Morgan and Jacob Choi have lived all over the globe—from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, and Moscow, Russia, to Harare, Zimbabwe, where they currently live. Throughout the changes involved with living in different countries for Jacob’s career, their faith in God has remained constant.
This trust has helped them navigate the unknown with greater confidence, even while wading through a difficult season of infertility when they first started trying to grow their family.
As Morgan shared on a recent episode of the All In podcast, “[Infertility] is so individual. ... Sometimes when you're going through those trials, it can be really hard to feel the direction that you need.”
This need for guidance led Morgan to rely on the scriptures more than ever. She and Jacob had recently moved to Moscow and started in vitro fertilization (IVF) rounds, and Morgan felt extremely isolated from family and friends—struggling to adjust to the Russian winter temperatures and darkness.
“In [the book of] Nephi, the Lord tells Nephi’s family, ‘I will be your light in the wilderness,’” she says. “[Infertility] felt very heavy at the time, and I think that it was my wilderness.”
The light of clear direction didn’t come all at once, but she did find comfort by studying the Book of Mormon. As she read, she found herself wishing there was a resource to help her visualize the book’s timeline amid the overlapping events and stories.
Around this time, President Russell M. Nelson invited members to participate in a social media fast, and Morgan accepted the challenge. During the fast, she prayed for direction on what to do with her time while navigating infertility, and she came back to her thought of wanting a visual timeline of the Book of Mormon—and felt prompted to make one herself. So she dove into the project, putting in hours of scripture study and reaching out to her friend Joy Nevada to create illustrations.
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As Morgan worked, she found purpose and comfort in President Nelson’s prophetic promise that prayerfully studying the Book of Mormon would lead to “[making] better decisions every day” and “[receiving] answers to your own questions and direction for your own life.”
“I feel such gratitude that during that time when we had so many questions about what to do to grow our family, that that was a time I was actually dedicating to studying the Book of Mormon,” Morgan says. “I have no doubt that it helped us in our journey through infertility. And I look back at that time, and I have so much confidence because I was studying the Book of Mormon every day.”
Morgan recognizes that infertility can be a complex journey—and one that doesn’t always have a resolution or clear path forward.
“For anyone who’s in that situation, my advice and what has helped me is sometimes you just go forward with the best decision that you can make, even if you haven't felt like you had any guidance,” she says. “And then sometimes, I know in cases for me, once I walk forward and have made the decision, I will get confirmation [about] what has to be done.”
She also found Elder Robert D. Hales’s talk “Waiting upon the Lord: Thy Will Be Done” to be helpful as she searched for direction. He taught:
“We may not know when or how the Lord’s answers will be given, but in His time and His way, I testify, His answers will come. For some answers we may have to wait until the hereafter. This may be true for some promises in our patriarchal blessings and for some blessings for family members. Let us not give up on the Lord. His blessings are eternal, not temporary.”
Morgan’s answer to work on a book was unexpected, but she was grateful for the way the trial of infertility brought her closer to God as she studied the Book of Mormon.
To learn more about Morgan’s story, listen to the full episode in the player below or find All In on your favorite streaming platform.
Morgan and her husband now have two daughters, and Morgan published her findings about the Book of Mormon in The Book of Mormon Timeline, available at Deseret Book and deseretbook.com.
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