My Story

by Elizabeth Smart

“If you will pray to do what God wants you to do, He will change your life,” he said.

“If you will lose your life in the service of God, He will direct you. He will help you. So I challenge you to do that. Commit to the Heavenly Father, and He will guide your way.”

Yes, God can make some good come from evil. But even He, in all His majesty, won’t make the evil go away. Men are free. He won’t control them. There is wickedness in this world. Which left me with this: When faced with pain and evil, we have to make a choice.

We can choose to be taken by the evil. Or we can try to embrace the good.

He is a manipulative, antisocial, and narcissistic pedophile. He is not clinically psychotic or delusional. He is just an evil man.

I began to realize that there were some things worse than death.

The realization that my family would still love me proved to be the turning point. In fact, it proved to be the most important moment throughout my entire nine-month ordeal.

I pictured my horrible captor. I thought of his long beard and salt-and-pepper hair. He had to be at least as old as my father. The woman looked as old as he. Which meant I could outlive them. The thought was like a lightning bolt inside my mind. It might be twenty years, or maybe thirty, but one day they were going to die. And when they did, I would be free of them. And I could go back to my life.

In my life, I have come to believe there are lots of examples where God provides us little miracles to give us hope. Most of these experiences are not as obvious as waking up and finding a cup of water. Some of them are much more subtle. We may even have to look for His miracles along the way. But they are there. And they’re important when we are struggling with the challenging battles of this life.

But I knew I had him. He was caught with his own artillery.

“Elizabeth, what this man has done is terrible. There aren’t any words that are strong enough to describe how wicked and evil he is! He has taken nine months of your life that you will never get back again. But the best punishment you could ever give him is to be happy. To move forward with your life. To do exactly what you want.

“You be happy, Elizabeth. Just be happy. If you go and feel sorry for yourself, or if you dwell on what has happened, if you hold on to your pain, that is allowing him to steal more of your life away. So don’t you do that! Don’t you let him! There is no way that he deserves that. Not one more second of your life. You keep every second for yourself. You keep them and be happy. God will take care of the rest.”

Life is a journey for us all. We all face trials. We all have ups and downs. All of us are human. But we are also the masters of our fate. We are the ones who decide how we are going to react to life.

Yes, I could have decided to allow myself to be handicapped by what happened to me. But I decided very early that I only had one life and that I wasn’t going to waste it.

would tell myself, Elizabeth, you have everything back now! But you remember all those hard times, right? And because you remember all those hard times, you can remember the depth of your gratitude.

“We always have something to be grateful for because there will always be something that could make your situation worse.”

Knowing it can always get worse, I try to be grateful for whatever good I have.