Prayer are answered, prayers are heard. Heartwarming is the example of the mother in America who prayed for her son's well-being as the ship on which he served sailed into the bloody cauldron known was the pacific theater of war. Each morning she would arise from kneeling in prayer and serve as a volunteer on those production lines which became life-lines to those in battle. Could it be that a mother's own handiwork might somehow directly affect the life of a loved one? All who knew her or her family cherished the actual account of her sailor son, Elgin Staples, whose ship went down off Guadalcanal. Staples was swept over the side - but he survived, thanks to a life belt  that proved, on later examination, to have been inspected, packed and stamped back home in Akron, Ohio, by his own mother.  - Conference Report 1978  - Thomas S. Monson