The Spirit of Elijah (8/2/2010)

Yesterday as I sat in front of my computer trying to decipher the handwriting on the 1900 Census of the United States for Ritchie County, West Virginia, my 13 year old daughter came up and asked me what I was doing. The new Family Search page has been a great tool and has made it easier for me to get names ready to take to the temple, something that I have never done before because most of our family history had already been done. With the passing of my grandfather a few years ago, I felt a need to work on his genealogy and, hopefully, perform some temple work along the way.

The process of putting these names together can be time consuming, and over the past month I have only been able to process just under 30 names for the temple work. When I processed the first group of names, I told my daughter that she could perform baptisms for the women in this group which made her happy, but since then the pace of my work has kept me from making any other exciting announcements.

I showed her how to do what I was doing, and then she asked for a chance to try. I let her do it while I monitored her work, and after inserting a few names then selecting the option to prepare these names for the temple, she got very excited and even though we had to stop so I could make dinner, she wanted to continue. The fact that she was able to take information recorded by someone over a century ago and convert that to work for her ancestors definitely caught her interest, and I anticipate several more Sundays working together on this.

I share this experience with you because to me it is another testimony that the power of the Spirit of Elijah as described in Malachi 4:5-6 is alive and well today. When I think of teenagers and their interest in their music and fashions and "hanging out," it seems unlikely to me that finding the names of people who are long dead would not have great appeal. Instead, my daughter appears to have caught that spirit to her benefit as well as to the benefit of those who have accepted the Gospel on the other side.