Ben Howington
Ben Howington is also known as “Guitar Dad” with his YouTube postings of hymn arrangements and his guitar tutorials on his [1]. His December 2015 production of “Families Can Be Together Forever” attracted many more viewers than usual because he expressed gratitude for the life of his daughter, who was celebrating five years of remission from brain cancer. She was diagnosed when she was three-and-one-half months old.
Howington earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Brigham Young University-Idaho. He is a manager of corporate communications. He was a senior account manager for a New York company when his daughter Lila was diagnosed on a trip to visit family in North Carolina. After the diagnosis, he moved his wife, Annie, and their two children to be closer to family and to have their daughter treated at Duke University Medical Center, one of the best in the country for pediatric brain cancer and stem cell transplant. Lila went through chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant before the age of one, and although the tumor came back four months after it was removed and the process had to begin again, the cancer has not returned in five years.
“We feel blessed because it doesn't always have the same outcome for everyone, but that doesn't change the way we felt the Lord's hand in everything.” “We never felt like she was going to leave us, and I know that's because of the eternal nature of families because we're an eternal family.”[2] Howington is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
His children pick a song from the Latter-day Saint hymnbook for him to arrange each month and he posts it to his website. "It's a lot of fun. I love the guitar. I love the hymns," Howington said. "I thought, there is so much crap out there on the Internet that I wanted to do something to try and offset that, and I thought what better way to do that than the hymns."[3]
