Though his family lived in Logan when he was born and in Colorado for a few years after that, Neil Linden Andersen mostly grew up on a dairy farm in Pocatello, Idaho.

In an article published in the August issue of the Ensign magazine, Andersen said that living on a farm taught him the value of hard work.

“I milked a lot of cows and moved a lot of irrigation pipe,” Andersen said. “I can remember that on Christmas morning before we opened our presents, we had cows to milk.”

Working with cows provided another life lesson for Andersen when he was about 16. His father got him out of bed late at night so that the two of them could retrieve the carcass of one of the family’s steers that had wandered onto a road and been hit by a truck. After dragging the dead animal from the road, they butchered it for the meat that could still be recovered.

Describing the experience for a 1995 Ensign article, Andersen wrote that, “We didn’t finish until about 3 in the morning. The smell, the slime, the dirt, and the filth clung to me.”

The relief of removing his dirty clothes and washing himself once the job had been completed left a lasting impression. When he went back to bed, Andersen said, “I was exhausted, but the feelings of tiredness did not approach the sensational satisfaction of being washed and clean.” The exhilaration of being physically clean, he said, became a memorable metaphor for spiritual cleanliness.

After graduating from Highland High School and attending a year of classes at Brigham Young University, Andersen accepted the call to be a missionary in France, where he would later return to serve as a mission president.

After completing his mission, Andersen returned to BYU, where he met Kathy Sue Williams. They were married in the Salt Lake Temple on March 20, 1975, just prior to his graduation. The newlyweds spent the next two years in Massachusetts, where Andersen completed a master’s degree in business administration at Harvard University.

After graduating, Andersen moved to Tampa, Fla., and applied his business administration training in the fields of advertising, real estate development and health care. When Andersen was called to serve as president of the France Bordeaux Mission in 1989, he owned a successful advertising agency. At the time, Andersen was unsure how, or even whether, his business affairs could be left in the hands of others while he was away.

Trusting that the situation could be handled somehow, Andersen began preparing to move his family overseas. A few weeks later, he received an unsolicited offer to purchase the business. “It was clearly the Lord’s hand at work in a miraculous way,” Andersen said.

Shortly after returning from France, he accepted a call to full-time church service as a general authority in 1993. He was called to the Presidency of the Seventy in 2005, and has had a number of church responsibilities, including serving as executive director of the Church Audiovisual Department, where he managed the development of the film “The Testaments of One Fold and One Shepherd” and supervised the initial launch of the missionary Web site Mormon.org.

Andersen is the second apostle to be called during the tenure of President Thomas S. Monson. He was called to fill the vacancy left by the death of Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin.

— Cody Clark

Sources: Ensign magazine, Deseret Morning News 2009 Church Almanac, www.lds.org