Voices from the Dust

President Spencer W. Kimball accompanied by D. Arthur Haycock, circa 1974

This week I have been thinking a lot about family.  Earlier in the week I came across a couple of talks that my grandfather, D. Arthur Haycock, had delivered in behalf of President Spencer W. Kimball entitled "Remember the Mission of the Church" and "The Lord Expects Righteousness."  The blog won't let me post the whole talks, but here is a part that I loved from "The Lord Expects Righteousness" in the October 1982 Conference.

Finding that my cousin was on facebook and thinking she might be interested, I shared the links with her.  She posted them on her facebook page, tagging each of the cousins so that they would all be made aware of the video.  The result was an interesting facebook gathering of cousins sharing thoughts and feelings about our Nana and Papa Haycock.  The thoughts and memories shared there were touching.  One of my cousins wrote, "Amazing timing, thank you.  It's been a long day and long week...but this brought things back into perspective."  It was amazing that these two talks seemed to have the same effect upon all of us cousins, reminding us of things we had forgotten, a familiar voice that we loved, and one of "those angel faces [smiling], which we have loved long since and lost awhile."

Such feelings shouldn't be surprising.  We are a Church that believes in the value and power of voices that "speak from the dust" (2 Nephi 26:16).  But it seems that no matter how many times I hear those voices, they still move me in the same way.  They still remind me of a noble heritage I carry and of the importance of honoring that heritage.  After this experience early in the week, I received a package in the mail yesterday from the Church Archives.  They had digitized two talks that my Papa gave at a workshop for Church secretaries in 1983.  Today as I drove to Church, I listened to one of them and heard the following sage counsel:

"Some of the jobs we have may not always be to our liking.  I had one that I hated with a passion.  I wept over it.  The war came along.  I had been [at the Church offices] for six years.  I was happy and ready to stay the rest of my life.  And the [Second] World War came.  Pearl Harbor came.  And they came to President Hinckley and to me and a couple of others and said 'You can't stay here any longer.  You're pre-Pearl Harbor fathers.  We don't want you in the Army.  But you can't work in an office.  You've got to go to the railroad or the smelters or to the mines and make a contribution in one of the war efforts.'  President Hinckley and I ended up in the railroad.  I hated every minute of it.  It wasn't my way of life.  I wasn't happy.  I'd trained to work in an office.  I hadn't trained to swing a sixteen pound sledge hammer or roll around in tobacco juice or oil and grease and dirt.  I didn't like it.  And then President Hinckley went to Denver to the headquarters and I came over to the depot and put on a cap and brass buttons and was a station master in his place.  And so I learned all about trains and railroads and the time tables.  Finally the war was over.  [The Church] asked me to come back.  The President of the Church, George Albert Smith, invited me in and said he wanted me to travel with him.  He was a railroad nut; a railroad buff.  I was the first person he had ever found that could read a time table.  We became instant friends and associates because of the experience I had with the worst experience of my life.  I got a training that helped me for the rest of my life and started me on a road of being secretary to several Presidents of the Church.  It came out of that terrible experience that was forced upon me, but I learned something from it that benefitted me and blessed me later on and has blessed me ever since" (D. Arthur Haycock, Secretaries Week Address, 27 April 1983, LDS Church Archives).

I was two years and six days old at the time my grandfather gave this talk.  I highly doubt he ever thought I would hear it, much less benefit from it.  But in the middle of a talk that he gave in 1983, he spoke very personally and very directly to his 31 year old grandson in 2012.  He reminded me that sometimes the hardest and most undesirable things we are asked to do yield the most profound blessings in our lives.  He reminded me that the Lord has a plan for me and He knows where I need to go and what I need to do to gain the experiences and abilities that I will need to be able to carry out that plan.

There are a lot of reasons why the Lord has asked us to search out our kindred dead.  Clearly, providing them with the ordinances of the House of the Lord is the most critical of these reasons.  But I firmly believe that there are blessings that extend beyond the satisfaction of knowing that we have done for them what they could not do for themselves.  I believe that in searching out our ancestry, including and perhaps particularly those who do not need help with their temple ordinances, we will find lessons, principles, and even occasionally scripture to guide us in our lives and help us along the path to eternal life.  If my time in Texas has taught me anything, it has taught me that I do not want any part of a heaven that does not include family and relationships.  For me, such a place would not be fit to be called heaven.  Gratefully, ours is a Church that preaches of enduring families and eternal relationships bound by the Holy Priesthood of God, unified by the infinite Atonement of Christ, and sanctified by a shared commitment to lives of holiness and obedience to the principles of godliness.

Brett