Lest It Be Lost to Posterity

To My Daughter, 

To write can be a powerful process that enables us to see more clearly, to understand better what is most important, and to feel the Spirit of the Lord as we sort out our thoughts and put them down on paper. As you know, I try to write each day something I learned from the scriptures, and one of the verses that inspired me to do this was this one in the Book of Mormon: “I write what few things I write, in the same book with my brother; for behold, I saw the last which he wrote, that he wrote it with his own hand; and he wrote it in the day that he delivered them unto me” (Omni 1:9). I have added the italics so you can see how he focused on the act of writing in this short verse. This was written by Chemish, the great grandson of Enos. This is the only verse he wrote, making his contribution perhaps the shortest of any Book of Mormon record keeper. But he knew he needed to write, and even if he did not have anything incredibly profound to say, he still wrote and understood the importance of writing something for posterity. I hope you will continue to take the time to write and express the ideas and feelings in your heart.

               One of the things that makes me sad is that for some of our ancestors, we know so very little about them. There is just no record of their life, so though we might have a picture and some dates about when they were born and when they died, we know almost nothing of their life or personality. As I have thought about this, I realize that if we do not write down and preserve some record of our life, it will be largely forgotten in subsequent generations.

                I am so grateful in the cases where we do have some kind of written document from an ancestor that we can preserve for the future. For example, Thomas Conk, your fifth great grandfather, was born in 1775 and was married a woman whose father was an Iroquois and whose mother was a white American. Obviously this was pretty unique, and at the end of his life he recorded some details about his wife’s story, saying, “Being of advanced years and aware of the frailities of the flesh, I take pen to paper to record the interesting history of my wife least it be lost to posterity. My wife, though greatly beloved, is unlearned and so it falls to me to make this record as best my limited ability allows.” He then went on to tell how it came to be that a young girl in New Jersey married an Indian, which is indeed a very fascinating story that would have been lost to his descendants if he had not taken the time to write it down!

               In the Book of Mormon when the Savior visited the Nephites after His resurrection, one of the things He did was analyze the record that was being kept by the prophet Nephi. He found that an important event, the appearance of saints who arose from the dead, had not been recorded by Nephi. When He found this out He said, “How be it that ye have not written this thing?” Perhaps He would say that to all of us at times when we fail to write the important events that happen to us. I encourage you to find time occasionally to write down the feelings of your heart in your journal and record some things that happen to you. Do not feel like you need to write everything – just find those events that are most important and write your thoughts about them. 

Love,

Dad