Week 35

This has been a week of highs and lows, the latter of which we are still struggling through. But this too will pass. John has been really ill since Thursday with a flu bug and a rotten cold following hard on its heels. Since we are such a team, I decided to join in with the fun with my back slipping out on me and then catching John’s cold. We have been pretty miserable today. But that is the way mortality goes sometimes. If we always felt terrific we would likely take it for granted and not be as grateful as we should be.

We are glad that we still have a day and a half before we are scheduled to return to the temple Tuesday morning, and hope, by then, to be up and going again!

On our way! Don't we look energetic!

Saturday after we went to the temple for the first session so we could get Tuesday’s plans put together—we have Polish saints coming in Monday night—we left for a president-approved-get-away for our 44^th wedding anniversary.  We had originally thought of going to Berlin but it just seemed too much so chose instead a charming country hotel and spa near Seiffen, just next to the Czech boarder.

Land Heidelberg Hotel, Seiffen, Germany

Wedding party along our way.

This area is, of course, Erzgebirge country with beautiful rolling green mountains and quaint little towns dotting the landscape and tucked in among the hills. The area has no train service so we took a wonderful German bus and were there in just over an hour, passing along the way one wedding party in a carriage and seeing another celebrate at our hotel. When we arrived we checked in, ate a delicious bowl of soup, had a nap and reported for our massage appointments—our anniversary gifts to each other. The best part of that experience was sharing the gospel with the massage therapist, who was anxious to hear about it. John also gave her a pass-along card, which she was very eager to receive. It will be fun to see what she thinks when she emails him.

Hannalore Massage and Missionary contact

We enjoyed the charming room with its lace curtains, the vistas around the hotel and the wonderful dinner before turning in to nurse our miseries. When we woke up this morning I was much worse and John still felt pretty miserable so we decided to abort and head for Freiberg. We caught an early bus and arrived grateful to be home.

This area is known for its woodworking and Bogens

If we aren’t up to doing anything fun we figured we might just as well sleep in our own bed, soak in the deep, handicapped tub upstairs, and rest up to recuperate. We are always happy to be together, whatever the circumstances are. In many ways, that is how our marriage has been for all these years—highs and lows, health and sickness, joy and sorrow. So ist es! At least we have been able to enjoy our whole life’s journey together.

Stoking up the fires at Freibergsdorfer Hammer

Last Monday we had a delightful time with our missionary group by going to an old waterwheel-run blacksmith’s factory that began operation in 1607 and continued until 1974. Now it is a living museum and fascinating to see. John and I thought much about Nephi’s challenges in finding ore and forging it in order to make tools to be obedient to the Lord’s charge to build a ship. Wow! That was no easy assignment. Just watching the process we were grateful for his faithful obedience in the face of a hard assignment, very glad it wasn't us since neither of us could have even lifted the hammers used.

We have talked with John’s dad this week and continue to be amazed at his determination to endure well to the end, despite great pain and substantial loss of ground. He is anxious to move on from this mortal world and as a family we are fasting today that he might be released and for Becca and Carl to continue to be strengthened in their wonderful caregiving. Theirs is a remarkable family. It is a sweet thing to be part of a good man’s making the transition between the mortal and spirit worlds. When we called Thursday we could only leave our love to be communicated to him.

Charles W Laing--96

One of my favorite monthly emails I receive is from Colleen Whitley, one of my former H200 teachers at BYU. She is a giving, woman, and a terrific writer in the process. I received her May letter today with its wonderful report on the new Kansas City Temple and the events that led to its being built—that area figured so heavily in the early days of the Church and she captures important developments, then and now, a tiny portion with which Colleen had personal experience:

Kansas City Temple--#137

Last month the Kansas City Temple was dedicated, the 137th in the Church. But in addition to being the most recent, this temple stands on ground that was hallowed by enormous sacrifices and great suffering by the early Saints.

The temple is in Clay County in Western Missouri, very near the area the Lord designated as the Garden of Eden and the gathering place for the Saints in the last days when Adam will return and address his posterity (D & C 116 – the only section of the Doctrine and Covenants where the Lord basically tapped Joseph on the shoulder to give him a revelation; in just about all the rest, Joseph was either studying something in the Bible and asked for clarification or prayed with a question either he or another member had raised). The Temple is only six miles from Liberty Jail, where several early Church leaders, including Joseph Smith were imprisoned and where Joseph received the revelations now contained in the Doctrine and Covenants as Sections, 121, 122, and 123. Independence, where the Temple Lot for the City of Zion is located (D & C 57), is now a suburb of Kansas City.

Moreover, the new temple is also near Far West, where the early Saints laid the cornerstones for a temple and where many of them are buried. Only a short distance away is Haun’s Mill, where in 1838 a mob attacked the 30 Mormon families living there killing 17 men (some of them quite young men, one really still a child) and seriously injuring 13 others. The women and children fled into the surrounding woods and hid until the killers left, then returned to bandage wounds and help bury the dead. The Church has recently been able to purchase much of that historic property.

So, while 170 years ago the Saints were persecuted, raped, murdered, and driven from their homes, we are now being welcomed back. In 1838 Governor Lilburn Boggs, issued an extermination order saying any Mormons who would not leave the state should be killed and authorizing local officials to increase their forces as necessary to accomplish those ends. That order was not officially rescinded until 1976, when Governor Christopher S. Bond nullified it, “Expressing on behalf of all Missourians our deep regret for the injustice and undue suffering which was caused by the 1838 order.” A few weeks ago Missouri’s current Governor Jay Nixon visited the Temple during the open house and said the opening of the Temple symbolized “a time of healing.” Indeed it is. It is also helping to bring about the fulfillment of a great many prophecies concerning the City of Zion.

Independence Visitor's Center

I encountered one of the miracles involved in the process of that fulfillment over 40 years ago while Tom was in graduate school at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. The Central States Mission at that time covered all of Iowa and Missouri and parts of Nebraska, Arkansas, and Minnesota . . . we frequently traveled to the mission headquarters in Independence.  On one of our trips there, President Black showed us a fascinating map. The Church had just acquired a piece of land on West Walnut Street, between what was then the Mission Home and the Reorganized Church's Auditorium. They wanted to build a Visitors' Center and had talked with the local zoning and planning officials and received clearance for a building of rather exacting dimensions—it had to be a specific number of feet back from the street and could only contain so many square feet, and so on. Having done that, it occurred to someone in the planning group to look at Joseph Smith's plans for the City of Zion, to see what he had designated should go there. Those plans showed a building in that location of almost exactly the proportions the zoning laws would allow, but there was no label indicating its use. Since the rest of the plans for the City of Zion accounted for essential things, like the temple, they decided to go ahead and build the Visitors’ Center. It is still functioning very well.

What an astounding Church we are blessed to be part of, led as it is by living prophets, to guide us.  Certainly the building and operating of temples is at the center point of so much that matters most. We are grateful to be a part of it and grateful to those of you who have been helping us do the temple names for ancestors we have been finding in our off hours. It is a great work to have a small part in!

Enjoy your week. We love you all.