The Knowledge of Your Fathers

Mormon’s final message to us in the Book of Mormon is found in Mormon 7. I was impressed as I read that today how he repeatedly instructed us to look to and remember our fathers. He wrote, “Know ye that ye are of the house of Israel…. Know ye that ye must come to the knowledge of your fathers…. If ye believe this ye will know concerning your fathers, and also the marvelous works which were wrought by the power of God among them. And ye will also know that ye are a remnant of the seed of Jacob; therefore ye are numbered among the people of the first covenant” (v2, 5, 9-10). He wanted us to look to our fathers and know that we are of the house of Israel. This reminds me of one of President Nelson’s teachings about who we are: “First and foremost, you are a child of God. Second, as a member of the Church, you are a child of the covenant. And third, you are a disciple of Jesus Christ. Tonight, I plead with you not to replace these three paramount and unchanging identifiers with any others.” All of these identifiers invite us, like Mormon, to look to our fathers. To be a child of God encourages us to turn to our Father in Heaven and remember that He created us as His spirit child, to be a child of the covenant invites to look to our ancestors and all those with whom God has covenanted before us, and to be a disciple of Christ should inspire us to look to the Savior who died for us and is the Father of our salvation. All three of these inspire us to look to the past to understand who we are today. To live only in the present without an understanding of where we have come from limits our ability to see clearly what we are doing here on earth. We need to “come to the knowledge of [our] fathers” from the past so that we can fulfil the mission God has for us today.

                Yesterday was Memorial Day, a holiday that encourages us to remember those who have gone before and whose sacrifices still bless us today. This morning I reread part of the story of my maternal Grandma’s life who served in the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve from 1944 to 1946. She wrote, “Because I wanted to show my patriotism during the war, I enlisted… at the age of 20. I traveled by train to Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, where l spent six weeks in boot camp training…. It was the first time in my life I had been such a Iong distance from home. This was such a new experience invoIving much discipline as to what to do and when to do it.” She spent 18 months in Washington D.C., far from her small hometown of Rembrandt, Iowa. This was surely a great sacrifice that she performed in order to do her part in helping her country in a time of war. After she returned home, another experienced changed her life forever. She wrote, “ln the summer of 1948 I met a fellow who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was traveling with the Army Band which had performed in Des Moines, Iowa. He seemed so different than most fellows I had known and after learning that he belonged to the Mormon Church, that led me to wonder just what the Mormons believed. Some time later I started attending the branch of the Mormon Church in Des Moines, Iowa, and studied the missionary lessons for several months before being baptized in April 1950.” She became the only member of the Church in her family, and in August 1952 she made the difficult decision to move by herself to Salt Lake City. As I understand it, she felt that it was the best thing to do in order to find a husband who was a member of the Church. My mom has recently expressed to me her appreciation and awe for the courage and faith this must have taken her mother to go out on her own like that to an unknown place. She did indeed meet my grandfather there, and they dated for three years before they were married in the Salt Lake Temple in 1956 (she wrote, “I chased him for three years until he caught me.”). As I thought about her story, I have to think that her time away from home serving in the war helped give her courage to later move away from home permanently to Salt Lake City. She was a true pioneer and her posterity, including myself, are blessed because of her faith and devotion to the Lord. Mormon’s final words encourage us to remember those who have come before us, like my Grandma Best, and their commitment to the Lord in years past should inspire us to likewise “lay hold upon the gospel of Christ” in our own lives (Mormon 7:8).