Walking With: What Carol Lynn Pearson Taught Me About Living The Gospel

by Amy Watkins Jensen

I’ll Walk With You

If you don’t walk as most people do,
Some people walk away from you,
But I won’t! I won’t!
If you don’t talk as most people do,
Some people talk and laugh at you,
But I won’t! I won’t!
I’ll walk with you. I’ll talk with you.
That’s how I’ll show my love for you.
Jesus walked away from none.
He gave his love to ev’ryone.
So I will! I will!

—Carol Lynn Pearson

When our daughter Lulu was born with Down syndrome 19 years ago, the Primary song “I’ll Walk with You” brought me comfort amid the confusion of an unexpected diagnosis and helped me find hope in the unknown. At the time, we didn’t know what our lives would look like, what might be possible, or how everything would change. But through those simple yet profound lyrics, my Church community had made me a promise: We will embrace Lulu. We will love her as Jesus would. We will not walk away from her—or from you—no matter what.

I held on to that promise for dear life.

The hymn became one of the lullabies I most often sang to a fussy baby Lulu in the middle of the night. Its lyrics became a kind of talisman, a simple prayer carrying all my hopes: for my daughter, for the lived gospel, for the love of Jesus, and for a community that I hoped would fully embrace her differences. They were the exact words I needed at the exact time I needed them.

So imagine my delight when, a few short years later, fate and circumstance intervened and I found myself sitting in the living room of the very poet who had penned the words that had offered me such solace during that poignant time in my young motherhood.

I had received her blessing once. Would it be too much to ask her to offer it again?

That afternoon, I arrived at Carol Lynn’s home seeking, tender, and hoping for wisdom to help me make sense of the questions and contradictions of a faith I loved but was struggling to reconcile. I was convinced that she had the answers I needed. She was the prescient matriarch whose words had soothed my soul so often, and I was confident that she would once again bring relief to my weary wandering.

I sat down on her couch with my heavy questions and a brown paper bag of tomatoes, still warm from my garden’s afternoon sun—an offering, perhaps, to the oracle I hoped she would be.

As it turned out, the answers she had were few. But the embodied promise of her own prose was worth so much more. That sunny California summer day, she walked with me. She talked with me. She did not walk away from me.

My heartbreak, my doubt, my questions, my sadness, my need—none of it was too much for Carol Lynn. She seemed incapable of offering easy or shallow answers and impervious to the temptation to dismiss my experiences, doubts, complaints, or questions, even when I nearly begged her to do so. I had never been met with such faithful love by a complete stranger.

I left that meeting transformed by her commitment to live the promise she had written into those lyrics so many years before:

Jesus walked away from none.
He gave his love to ev’ryone.
So I will! I will!

Jesus blessed all he could see,
Then turned and said, “Come, follow me.”
And I will! I will!

I will! I will!
I’ll walk with you. I’ll talk with you.
That’s how I’ll show my love for you.

Her willingness to accompany me in my wilderness convinced me that I was not as alone as I had imagined. I was not the only one who wanders and wonders, who grieves or rages, or who loves with abandon even when told she should not. I did not have to hide my doubt, my sorrow, my questions, or my holy lament in order to be loved by Jesus or fully embraced by my Heavenly Parents.

I had arrived on Carol Lynn’s doorstep hoping for concrete answers—or perhaps hoping she would convince me that there was nothing to worry about. Instead, she offered something more honest and more enduring. She seemed to say, Let’s worry about these things together. Rather than turning away from the margins, she invited me to join her in the sacred work of loving them.

That was the gift Carol Lynn gave me that day in her living room: the grace of being accompanied without being explained away. But what made her remarkable was her ability to extend that same sense of companionship far beyond the room we shared. Through her words and witness, she reached across distance, difference, and generations, helping countless others feel less alone.

Her writings and her advocacy all carried the same message to those of us who received them: You belong. Whether her words came to us through theater, poetry, song, or memoir, they carried the same weighty gospel truth: you are not too much for God, and you should not be too much for one another.

And we drank it all in when she passed us the cup: her wisdom, her witness of our divine importance, and the truth of our shared celestial heritage. She offered it all to us as she helped us find our Mother; as she insisted that we learn to love those who love differently; as she guided us through our wrestling with the complexities of our shared faith; as she inspired hope for greater partnership between women and men; and as she lived a life that testified of the simple, powerful holiness of walking with God’s children and refusing to turn away.

It is difficult to overstate what Carol Lynn meant to so many of us, including people whose need for her message of belonging might never have been visible.

The last time I sang “I’ll Walk with You” in a congregation was at our stake conference nearly three years ago. Carol Lynn was there. The visiting General Authority had requested the hymn and seemed delighted that we would sing it in Carol Lynn’s home stake, with its author among us. He announced it himself and, before we sang, invited Carol Lynn to offer an impromptu testimony.

I remember thinking, This hymn means something to him. I wonder what. I knew he had his story. I knew most of the people gathered that day had stories of their own. I certainly had mine.

I had never heard the hymn sung with such fervor and tenderness. The stake center on the top of Oakland Temple Hill filled with our voices and our stories—stories of belonging, longing, and hope for a more expansive belonging still. Our voices rang out with love for God, for one another, and for the matriarch who had given us those words of promise.

In my mind’s eye, we are still singing. Our voices rise through the stake center and beyond it, reaching Carol Lynn in heaven, where I imagine her in joyful reunion, gathered into the embrace of Heavenly Parents who have welcomed Their beloved daughter home.

And still we sing:

I’ll walk with you. I’ll talk with you.
That’s how I’ll show my love for you.

And because she did, so will we.

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Carol Lynn Pearson 1939-2026