No holier place

Thursday at work it was my turn to give the spiritual thought in our Executive Directors' meeting. I mentioned that I had recently been called to teach gospel doctrine in our ward and that this Sunday I was teaching a lesson on the 1856 rescue of the Willie and Martin handcart companies. I shared a couple of scriptures and this bit of testimony from a man who had crossed the plains with the Martin handcart company:

"One day he was in a group of people who began sharply criticizing the Church leaders for ever allowing the Saints to cross the plains with no more supplies or protection than a handcart company provided. The old man listened until he could stand it no more; then he arose and said with great emotion:

"'I was in that company and my wife was in it. . . . We suffered beyond anything you can imagine and many died of exposure and starvation, but did you ever hear a survivor of that company utter a word of criticism? . . . [We] came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with him in our extremities.

"'I have pulled my handcart when I was so weak and weary from illness and lack of food that I could hardly put one foot ahead of the other. I have looked ahead and seen a patch of sand or a hill slope and I have said, I can go only that far and there I must give up, for I cannot pull the load through it. . . . I have gone on to that sand and when I reached it, the cart began pushing me. I have looked back many times to see who was pushing my cart, but my eyes saw no one. I knew then that the angels of God were there.

"'Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart? No. Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay, and I am thankful that I was privileged to come in the Martin Handcart Company'" (quoted in Our Heritage: A Brief History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [1996], 78).

At the conclusion of my thought, Elder Richard G. Hinckley shared an experience from his family that he said I was free to use, if I wanted, in my lesson Sunday. A few years ago his father, President Gordon B. Hinckley, took all of his family, his children and their children, to the area along the Sweetwater River in south central Wyoming known as Martin's Cove, where the handcart pioneers sought refuge from the early winter storms that descended upon them. As they were walking along the trail, the Prophet stopped and talked to them about what had happened here.

"You have all been in holy places," President Hinckley said in essence, "some of you in the Holy Land, all of you in temples." And then with some emotion he added that they would never stand in any holier place than here.


Claudia and I and some of our children have been to these same sites on the wind-swept highlands of Wyoming, where the handcart pioneers became acquainted with God in their extremities and where a prophet-directed rescue took place. And I feel the same as President Hinckley. It is a holy place.