In August of 2020, two sister missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were stabbed in their Houston apartment in the middle of the night. Despite the traumatic event, one missionary has turned the experience into a faith-building story for herself and many others.
After the attack, Lauren Willardson spent months healing physically and mentally. Although she faced one of the greatest trials of her life, Willardson never lost sight of God’s hand in everything.
“His power to heal is so much more than you could realize,” Willardson said. “(I’ll) look back and (I) won't even think about how much pain (I) had because all (I) can see is how much God has blessed (me) because of it.”
Her mother, Heidi Willardson, said one of the first things Lauren said after the attack was that if her experience could help even one person, it would have been worth it.
The attack received widespread news coverage. Willardson said she began noticing inaccuracies in some reports, so she decided to share the story from her own perspective in a Facebook post for the very first time.
Willardson then created her social media page, “The Work of His Hands,” where she shares her story and the lessons it taught her.
“I'm hoping that as I continue to share, I'll continue to discover what God wants me to do with it and I'll continue to find those opportunities,” she said.
Many people have reached out to Willardson through social media to tell her how her story has helped increase their faith and even inspired them to join the Church.
Britta Hilton, Willardson’s senior year roommate at BYU, said Willardson’s testimony has strengthened her own.
“She's so good about connecting it back to God,” Hilton said. “Just taking every experience and using it as something that can bring her closer to the Lord and help her bring others closer to God.”
After completing the rest of her mission in the Arizona Tempe Mission, Willardson returned to Utah to complete her studies at Brigham Young University from fall 2022 to spring 2025.
Because of all the news coverage the story received, Willardson is often recognized in her daily life. She has had the opportunity to share her story many times and said it comes up multiple times a week.
Through social media, she has been invited to speak at religious events such as youth camps and firesides. She has also appeared on podcasts, collaborated with journalists and published her own articles and op-eds. She was even invited to speak at a religious freedom roundtable with political and religious leaders.
“I feel like I want to be such a good steward of the story,” Willardson said. “I would never want someone to hear the story that builds their faith and then meet me in person and have it take away any good that the story did.”
A major healing moment for Willardson and her former companion came in 2022 when they returned to Texas to attend the trial of their attacker.
Willardson said that, through Christ’s grace, she never felt any anger towards him.
“What made me forgive him was my relationship with Jesus Christ,” she said. “At this point, I'd already been hurt so much, holding any anger against him was just going to hurt me more. The best thing I could do was give it over to Christ.”
She remembers feeling Christ’s love for her attacker and not wanting him to go to prison on her account, but purely to prevent him from hurting someone else.
The attacker was sentenced to 35 years in prison, followed by deportation. Willardson found peace by compiling a Book of Mormon for him to have in prison with highlighted scriptures about mercy, forgiveness and Christ’s Atonement, along with her testimony written inside.
Willardson graduated from BYU in spring of 2025 with a degree in journalism and minors in Spanish and political science, with an emphasis in religious freedom.
She will be working in the U.S. Senate and hopes that as she moves forward with her career and life, she will continue to serve others and further God’s work.
“Resilience is not just getting back to how you were beforehand, because I didn't want to be how I was before,” Willardson said. “I think resilience is having something hard happen and then being able to become better because of it and hopefully help other people from it.”