Description

The Mysterious Loaf of Bread

May 3, 1856, President Brigham Young called David H. Cannon into his office and asked him to journey to California for a special mission. The next day, David left Salt Lake City journeying west. He came to a place called Johnson’s ranch at the foot of the Sierra Nevada range, where he was told of a shortcut– “that if I would go right up the mountain, there,” David said, “I would save forty miles in going from there to Sacramento.” He was told he would “have to follow the blazed trees, that the path was not a clear one.” Anxious to be on his way, David took the shortcut, but as it grew dark, he could not see the marks on the trees and was soon lost.

He wandered the rest of that night and all the next day. Finally, tired, hungry, and discouraged, he began to rethink why he was on this journey in the first place. “What are you going for,” he thought to himself, “and what are you going to do after you get there?” David knelt to pray and told the Lord of his condition—how he was lost and was it right for him to go on.

“I told Him that I knew this to be His work and if it was right for me to go on this mission, to make it manifest by opening the way for me, and that if it was not proper I did not care to go on.”

At the end of his prayer, David laid down and slept soundly. The next morning, awake and refreshed, he walked on. He came to a small meltwater stream and washed his face and hands.

Again, he felt prompted to pray. “[I] told the Lord,” he said, “just as I had the night before, that if it was right for me to go, that the way be opened, and it should be as an enduring testimony to me.”

He had not gone far when he came out on a main road. Uncertain which way to go, he hesitated, and then felt prompted to walk toward the town of Genoa, which logic told him was the wrong way. He had not gone far, when he saw sitting by the side of the road, placed neatly atop a rock, a loaf of bread and a griddle cake. He looked around. There was no one near. “I gathered it up,” he said, “and didn’t stop to ask where it came from. I thought about my prayer the night before and my prayer of that morning.”

David concluded his narrative by saying,

“Someone might say that there was not any manifestation of the powers of the Lord about that… “yet I have never doubted from that time to this but what that was a direct answer to my prayer.”

Source: http://www.sedgwickresearch.com/cannon/dhcannon.htm