Thomas S. Monson was always the young one.
For decades he was the young Mormon apostle, the big, tall, smiling fellow helping the octogenarians around him to their seats. He had a heart as big as his chest and a good cheer that filled the Tabernacle and the Conference Center and sometimes the world.
He was the Mormon prophet, and he died yesterday.
He was 90 and infirm and had been in visible decline for a time. But in the hearts of his co-religionists, in the hearts of the Mormon people, he was beloved and dear. He was, as he sometimes referred to himself in stories from his youth, "Tommy Monson," the young bishop tending to widows, or the even younger sailor at the end of the war.
A fixture in the leadership of the church's religious and business ventures since the late 1950s, he served under the church's most conservative leaders and presided over its most liberal era without ever ideologically identifying himself.
On his watch, the church reversed its tone toward gay rights, embracing homosexual members and their families even while not spiritually sanctioning their intimacies. There was also a normalization of the use of government welfare programs, something long decried by Mormon leaders. Subordinate Mormon leaders also pushed hard -- though unofficially -- to break the long association between members of the church and the Republican Party. Through the lds.org/newsroom instrument there was a liberalization of church approach and a scrubbing of some Mormon history and dogma.
And during President Monson's administration, the long-held "Three-fold Mission of the Church" got a fourth and paramount component -- a reshaping of the church and its members' charity to the poor into something very similar to the social ministries of mainline American Protestants and Catholics.
But while all of that was percolating through the Mormon curia, President Monson himself, from the pulpit, was what he had been for 50 years. His approach was always pastoral. Thematically, his general conference addresses were almost always about service to others at a close and personal level. Though he had not been a young bishop overseeing a Mormon congregation since the days of President Eisenhower, he mined those experiences over and over for decades of stories and examples.
Probably all Mormons have heard at least once his recounting of his pledge to visit with and look after all the elderly widows in his congregation. Likewise they know that when just a boy he and his bishop went looking for other lads who were skipping church, and took the good word to them. He was the sort of leader who knew who was sick and went to tend to their needs, sometimes laying other responsibilities aside because he had felt spiritually prompted to go and show concern now. And time after time, in what the afflicted saw as a direct response to their prayers, he came through the door with a smile or a prayer or a bag of food exactly when he was needed.
His was a "follow me" type of leadership based on an understanding of Jesus as a Savior and a minister. He believed in and spoke often of the lost sheep, sending shepherds out to look, and calling to those sheep himself.
Notably, as a mission president in Toronto, he sent no missionaries home early. He worked with those with challenges and loved and counseled them into being the young men he knew they could be.
In crowds, he was the center of attention and affection. He was the hale fellow well met, and his good spirit was, for decades, the bridge between Mormon and non-Mormon interests in Utah and elsewhere. Those who couldn't quite figure out Mormons, understood Thomas S. Monson and knew he was an honest man and their friend. And back when general authorities of the church sat on various corporate boards in Utah and New York City, the integrity and kindness of Tom Monson were the church's best ambassadors.
In general conference addresses, there was a lilting phrasing to his speech, as if there was a constant state of wonder and amazement at some principle of truth or goodness. In less formal meetings, his conversation was smooth and familiar, flowing like a river, and chock full of lengthy recited quotations from poety and the theater. He was humble and comfortable, with the intimacy and familiarity of a true friend -- which he genuinely was.
His legacy is closely tied to that of his predecessor as president of the church, Gordon B. Hinckley. They were long colleagues in the quorum of the twelve apostles, and then in the first presidency. And President Hinckley's long and charismatic tenure may have cast a bit of a shadow over President Monson's years, especially as age took just a bit off his no-longer-youthful exuberance.
But his was a long history of service in successive eras of a growing and changing church. When he was first called to the pulpit of the Tabernacle, in the days of grainy black-and-white television transmissions, no one could have imagined the dramatic growth of the church, the shift of membership to beyond the American borders, the fall of Russian communism or the rise of western antagonism toward traditional Christianity.
Thomas S. Monson sailed those seas and skippered that ship, led by his faith in Jesus and what he believed to be Jesus's church. And though it was an era of change, there was an undeviating theme to his ministry -- love the Lord, and love your neighbor.
And show your love by acts of compassionate and unfailing service.
That was the ministry and the legacy of Thomas S. Monson.
And it was a message that never grew old.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT - APRIL 2: President Thomas Monson, gives a thumbs up as he leaves the morning session of the 186th Annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on April 2, 2016 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormons from around the world will gather in Salt Lake City to hear direction from church leaders at the two day conference. (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images)