Finally, after much pondering and prayer, [Dallin] received the clarity he had been craving, including a clearer understanding of the revelation he received in the temple years earlier before his appointment to the Utah Supreme Court: "Go to the court, and I will call you from there."

On Friday evening, April 6, 1984, Dallin was in Tucson, Arizona, where he and two others sat as moot court judges at the University of Arizona Law School. When the competition ended, the three judges went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner and an awards presentation. During the festivities before dinner, ("cocktails for others, nachos for me," Dallin wrote), he was called to the phone near the restaurant's cash register. "I went to the cash register," Dallin recalled, "and a mariachi band was wanging away in the background. It was a chaotic scene."

The caller turned out to be President Gordon B. Hinckley of the First Presidency. "I cannot imagine how he found me there," Dallin wondered in his journal, especially since, as he learned from the law school's dean, the school's switchboard was closed. In any case, President Hinckley asked Dallin to call him when he got back to his hotel. Dallin was accustomed to contact with senior church leaders and went on to dinner without concern, though "curious about what would be so serious that he would phone me at this busy time."

After the dinner, as Dallin was being driven back to his hotel, he finally had time to focus on what President Hinckley might want and wondered if this could be a calling. "Though that was possible," he thought, "it was not likely, since I had received no inklings or premonitions of such a thing recently." He knew it was General Conference weekend, but as he wrote two days later, "I was blissfully unaware that this had any significance for my future."

When Dallin got to the hotel, he phoned President Hinckley as requested. After a quick inquiry about worthiness, President Hinckley, in the direct manner for which he was well known, told Dallin he was called to be a member of the Council of the Twelve. "I gasped, 'oh!'" Dallin recorded in his journal. "It seemed unreal. I heard him say how this would change my life. My life," Dallin replied, "is in the hands of the Lord, and my career is in the hands of his servants. …

"As I took off my robe," he reflected later, "I felt the sadness one always feels at concluding a pleasant phase of his life, but I felt no sense of loss or regret. I am living in the future, not the past, and I anticipate my new life with eagerness and optimism." While in Chicago later that week for a PBS board meeting, Dallin spent time at his son, Lloyd's, apartment. When Dallin's daughter, Sharmon, came to pick him up, two of her children, Spencer and Julie, looked at their grandfather over and over again. Finally, Spencer blurted, "I can't believe I'm talking to an apostle!" "I can't believe it either," Dallin concurred when recounting the incident in his journal.

[I]f we face up to our individual adversities or hardships, they can become sources of blessings to their apparent victims. God will not give us adversities we cannot handle, and he will bless us richly for patiently doing the best we can in the circumstances.

We should judge the actions of our predecessors on the basis of the laws and commandments and circumstances of their day, not ours.