A Call for Conviction

There are still "waste place[s] in Zion" to be built up, and some of those are much closer than the Muddy or San Juan Missions. Some of them are in our own hearts and in our own homes.

And so I issue a call for the conviction we all must have burning in our hearts that this is the work of God and that it requires the best we can give to the effort. My appeal is that you nurture your own physical and spiritual strength so that you have a deep reservoir of faith to call upon when tasks or challenges or demands of one kind or another come. Pray a little more, study a little more, shut out the noise and shut down the clamor, enjoy nature, call down personal revelation, search your soul, and search the heavens for the testimony that led our pioneer parents. Then, when you need to reach down inside a little deeper and a little farther to face life and do your work, you will be sure there is something down there to call upon.

When you have your own faith, you are prepared to bless your family. The single strongest indicator of activity and service, of devotion and loyalty in this Church continues to be the presence of strong family ties. I say that, knowing full well that part of the majesty of this Church is in the individual member. Sometimes that member is a new convert; sometimes that member is the only Latter-day Saint in the family. Some individual somewhere had to plant the flag of faith and start a new generation in the gospel. But the fact is that faith is better nurtured and more protected and longer lasting when there is an entire family to reinforce it. So after standing alone if you have to, work diligently to see that others in your family don't stand alone. Build your family and see that faith is strong there.

With that accomplished, we can serve the Church near at hand or at some distant outpost if called. Then we can search out that lost sheep—member or nonmember, living or dead. This can be done wisely and well only when the other 99 lambs, including our own little flock, are safely folded while we search. If we have loved and taught those at home, they will understand exactly as little Elizabeth Claridge did: when the call comes, you can be certain that your father and mother, your brothers and sisters are going to go.

There is work to be done. We cannot say that every one of our neighbors has deep faith, that every one has a strong family, that every one near and far has heard the gospel message and has become a believing, teaching, temple-going Latter-day Saint. The world is getting more wicked, and the times ahead will try the best of us. But the forces of righteousness will always prevail when people like Stanford and Arabella Smith, people like Samuel Claridge and his spunky daughter Elizabeth make it prevail.

We must have faith in this work—faith in what all believers are called to do, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and in our Father in Heaven. We need to conform our will to Theirs and then make that will rock-ribbed and pioneer strong indeed. If we do that, I know we will be safe and secure in the inexorable onward movement of the Church and kingdom of God on earth.

What are we seeing in these examples of faithful pioneers? 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 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.

What we see in the pioneers 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.

When her father was called to move his family to the difficult Muddy Mission in present-day Nevada, USA, Elizabeth Claridge (above) wept but declared, "I should not own him as a father if he would not go when he is called."

The Last Wagon, by Lynn Griffin

Martin Handcart Company, Bitter Creek, Wyoming, 1856, by Clark Kelley Price © 1980 IRI

Notes

 

1.

In Milton R. Hunter, Brigham Young the Colonizer (1973), 47.

 

2.

See David E. Miller, Hole-in-the-Rock: An Epic in the Colonization of the Great American West (1959), 101–18; emphasis added and punctuation standardized.

 

3.

Elizabeth Claridge McCune, in Susa Young Gates, "Biographical Sketches," Young Woman's Journal, July 1898, 292, 293; punctuation standardized.

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