Elder Keith R. Edwards

Of the Seventy

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Elder Keith Reid Edwards has served as bishop, stake president, president of the Zimbabwe Harare Mission, and Area Seventy. But when he lists defining moments in his life, they center around family.

One such event was after he first asked his future wife on a date. “My twin brother said, ‘That’s not the kind of girl you just date. That’s the kind of girl you marry.’ And he was right.” Elder Edwards, son of Elbert and Mary Reid Edwards, married Judith Lee Higgins on June 20, 1964, in the St. George Utah Temple.

Elder Edwards was born in Boulder City, Nevada, USA, on March 16, 1942. He attended the Church College of Hawaii, served in the Florida Mission from 1961 to 1963, completed his bachelor’s degree in political science at Brigham Young University, then obtained a law degree from the University of Utah.

Elder and Sister Edwards settled in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he practiced law. During that time, another life-defining event occurred. During Sister Edwards’s seventh and final pregnancy, she became quite ill and couldn’t eat. After a family fast and priesthood blessing, she improved. But halfway through the pregnancy she took a sudden turn for the worse, and the doctor told them to expect the baby by morning. That night was filled with fervent prayers by the anxious couple. Their daughter was later born at full term.

“Twenty-one years later, on the eve of that daughter’s wedding,” Elder Edwards recounts, “we learned that each of our older children had found a quiet place and had also poured out his or her heart to the Lord that night.” It was a powerful lesson of a family united in faith.

Of his call to the Second Quorum of the Seventy, Elder Edwards says, “I come to this as a product of generations of good, strong, solid men and women. I just climbed the trail they blazed for me.”