"One big preoccupation the young people have here is how they can marry if they don't have much," President Silva says. "We have helped them understand that we don't have to have everything before we get married."
Ruth Rodríguez got to know Emanuel Silva when the two were asked to help organize a combined district young single adult activity in Rio Gallegos, more than 200 miles (320 km) to the north, in February 2006. The friend who asked the two to work together hoped they would hit it off. "It worked," recalls Emanuel, who had been home two years from serving in the Arizona Tucson Mission.
When he and Ruth married six months later, their preparation—spiritual and temporal—helped them overcome their fear of the future.
"I felt the love of my Father in Heaven and that He wanted me to form my family," Emanuel says of answers to his prayers. "Once I set that goal, He showed me the way and helped me find a wife."
Ruth adds that goals they set as a couple, including working hard to save money for their trip to the temple, helped them move forward. "Sometimes there were things we wanted to buy," she says, "but we said, 'No, we have to save so we can go to the temple.'"
The cost of their flight to and from the Buenos Aires Argentina Temple in 2006 exhausted their savings. "Afterward we had nothing," says Emanuel, echoing a common newlywed refrain. Today he and Ruth laugh at that memory, grateful that their faith afforded them the "beautiful experience" of being sealed in the temple—an experience that still means everything to them.
"We can have a lot of fearful feelings as we contemplate marriage," says Ruth. "What about the things we lack? What about our economic situation? What about raising children? But if we are obedient to the word of the Lord, go to the temple, and start our families, we don't need to worry. The Lord will bless us in ways we never could have imagined."