washy and gray areas. You either do this or you don't do this. And I'm probably about as wishy-washy as anybody. You give me a little bit of gray area, and I'll take advantage of the gray area. And I thought, you know, what, if I'm going to be a husband, and I'm going to be a dad, I don't want to be wishy-washy. And I thought, "You know what, I need that in my life." But again, the reason why I'm first interested in this religion is not because of the philosophy of the religion, it is because of the young woman that I've fallen in love with. And if she wants me to join this church, then I'm going to do it. Because I don't see anything like really bad about it, you know, it's a good group of people to be around. So I got baptized, really for ulterior motives. We moved back to Alaska, and my wife, being new to the 49th state, went to the church to get friends and I went with her. And then, of course, you receive callings, which kind of gives you some purpose and that was very important to me. And so going to church was never an issue. Being raised the Buddhist, a Jesus figure is not relevant. But it was an interesting concept for me. So everything that I learned from the religion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was relatively new and it was fascinating. Did I have a testimony of Jesus Christ? Probably not in the sense that most members of the church would say. But did I believe He existed and He was doing good things and trying to make people better people? Absolutely. For me, He became more of a role model of how I should live my life, rather than my Savior, so to speak. That came later. Well, back to Alaska. One of my jobs in Alaska was a wilderness adventure guide. And every year I was guiding people on Denali, which is the highest mountain in North America, it stands at 20,320 feet. And on one particular expedition, one of the clients was a police officer who his dream was to climb the "Nali." And he came from a police department that sponsored one of their police officers every year to accomplish something that they're doing if they can tie it in with a charity. And so this gentleman, he was going to get pledges for every thousand feet that he would gain on the mountain. So that was his thing. But what was interesting about him was not him so much, as his girlfriend who was at this gear check. We usually about a couple of days before we leave for the mountain—the guides
