Home, Hands, and Plans
I have three things to talk about today: Home, hands, and plans. It is altogether fitting that we are here at home for Dad's services. More than a year ago I convinced him to move from his home. Nearly every day since then he has longed to be back here, back home. He found it disorienting to be away from home. It was hard for him to get his bearings. It was frustrating. It's good to be in this building. He had an office here when it was an annex to the county courthouse. He did the structural design when Perry decided to turn it into a suitable place for families to mourn and remember their departed loved ones. He approved of that plan very much. He engineered the massive beams hidden above our heads, the pillars concealed in the walls that surround us, and the footings below us. This is one of his structures. Our family is very proud of these. They are like him. They're not very fancy. You won't find them on the covers of architectural magazines. But they are firm, steadfast, and immovable. So it's good to be in this building. And it's good to be home in this town. Over the railroad tracks is the Beck Hospital building where Dad was born in the summer of 1933. Across the street is the school where Mom and Dad met in English class as high school juniors. There's the gym where they danced, and the street they bravely crossed so Dad could ask Mom's Dad if he could take her home that night. Who is your father? Grandpa Hill asked. Marvin Harper, Dad answered. Well then, Grandpa said, I guess that would be alright. The Packer Esplin law office next door was their seminary. They shared their first kiss in the stairwell of the home just down the street, where Mom's family lived while their Riverside home was remodeled. They fell in love right here. This is where they enacted the truth that family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. They took seriously their solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children. They believe that “Children are an heritage of the Lord” (Psalm 127:3). They believe that parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve one another, and to observe the commandments of God. This is where they showed us that happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. This is where Dad taught us the principle behind his saying that he never took up golf because he feared he would enjoy it too much. But none of that is what I really mean by home. Lately Dad has longed not so much for this home as for his Heavenly home. Lately he has been Jackie Harper, Opal's little boy, and what I mean is that it is so good to know that he belongs to his parents forever. What a homecoming that must be. He's not disoriented or frustrated. He knows exactly where he is, who he is, and who he's with. He's home. It's good to leave home for a time. It's good to go home when it's time. Now hands. I have had the sacred privilege of holding and looking at Dad's hands lately. They are substantial, cow milking, beet topping hands. I mocked him once because he couldn't turn those hands palm up. He reminded me of the things he could do. Those hands rolled at least a hundred thousand newspapers for me to deliver. And on one memorable occasion the index finger of one of those hands came in direct, repeated contact with my sternum as Dad reminded me that I was not better than other people. More often they patted my back or held my slumped shoulders as he reminded me that I was better than I thought I was and could be better still. For me they are the hands of the holy priesthood. They are the hands that immersed me in baptismal waters and confirmed me a member of the Savior's church. They are the hands that ordained me to the holy priesthood. When I was very sick and couldn't walk or talk, I knew that if those hands could be laid on my head again, I would be healed. And they were. And I was. Those are the hands of hundreds of patriarchal blessings. Will you stand for a minute if you received your patriarchal blessing under those hands, or baptism, or confirmation, or a blessing of any kind. I invite you to cherish with me the memory of the hands of the holy priesthood. Finally plans. Dads make plans. I know because it used to be my job to copy Dad's plans on the blueprint machine in the basement of the office building. They were elaborate, detailed, expert plans. I couldn't understand their complexities or intricacies, but they must have been good plans. People used them to create enduring structures. This room was created based on those plans. The massive beams above our heads, the pillars that hold up this building, and the reinforced foundation on which it rests, were created based on those plans. Dads make plans. The Book of Mormon teaches that death comes to everyone eventually "to fulfill the merciful plan of the great creator" (2 Nephi 9:6). Sometimes death comes late in life, as it did to Dad's maternal grandmother, Martha Jackman, in the fall of 1958. Sometimes it comes shockingly, tragically early, as it did to Dad's little sister, Carol, just 23 years old, and to her four-year-old daughter Cynthia, two-year-old son David, and infant son Steven. They were southbound on a two-lane highway, driving home from Grandma Jackman's funeral, when a truck coming the opposite direction foolishly passed a semi with a trailer full of cars. The oncoming truck forced Carol to swerve toward the shoulder. When she corrected her tiny car shot across the highway and under the semi, where it exploded. Does that sound like the merciful plan of a great creator? Dad and Mom learned about Carol and her children when Dad's Dad came bearing the unbearable news. Crueler still, Carol's husband Jim Pendlebury learned that his whole family was dead when he read the news over the air at his job as a radio announcer. Merciful plan? Great creator? Yes. And yes. There is a Great Creator. He has a plan. And it is merciful. I will try to explain. God, our Heavenly Father, is creating us in his image--not created, past tense. Creating--right here, right now. First he created us spiritually. Then he embodied our spirits here on earth, which is a kind of school for learning how to become like our Heavenly Parents, how to be embodied, how to live, love, suffer, struggle, sacrifice, and ultimately how to be born into eternal life by death. Or, as God put it, "Thus did I, the Lord God, appoint unto man the days of his probation--that by his natural death he might be raised in immortality unto eternal life" (D&C 29:43). Death, in other words, is birth into eternal life. It's an essential part of the process of being created in God's image, according to his plan. Christ and covenants are two key components of the merciful plan of the Great Creator. Jesus Christ is the mediator of the plan. He forgives the repentant, heals the wounded, rescues the lost, redeems the captive, and resurrects the dead. He does all of that gratis--for free. But an old Methodist hymn says truly: 1. Know this, that ev’ry soul is free To choose his life and what he’ll be; For this eternal truth is giv’n: That God will force no man to heav’n. 2. He’ll call, persuade, direct aright, And bless with wisdom, love, and light, In nameless ways be good and kind, But never force the human mind. That's where covenants come in. The merciful plan of the great creator depends on covenants. He sets the terms and conditions of the covenants. We freely accept them or reject them. Christ mediates them. Christ and covenants conquer death. They bind us to God and each other despite the disruption in our relationships caused by our leaving God's presence to come here to earth, and our leaving each other when we die. Covenants (in which we promise to obey God's laws) endow us with power over death and seals our relationships so that death can only disrupt them, not end them. The highest and holiest of these covenants are made in temples. For my parents and their parents, the saddest part of this story is that when Carol died, she and Jim had not yet made the covenants of the holy temple. Jim's dad was abusive but Dad's parents were welcoming, and that helped Jim and Carol want to make the Christ-centered covenants that would seal their family together forever. That awful October day in 1958 upset their plans, but it did not upset the Great Creator's merciful plan. The following spring, Carol's mom was her proxy in the temple, and Carol and Jim made the covenants that sealed them to God, each other, and to their children. That's the happiest part of the story. The great creator's plan is merciful indeed. Every contingency is covered. Every possible permutation is planned for. Anyone and everyone who wants to make and keep the covenants can do so. The promises of Christ's redeeming love, eternal life, and endless family relationships are sure. Dad had befriended Jim and was a brother to him. Jim was family. But after several years he wandered in strange roads and took forbidden paths. He was excommunicated from the Savior's Church. He nullified and voided his covenants. That is a sad part of this story, but it is not a hopeless one. Not to Dad. Jim had forsaken his covenants but his family never forsook him. Dad looked after him. Jim was living in the Pacific Northwest when Jennifer and Elizabeth were baptized there in 1990. Dad invited Jim to go with him to see his granddaughters be born again, make covenants, and choose Christ. That was the catalyst Jim needed. Dad talked to him about the way back to his covenants and to Christ. Dad put Jim in touch with his good bishop. Soon Jim asked Dad to baptize him. Jim chose to renew his covenants and let Christ forgive him, heal him, rescue, and redeem him. Jim had all of his covenants restored. The sealing he had once chosen to nullify was now back in tact. Though debilitated by diabetes, Jim's life was happier than ever before. When he died in 2000 he was in the covenant and firm in the faith of Jesus Christ. There is a great creator. He has a merciful plan. It is for us to be with him and those we love "forever and ever." He plans to give us his fulness and his grace and make us equal with him in power, and in might, and in dominion (D&C 76:94-95). One hundred and eighty-nine years ago this week, Joseph Smith saw the Great Creator's merciful plan. He marveled at what he called its sublimity, purity, scope, and the duration for completion. It is "so much beyond the narrow mindedness of men," he said. We are free. We don't have to follow this plan. There are much easier ones. The merciful plan of the great creator requires immense faith and faithfulness--fidelity to God and his way of doing things. It requires sacrifice, and love, and it involves suffering. Moreover, it seems arbitrary, and even unjust. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, a young mother and her three children are stolen from us in an instant because of a cruel, careless act of another person, who drives away and never answers for his actions. Sometimes a husband and a father of six young children who need him leaves for work in the morning and is killed in a horrifying accident. And sometimes, just when dreams are coming true, a tumor grows in the brain of a psychologist who knows so much about the brain, and contributes to cutting his life way too short. Death will come to all of us sooner or later to fulfill the merciful plan of the great creator. In order to maximize happiness, choose to be in Christ and in the covenant when that day comes. I'm wearing a pair of Dad's shoes as I stand here today. They are pinching my toes and yet I can't fill them. I'm not trying to. I'm wearing them as a reminder to me and as a promise to each of you. The promise is that I will follow his lead: I will cherish our family above everything else. If you are in a sad part of your story, it's not hopeless. I won't give up hope. Your family won't give up on you, not your earthly family nor your heavenly family. I would walk in these shoes to Portland or to Peru if I thought it would help any of you choose Christ and make and keep covenants. That's who we are. That's our inheritance. We being many are one: sealed together forever in the covenant, in Christ. We belong to each other. And we belong together, forever.