Us with Them and Them with Us

 

Reminds me of this teaching: https://quotestokeep.blogspot.com/2013/09/our-ancestors-are-solicitous-for-our.html

Us with Them and Them with Us, by Caitlin Connolly
November 3–9: “A Voice of Gladness for the Living and the Dead”
Doctrine and Covenants 125–128

The Faith and Testimonies of Our Parents Who Through All Their Hardships Have Remained Faithful!

Why is it that some of us take for granted the faith and testimonies of our parents who through all their hardships have remained faithful? Do we think that they do not have a clear understanding of things? They were not and are not deceived! They just have had too many experiences with the Spirit and can say with the Prophet Joseph, “I knew it, … and I could not deny it.”

True to the Faith That Our Parents Have Cherished

April 2025

Hans T. Boom

Meeting our Ancestors in the Next Life

 How would I feel, after living as long as I have, with the privileges I have had of going into these temples, to go into the spirit world without having done this work? I meet my father’s house, I meet my mother’s house, I meet my progenitors, and they are shut up in prison; I held the keys of their salvation, and yet did nothing for them; what would be my feelings, or what would be their feelings toward me?

I do not want to go into the spirit world and meet with my progenitors who never heard the Gospel in their day and generation, and have them tell me, “You held in your hand the power to go forth and redeem me, and you have not done it.” I do not want to meet that. I do not want the Latter-day Saints to meet it. I think we are doing pretty well. We have four temples reared in these valleys of the mountains [in 1897], and they are fairly well occupied by the Latter-day Saints. But we want to continue this until we have redeemed all within our power to redeem. If we will carry this principle out, we will have the blessing of it. It will be with us in the morning of the resurrection, when our fathers and mothers and our progenitors come up with us because we have redeemed them.

If we do not do what is required of us in this thing, we are under condemnation. If we do attend to this, then when we come to meet our friends in the celestial kingdom, they will say, “You have been our saviors, because you had power to do it. You have attended to these ordinances that God has required.”

We have been called as Saviors upon Mount Zion, while the kingdom has been the Lord’s. These are glorious principles. To be saved ourselves, and to save our fellowmen, what a glorious thing!

Chapter 18: Temple Work: Becoming Saviors on Mount Zion

Wilford Woodruff

Teachings of Presidents

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teachings-wilford-woodruff/chapter-18?lang=eng&verse=#p

Our Ancestors Are Solicitous for Our Welfare

Us with Them and Them with Us, by Caitlin Connolly
November 3–9: “A Voice of Gladness for the Living and the Dead”

Doctrine and Covenants 125–128I believe we move and have our being in the presence of heavenly messengers and of heavenly beings. We are not separate from them. We begin to realize more and more fully, as we become acquainted with the principles of the Gospel, as they have been revealed anew in this dispensation, that we are closely related to our kindred, to our ancestors, to our friends and associates and co-laborers who have preceded us into the spirit world. We cannot forget them; we do not cease to love them; we always hold them in our hearts, in memory, and thus we are associated and united to them by ties that we can not break, that we can not dissolve or free ourselves from. If this is the case with us in our finite condition, surrounded by our mortal weaknesses, shortsightedness, lack of inspiration and wisdom from time to time, how much more certain it is and reasonable and consistent to believe that those who have been faithful, who have gone beyond and are still engaged in the work for the salvation of the souls of men, the opening of the prison doors to them that are bound and proclaiming liberty to the captives who can see us better than we can see them; that they know us better than we know them. They have advanced; we are advancing; we are growing as they have grown; we are reaching the goal that they have attained unto; and therefore, I claim that we live in their presence, they see us, they are solicitous for our welfare, they love us now more than ever. For now they see the dangers that beset us; they can comprehend better than ever before, the weaknesses that are liable to mislead us into dark and forbidden paths. They see the temptations and the evils that beset us in life and the proneness of mortal beings to yield to temptation and to wrong doing; hence their solicitude for us and their love for us and their desire for our well being must be greater than that which we feel for ourselves. I thank God for the feeling that I possess and enjoy and for the realization that I have, that I stand, not only in the presence of Almighty God, my Maker and Father, but in the presence of His Only Begotten Son in the flesh, the Savior of the world; and I stand in the presence of Peter and James, (and perhaps the eyes of John are also upon us and we know it not); and that I stand also in the presence of Joseph and Hyrum and Brigham and John, and those who have been valiant in the testimony of Jesus Christ and faithful to their mission in the world, who have gone before. When I go I want to have the privilege of meeting them with the consciousness that I have followed their example, that I have carried out the mission in which they were engaged as they would have it carried out; that I have been as faithful in the discharge of duty committed to me and required at my hand as they were faithful in their time, and that when I meet them I shall meet them as I met them here, in love, in harmony, in unison and in perfect confidence that I have done my duty as they have done theirs.  (Conference Report, April 1916, p.3, Joseph F. Smith)

I Wish I Could Speak Into the Ears of The Dead The Gratitude Which Was Due Them In Life

We often take for granted the very people who most deserve our gratitude. Let us not wait until it is too late for us to express that gratitude. Speaking of loved ones he had lost, one man declared his regret this way: “I remember those happy days, and often wish I could speak into the ears of the dead the gratitude which was due them in life, and so ill returned.”11

Thomas S. Monson, “The Divine Gift of Gratitude,” Ensign, Nov 2010, 87–90