What is it that bred then and breeds now the loyalty and devotion found in this 15-year-old girl and the family into which she was born? What is it that made her turn on her slightly less stalwart friend and declare, "I know that my father will go and that nothing could prevent him"? Where does that kind of spunk come from that would allow her to go on to say, "And I should not own him as a father if he would not go when he is called"?
And what of those three little children who watched their parents disappear in a wagon over the edge of the Colorado River gorge but trusted in the instruction they had been given by their mother? They sat there stalwartly, determined not to move or weep despite what must have been their tremendous fear.
What are we seeing in these examples of faithful pioneers? It is what we have seen down through the dispensations of time and certainly down through this dispensation. We are seeing what we saw when the Saints fled New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Missouri and then fled their beloved Nauvoo across an ice-bound river with the temple soon burning in the distance. It is what we saw when those same people buried their dead in large numbers at Winter Quarters, followed by leaving isolated graves, sometimes as tiny as a bread box, in Wyoming near Chimney Rock or at one of the many crossings of the Sweetwater River or in a snowbank at Martin's Cove.
What we saw then and what we see now among the blessed Saints the world over is faith in God, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, faith in the Prophet Joseph Smith, faith in the reality of this work and the truthfulness of its message. It was faith that took a boy into a grove of trees to pray, and it was faith that enabled him to get up off his knees, place himself in God's hands for the Restoration of the gospel, and ultimately march toward his own martyrdom scarcely two dozen short years later.
Little wonder that faith always has been and always will be the first and abiding principle of the gospel and of our work. It is the heart of our conviction that the work not only should go forth but that it also can and will and must go forth.
I don't know how else mothers and fathers could leave those babies in those makeshift graves on the plains and then, with one last look, weep their way forward toward Zion. I don't know how else a woman like Belle Smith could set her children at the edge of a cliff and muscle her wagon down the perilous incline. I don't know how else Samuel Claridge could sell all he owned and head off to build Zion in the desolate Muddy Mission. The fundamental driving force in these stories is faith—rock-ribbed, furnace-refined, event-filled, spiritually girded faith that this is the very Church and kingdom of God and that when you are called, you go.