Joy and the Covenant Path
The covenant path truly is a path of redeeming love.
Light and Life, by Mandy Williams
When Israel and Elizabeth Haven Barlow left Nauvoo, Illinois, for the Salt Lake Valley in 1848, they left behind a baby boy buried in a small Nauvoo cemetery. Little James Nathaniel Barlow, their first child, had died shortly after birth in May 1841.
Israel and Elizabeth likely never expected to gaze again upon their son’s grave. But when Israel was called on a mission to England a few years later, he passed through Nauvoo. At Elizabeth’s request, he stopped to locate their son’s grave and move it to the main cemetery.
After Israel found the grave, he saw that it was decayed and broken. In a letter to his wife, Israel wrote that he decided to leave the grave and return in the future.
He had not walked more than a few feet from the grave when he heard a voice in his mind say, “Daddy, do not leave me here.” Israel returned to the grave, concluding to move his little boy after all.
As Israel lingered at the graveside, he told Elizabeth, “I felt a desire to dedicate myself and all that I might call mine into the hands of the Lord that I might be counted worthy to come forth with [James] in the morning of the First Resurrection.”
Israel’s devotion to the gospel of Jesus Christ and honoring sacred covenants make eternal life—that grandest of all blessings—possible for him and bless his family—both ancestors and posterity.
The same is true for all of us.
Sacred Promises
Your Heavenly Father and His Son Jesus Christ love you beyond anything you can imagine. They want to draw you closer to Them and help you learn and grow in faith and understanding. They want to bless you with heavenly power, healing, and peace in a world where such blessings can be hard to find. They want you to experience joy in this life and in the life to come.
Flowing from this perfect love, They offer everyone the opportunity to enter into a covenant bond with Them at baptism and in the house of the Lord. We have the blessing of recommitting to those covenants weekly during sacrament meeting.
When we partake of the sacrament, we take upon ourselves the name of Jesus Christ. We remember Him and His love for us shown through the gift of His Atonement. We also show our willingness to keep His commandments (see Doctrine and Covenants 20:77, 79).
President Russell M. Nelson said: “Often, I hear the expression that we partake of the sacrament to renew covenants made at baptism. While that’s true, it’s much more than that.” President Nelson said that each time we partake of the sacrament we make a new covenant, “in return for which [the Lord] makes the statement that we will always have His Spirit to be with us. What a blessing!”
When we repent and partake of the sacrament with a pure heart, we receive the Holy Ghost and are “cleansed from sin as if we were baptized again. This is the hope and mercy Jesus offers each one of us.”
What a joy to repent and be forgiven through Christ’s redeeming love!
His House of Joy
Since becoming President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Nelson has spoken often about the covenant path. We enter that path through “repentance and baptism by water” (2 Nephi 31:17), and “then we enter it more completely in the temple.”
Our mortal life is but a moment in our existence, but that moment—sometimes very difficult—is of eternal importance. To make our lives to be beautiful and hopeful, our Heavenly Father has provided a Savior. Through His love and atoning sacrifice, He has dealt with and healed everything we will encounter in life. And because of His holy house—His house of joy—all will be well despite adversity.
San Pedro Sula Honduras Temple
The covenant path truly is a path of redeeming love. As you make covenants in the temple, and then honor them, you will receive blessings of greater power, greater love, greater mercy, greater understanding, and greater hope.
Gather Them Home
Sister Kearon and I have a particular sensitivity and great compassion for Israel and Elizabeth Barlow. Our first child, a boy named Sean, died during heart surgery when he was just three weeks old. This was an earth-shattering loss for us. At the time, we wondered if we could survive. We buried him in a painfully small grave in England. Fifteen years later, our family was asked to move from our home in the United Kingdom to serve full time in the Church, and we left that little grave behind.
We have the beginning of an understanding of what the Barlows went through. Our baby boy’s grave is very far away, yet like the Barlows, we have abiding faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the eternal nature of our family through the holy sealing covenant.
We all have ancestors and other loved ones beyond the grave who are saying to us, “Do not leave me here.” Because of temple covenants, no one need be left behind. Our call is to love them, serve them, and help gather them home.
That is why we have ordinances. That is why we make covenants. That is why we build temples. That is why Heavenly Father sent His Son to break the bands of death so one day we can shed tears of joy at the eternal reunions with our loved ones that await us and in the presence of the Father and the Son.
Our Heavenly Father loves us—you and me. May we find joy and peace as we keep our covenants and join the Lord in His glorious saving work.