Across cyberspace, youth shares gospel
LDS Church News 4Sep99 L6
Across cyberspace, youth shares gospel

When 14 year-old Grady Greer of the Gilbert 6th Ward, Gilbert Arizona Highland Stake was looking for someone over the Internet with whom he could exchange music, he didn't expect that he would become a missionary. What Grady found was a young French concert pianist whose heart was golden.

In September of 1998, Julien Nodier, a 22-year-old concert pianist living in Davron, France responded to Grady's request for someone interested in music. They found they had a mutual interest in the American musical group "Hanson," and became fast friends through their cyber messages, even talking occasionally on the telephone.

>From these conversations, Julien found out that the Greer family was Mormon and it aroused his interests. So Sister Greer and the family sent Julien "care packages" of material obtained from a local LDS bookstore, containing among other items, an LDS hymnbook, a compact disc of LDS music and the video, "Our Heavenly Father's Plan." The music really touched his heart.

"I loved it," Julien told Elder Kenneth Johnson of the Seventy during a recent visit with the Greer family to the General Authority's office in Salt Lake City. "And so I kept on reading and talking about it with Grady."

Julien found that his best source for Church information was the Internet. He read material on websites both favorable to and in opposition to the Church, "so I could get both sides," he said. To him, the adversarial material seemed weak by comparison.

"When you put truth and error together, truth glows," Elder Johnson observed.

"Then, after a while," Julien continued, "I called the missionaries."

"From the time he called them, the missionaries were there within two hours," Grady noted.

As much of the preparation work had already been done, Julien absorbed what Elders Nathan Tanner from Canada and Timothy Hanson from Utah taught him. (Julien thought it ironic that one of the missionaries had the name "Hanson," because it was the group Hanson that contributed to his and Grady's initial association.) In one week he was ready to be baptized.

"He e-mailed us on Mother's Day 'May 9' and told us, 'You won't believe it but I'm being baptized Sunday,'" Sister Greer said. "We were shocked, because we knew he had just started taking the discussions. Grady got the E-mail and yelled to us from the upstairs room where the computer is, 'He's getting baptized!'"

"They almost broke the stairs stampeding up to see the E-mail," Grady said.

Julien, who lives with his mother and attends Church at a ward in Versailles, said he has been well received, not only because he is accomplished at the piano but because he is the only one in his age group attending the ward, which has largely older people and young children.