Jane Clayson Johnson couldn't stress enough how important it is for Young Single Adults to trust in God, as she spoke to YSAs on Sunday in the Salt Lake Tabernacle.

Johnson, a former broadcaster, got her start at KSL in Salt Lake City and later was a co-host of CBS's "The Early Show," and a correspondent for "48." She also worked for ABC and NPR.

Johnson spoke at the concluding fireside of a three-day summit for YSAs in the Bonneville, Granger, Murray East, Holladay and Sugar House regions. Organizers estimated 3,000 Mormon young adults attended the conference, which included a keynote address Saturday by Jill Stevens Shepherd, concerts and workshops from an array of presenters.

"If there is one thing that I believe more intimately, more powerfully than anything in this life, it is this: Trust in the Lord," she said.

The author and mother of two young children and stepmother to three teenagers said life is full of twists and turns, especially for young adults. But while the way can be long and hilly, it's always safer when following where God leads.

Johnson met with women from the 54 invited stakes during a reception before her fireside address. Each stake president was given four tickets to give to women in his stake to attend the reception, at which Johnson shared a few words and greeted or hugged all those who wanted to meet her.

Johnson related an experience she had while  a news correspondent in Macedonia. She and her crew had heard of a group of refugees displaced by fighting in Kosovo who had been compassionately taken in by farmers in a remote mountain city. Before departing on what she was told would be a simple, direct drive to the village, a Red Cross worker informed her it was a potentially dangerous route.

He instructed them to take go another, albeit longer, more confusing, difficult way in order to stay safe, which they did.

"Sure enough, it was a very difficult trip," she said. "A bumpy road with lots of twists and turns. At one point we weren't actually sure we were on the right dirt path. Our instinct was to turn around ... but we kept going. And we eventually made it to our destination."

Johnson said she thinks of this story as a metaphor for the way peoples' lives play out. What they thought would be straight and easy paths can turn out to be long, challenging roads. What's more, often the paths people plan for themselves are in a different direction that what the Lord has in mind.

"Sometimes, the path that we have in our minds for ourselves is not necessarily the one the Lord has mapped out for us," she said.

A BYU graduate, Johnson said that when she entered college she had a specific plan that included marriage four months after graduation, and a baby 16 months after that.

"I was a young freshman. ... I had the perfect plan, and a very specific time line for me and the Lord. I had my wedding colors picked out, peach and teal. ... Well, you can imagine my shock and sense of disappointment when things didn't quite go as planned. And I watched in sadness and some fear as my friends started to walk on the path that I had wanted to be walking."

Because God's plan can sometimes be lonely, Johnson said it's imperative that Mormons stick together and be there for each other. She told of a time when she found herself struggling spiritually.

"I had faith, I just felt spiritually drained," she said. "Some weeks, it was all I could do to throw on a dress and drag myself to church."

She would sit on the back row, in a far corner, slink into the back of her meetings, then head home. One Sunday, she opened her front door shortly after getting home to see a sister with bunch of fresh tomatoes.

"She did not judge. What she did was show me somebody cared, somebody thought of me as her sister in the gospel," Johnson said. "We are here to help each other and we must never forget that."

Johnson, who married her husband, Mark, in her mid-30s, spoke reverently about the challenges YSAs face from a world that is constantly growing more secular. She cited several media outlets during her address, including a Time magazine article that reported the number of Americans who identify themselves as Christians has dropped by 11 percent in a single generation, and more and more people don't affiliate with religion at all.

"Religion and matters of faith are not only cast aside, but they are openly mocked," she said.

In spite of secularization, Johnson pleaded with those in attendance to "make good choices," as they would be the better for it.

She said she knows it's not always easy, citing examples from her own life when she had to tell prominent producers that she would "not be drinking wine or champagne with everybody else on set during those cooking segments at 8:30 in the morning."

Standing up for the Lord's will in similar ways "is not easy, but I can tell you, the rewards are exquisite."

E-mail: mfarmer@desnews.com