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The phone rang at 7:45 a.m. on the Monday morning after the 2002 Winter Olympics ended in an explosion of fireworks. A groggy Bonnie and Jim Parkin were still in bed.
On the line was the secretary to LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, who was already hard at work. Could they meet the 91-year- old leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints later that morning?
Jim Parkin hung up, turned to his wife and said, "This call is about you, not me."
At 11 a.m., the Parkins were ushered into Hinckley's spacious downtown office, where the man who is considered by Mormons to be a "prophet, seer and revelator" quietly asked Bonnie Parkin to take the helm of the church's Relief Society, a women's organization of 4.9 million members.
With her acceptance, Parkin gave up the life of a Salt Lake City physician's wife, whose days were filled with gardening and grandchildren, tennis and lunches, cleaning and canning, to become a kind of jet-setting global CEO -- without pay.
Parkin is now the most powerful woman in the LDS Church (with the possible exception of Hinckley's wife, Marjorie).
But that isn't how she sees the job.
Her assignment? Merely to create a "global sisterhood" among Mormon women in every culture and circumstance.
A tall task, especially for a woman who has lived the bulk of her life in the Salt Lake Valley. Parkin was born in Murray and grew up on a farm in Herriman. She earned a bachelor's degree in elementary education and early childhood development from Utah State University. She married Jim Parkin in...