REXBURG—When Elder Richard Norby called his wife, Sister Pam Norby, from the Brussels, Belgium airport, he repeated the same details three times. There had been a bombing. His hands and face were burned. His leg was broken. Then he told her he had to go.
The Norbys were serving as missionaries in Belgium when the attack happened. Now serving as service missionary advisors in the Utah Orem Mission, they shared what they learned from that experience during a BYU-Idaho forum titled “Fear Not, I Am with Thee.”
In an interview with BYU-Idaho Radio, they said those words from Isaiah 41:10 had been meaningful to them before their mission and took on greater meaning after the bombing.
Elder Norby had gone to the airport with three other missionaries to drop off a sister missionary who had just received her visa. When the bomb exploded, he tried to run but fell because of his injuries. As he lay on the airport floor, he felt at peace as he waited for help.
“I had an impression that God knew where I was and what had just happened. With this impression, I just felt relieved. If I live, I live and if I don’t live, I don’t live but I was fine with everything,” Elder Norby said in the interview.
Sister Norby called their children so they would hear about the bombing from her before they saw it on the news. A woman from their congregation came to her apartment and helped call hospitals and locate which one Elder Norby had been taken to. Sister Norby said it took eight hours to locate Elder Norby.
Sister Norby said she prayed throughout the day and found peace as she began to trust God with Elder Norby’s uncertain recovery.
“I didn’t have the full scope of everything, but He did,” Sister Norby said in the interview. “So, it was time to have faith and trust in Him and believe that things would work out, and however that was going to work out, at the time we didn’t know, but that’s where your trust in the Lord comes in, I believe. Then that’s when my peace came.”
Elder Norby spent four weeks in a Brussels hospital and another five weeks in a burn center in Utah. As he worked to regain strength, he set a goal to walk around Temple Square without help. About eight months after the bombing, he made it all the way around.
At the forum, Elder Norby asked students to think about their own worries, from classes to relationships. He told them God knows what they’re going through and encouraged them to give their best effort.
“Our purpose, or our goal, or our assignment in life is to do the best we can. We’re not expected to be perfect,” Elder Norby said at the forum. “Do the very best you can.”
Sister Norby said she hopes students draw on their own experiences with faith when they face uncertainty.
“I would hope that the next time they feel afraid, that they go back to the times where they felt the Lord in their lives. It often speaks in the Book of Mormon about the word ‘remember,’ and that’s great counsel. I believe that we need to remember those times when we’ve had the Lord lift and carry us, or the Holy Ghost inspires us in some way,” Sister Norby said in the interview.