Doctrine & Covenants Lesson # 40
Finding Joy
in Temple and Family History Work
Introduction
I just finished watching the video about the Saints in
Manaus—the first link in the additional material below. Such sacrifice and
truly a step into the unknown as 102 of
them sold everything they had to spend 3 days in a relatively small riverboat
and 3 in a bus traveling 2,600 miles from the jungle to Sao Paulo and be sealed
in the temple. The farthest away I have ever been from a temple is when I lived
in Germany and had a 260 mile drive down to Switzerland. We always had the
first weekend of the month as an “American” weekend for servicemen. It was a
fun excursion to drive down to Switzerland and enjoy the great cuisine and the
shopping! But more important was the ability to perform temple ordinances,
sometimes in different languages. It was but a small sacrifice, but it seems
that nowadays a big sacrifice would almost be easier. Temples (in the plural)
are just there for us, and we in Utah County do not need to make an
appointment. We can choose from adjacent temples, go at almost any hour from 6
in the morning until 8 at night, and yet sometimes we are so over-scheduled
that it seems impossible to find the time. This last Sunday, several people
remarked how different their lives were when the temple was not a regular part
of their lives. It does require our physical presence, as long as we are able.
I am not going to go through the lesson this week, since
Kara will be doing that next Sunday, but I wanted to give a few extra links for
those of you who haven’t tried indexing or haven’t moved to web indexing.
First, here are some videos the Church has posted on vimeo:
Here are some instructions
In addition, I mentioned the Memories section of
familysearch. This is a very easy site to master and is undoubtedly a better and
more enduring place for your family memories that current social media. You can
upload text, documents, photos, videos, etc. And link them to a particular
person.
Years ago, when I was taking a class my first year at
BYU, we had to do a family history project and I got my mother to write about
my father who had died just a few weeks before and about herself. I added my thoughts
and as many photos as I could—in those days I could only photocopy them. We
made up what we called “The Book of Dad” and I made copies for my brothers and
my mother for Christmas that year—1994. I didn’t think it would have much of an
impact on my non-member brothers (who are wonderful people and I love them
dearly), but fast forward to 2012 when my mother died, and at her funeral, my
brother talked about her early life from that book. Now I have the task of
putting that up on Familysearch so that future generations might find it. That
task came to me while I was teaching the lesson this last Sunday. I hadn’t even
thought about doing that before. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Additional resources for this lesson
- “Sealed
Together: The Manaus Temple Caravan”: This 14-minute video describes
the long journey Saints from Manaus, deep in the Amazon, made in order to
attend the São Paulo Brazil Temple.
- “Teachings
of Wilford Woodruff: Gather Family Records”: This two-minute video
discusses Wilford Woodruff’s teachings that all members should be sealed
to their own ancestors, instead of being sealed as adopted children to
missionaries or Church leaders they admired, as many had done in early
Utah.
- “Ministry
of John Taylor: Work for the Dead”: This one-minute video shares
some of John Taylor’s teachings on the importance of temple work.
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