And More Pioneer Legacy

More pioneer ancestors who have inspired me:

My great great grandparents on my mother's side, Palestine Palmima Stover and her husband Cornelius Jasper Stover, were baptized by Elder Joseph Standing in 1878. My great great grandmother Palestine made the clothing Elder Standing was wearing when he and his companion, the future apostle Rutger Clawson, were attacked by a mob and Elder Standing was shot to death near Rome Georgia.

The Stovers immigrated to the west, and the prophet John Taylor called them to settle in Manassa, Colorado in 1880. About 7 years later the prophet Wilford Woodruff called the next generation to settle near Taos, New Mexico, a desolate country with very poor farming, where they raised pinto beans.

This is where my maternal grandparents lived, and where my mother was raised. How would it be, if today, we were called to leave our comfortable homes and told to go to some uninhabited spot to build houses and plow the fields? (With no airconditioning or plumbing.) I wish my attitude could be like this man's:

In 1862, Charles Lowell Walker (no relation to me) received a call to settle in southern Utah. He recorded: "I learned a principle that I shall not forget in awhile. It showed to me that obedience was a great principle in heaven and on earth. Well, here I have worked for the last seven years through heat and cold, hunger and adverse circumstances, and at last have got me a home, a lot with fruit trees just beginning to bear fruit...Well, I must leave it and go and do the will of my Father in Heaven, who overrules all for the good of them that love and fear him. I pray God to give me strength to accomplish that which is required of me in an acceptable manner before him." ("Our Heritage" p. 88, from Diary of Charles Lowell Walker)

Can we make similar sacrifices? We make sacred covenants in the temple to sacrifice for the kingdom of God. But do we really mean it? I remember once when we used to go on Relief Society Temple trips on buses to the Washington DC temple, and we were on our way home.

I was on a spiritual high from going through the temple, but I became very discouraged as I listened to the conversation of the two women who were sitting behind me. One was telling the other how her bishop had recently given her a calling to be a Primary teacher, and she was explaining to her friend how she told him, "No way, I won't do that." She obviously didn't want to sacrifice the time and effort it would require to work in the Primary, and it made me wonder what she WAS willing to sacrifice.