Week 4-part 2

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES

Inevitably, the entrepreneur hero, who was once making tremendous progress, smacks into a wall of resistance. Many people abandon their journey because of setbacks, disappointments, or detours.

President Monson shared a story from his ancestry from his General Conference address titled Looking Back and Moving Forward, where he said that the family immigrated from Scotland, while in St. Louis the family contracted a disease called cholera, both parents and 2 brothers died, the other 9 children had to build caskets for the family members from their oxen pens because there were so many deaths in the area there were not any caskets. The 9 children moved forward on their own and made it to the Salt Lake Valley. He said his great-grandmother Margaret, who was 13 years old at the time. President Monson said, “Others of my ancestors faced similar hardships. Through it all, however, their testimonies remained steadfast and firm. From all of them I received a legacy of total dedication to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because of these faithful souls, I stand before you today.”

In Elder and sister Holland’s BYU address titled However Long and Hard the Road, they share about the struggles the saints went through in building the Salt lake Temple. This story really touched me and strengthened my testimony of the love they had for the Lord and the marvelous sacrifices they made to build his house. I will share the most profound quotes, Elder Holland tells us some of the feelings they most likely had, but never quit or gave up. This story is so amazing I am letting Elder Holland tell it here so you can feel the spirit as I did when reading it.

               

On 28 July 1847, four days after his arrival in that valley, Brigham Young stood upon the spot where now rises the magnificent Salt Lake Temple and exclaimed to his companions: “Here [we will build] the Temple of our God!” (James H. Anderson, “The Salt Lake Temple,” Contributor [The Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations of Zion], no. 6, April 1893, p. 243). They just marched forth and broke ground for the most massive, permanent, inspiring edifice they could conceive. And they would spend forty years of their lives trying to complete it.

“A temple would be fine, but do we really need one this big?” But they kept on digging. Maybe they believed they were “laying the foundation of a great work.” In any case they worked on, “not weary in well-doing.”

No sooner was the foundation work finished than Albert Sidney Johnston and his United States troops set out for the Salt Lake Valley intent on war with “the Mormons.” In response President Young made elaborate plans to evacuate and, if necessary, destroy the entire city behind them. But what to do about the temple whose massive excavation was already completed and its 8’ x 16’ foundational walls firmly in place? They did the only thing they could do—they filled it all back in again. Every shovelful. All that soil and gravel that had been so painstakingly removed with those nine thousand man days of labor was filled back in. When they finished, those acres looked like nothing more interesting than a field that had been plowed up and left unplanted.

When the Utah War threat had been removed, the Saints returned to their homes and painfully worked again at uncovering the foundation and removing the material from the excavated basement structure.

During that time, as if the United States Army hadn’t been enough, the Saints had plenty of other interruptions. The arrival of the railroad pulled almost all of the working force off the temple for nearly three years, two decades and untold misery after it had begun, the walls of the temple were barely visible above ground.

“The Temple will be built as soon as we are prepared to use it,” he said (Anderson,Contributor, p. 266). Indeed his vision was so lofty and his hope so broad that right in the middle of this staggering effort requiring virtually all that the Saints could seem to bear, he announced the construction of the St. George, Manti, and Logan Temples.

So they squared their shoulders and stiffened their backs and went forward with their might. But when President Brigham Young died in 1877, the temple was still scarcely twenty feet above the ground. Ten years later, his successor, President John Taylor, and the temple’s original architect, Truman O. Angell, were dead as well

In the writing of one who was there, “The scene that followed is beyond the power of language to describe.” Lorenzo Snow, beloved President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, came forward leading 40,000 Latter-day Saints in the Hosanna shout. Every hand held a handkerchief every eye was filled with tears. One said the very “ground seemed to tremble with the volume of the sound” which echoed off the tops of the mountains. “A grander or more imposing spectacle than this ceremony of laying the Temple capstone is not recorded in history” (Anderson, Contributor, p. 273). It was finally and forever finished.

Brigham Young said, “We never began to build [any] temple without the bells of hell beginning to ring”

I testify that God loves each of us and that Jesus of Nazareth, his Only Begotten Son, came to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees” (D&C 81:5)—bringing a divine form of worker’s compensation, if you will, to you who keep tugging those granite boulders so faithfully into place. I love you and believe in you. This morning I have wanted to encourage you. You are laying the foundation of a great work—your own inestimable future. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?” I pray that your life may be “a monument to Mormon perseverance” “however long and hard the road,” in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

The sacrifice that these saints made for 40 years without any instant gratification is awe inspiring and makes you really appreciate the foundation they set for us.

When I first saw the good things to come video it really meant a lot to me because I had an experience where I felt the spirit very very strong about a very large decision I was making in my life a just a short time later mu husband had a prompting to do the very opposite, I trusted that it was from the Lord and I followed my husbands council. It bothers me for a few years and then when I saw this video it gave me perspective of why that may have happened, and I have been at peace with it sense.