Week 73: Words on Far West
Dear Loved Ones,
This week marked my final zone conference. Usually I hate these because they drill us on obedience and never get into something as menial as the gospel or teaching lessons.
But this time, we held it outdoors at Far West with about sixty-two other missionaries. My companion and I (all two of us) can't teach one person indoors or outdoors, but is a truth, universally acknowledged, that people outdoors sitting four inches apart have different germs than people do indoors.
Far West never attracts so much attention as Liberty or Independence or Adam-ondi-Ahman. Taken at face value, it's just another place the church was headquartered, like Kirtland or Nauvoo, and unlike those two cities, it wasn't really taken over by anyone else after the Saints left. I once heard it said, "The most remarkable thing about Far West is that there's nothing there."
Five thousand of us lived here at one point, and now there's nothing. Nothing but the cornerstones of the temple we never built and stone monuments to the revelations received there on tithing and the name of the church.
And missionary work. I really wanted to go serve in England because I have an ancestor, John Benbow, who was converted in England by Wilford Woodruff. I wanted to pay my respects and say, "Grandpa, I'm back."
Elder Woodruff left for his mission from Far West.
On Thursday, I sat on the very lot where the Twelve were commanded by revelation to leave for their missions. But when the day came for them to leave, the Missouri-Mormon War was in full force. They risked their lives to go back there and had to meet on the temple lot at midnight to avoid detection.
Clearly it was important for them to leave from this spot or they wouldn't need to risk it. So why is Far West so important?
One of my past companions, Sister Nackos, told me there's a tradition that this is the site where Cain slew Abel.
Really gory. I'm not sure if I like it. Geographically, it does make sense. Independence (the Garden of Eden) and Adam-ondi-ahman (where Adam blessed his posterity at the end of his life) are 70 miles apart with Far West in the middle. If Adam and Eve were working their way up north, Far West is on the way.
I can't wait until I have access to the Internet and BYU folklore archives to research this more fully. I'll bust some Missouri myths (like the one where we all have to migrate back here) but that one is harmless and it intrigues me. I can't wait! Being around so much church history has primed me to learn so much more. I'm setting a goal to read one church history book every year for the rest of my life.
In my boredom earlier this week, I started doing family history. FamilySearch has this volunteer opportunity where you can correct weirdly-formatted place names to make record searching easier. I've done a few hundred and I keep coming up on a disproportionate number of Missouri place names. Slovakia and Bohemia too, but there's a lot of Missouri.
I think God gave me that as a little tender mercy. My activities are severely limited and I'm usually more on a mission than serving a mission nowadays, but I think God had the algorithm give me Missouri names so I'm at least helping the dead people of my state in some tiny way.
Missionaries going home give departing testimonies at zone conference and I've watched a lot of them, so I've had a good long while to think about what I wanted to do in mine. All anybody ever talks about here is rules, not about teaching people or loving people, and I had long fantasized about calling out that culture when I got my chance with the mic. I almost lost my nerve, but this week I read over some journal entries from this time last year. I found one where I'd been made to give a testimony in district council and wanted to do the same thing I want now, but I decided to play it safe and just said something similar to what I said in last week's email about finding the people you're meant to find.
So I decided to go for it. There's an audio clip at the bottom of the email. Here's what I said.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
This week marked my final zone conference. Usually I hate these because they drill us on obedience and never get into something as menial as the gospel or teaching lessons.
But this time, we held it outdoors at Far West with about sixty-two other missionaries. My companion and I (all two of us) can't teach one person indoors or outdoors, but is a truth, universally acknowledged, that people outdoors sitting four inches apart have different germs than people do indoors.
Far West never attracts so much attention as Liberty or Independence or Adam-ondi-Ahman. Taken at face value, it's just another place the church was headquartered, like Kirtland or Nauvoo, and unlike those two cities, it wasn't really taken over by anyone else after the Saints left. I once heard it said, "The most remarkable thing about Far West is that there's nothing there."
Five thousand of us lived here at one point, and now there's nothing. Nothing but the cornerstones of the temple we never built and stone monuments to the revelations received there on tithing and the name of the church.
And missionary work. I really wanted to go serve in England because I have an ancestor, John Benbow, who was converted in England by Wilford Woodruff. I wanted to pay my respects and say, "Grandpa, I'm back."
Elder Woodruff left for his mission from Far West.
On Thursday, I sat on the very lot where the Twelve were commanded by revelation to leave for their missions. But when the day came for them to leave, the Missouri-Mormon War was in full force. They risked their lives to go back there and had to meet on the temple lot at midnight to avoid detection.
Clearly it was important for them to leave from this spot or they wouldn't need to risk it. So why is Far West so important?
One of my past companions, Sister Nackos, told me there's a tradition that this is the site where Cain slew Abel.
Really gory. I'm not sure if I like it. Geographically, it does make sense. Independence (the Garden of Eden) and Adam-ondi-ahman (where Adam blessed his posterity at the end of his life) are 70 miles apart with Far West in the middle. If Adam and Eve were working their way up north, Far West is on the way.
I can't wait until I have access to the Internet and BYU folklore archives to research this more fully. I'll bust some Missouri myths (like the one where we all have to migrate back here) but that one is harmless and it intrigues me. I can't wait! Being around so much church history has primed me to learn so much more. I'm setting a goal to read one church history book every year for the rest of my life.
In my boredom earlier this week, I started doing family history. FamilySearch has this volunteer opportunity where you can correct weirdly-formatted place names to make record searching easier. I've done a few hundred and I keep coming up on a disproportionate number of Missouri place names. Slovakia and Bohemia too, but there's a lot of Missouri.
I think God gave me that as a little tender mercy. My activities are severely limited and I'm usually more on a mission than serving a mission nowadays, but I think God had the algorithm give me Missouri names so I'm at least helping the dead people of my state in some tiny way.
Missionaries going home give departing testimonies at zone conference and I've watched a lot of them, so I've had a good long while to think about what I wanted to do in mine. All anybody ever talks about here is rules, not about teaching people or loving people, and I had long fantasized about calling out that culture when I got my chance with the mic. I almost lost my nerve, but this week I read over some journal entries from this time last year. I found one where I'd been made to give a testimony in district council and wanted to do the same thing I want now, but I decided to play it safe and just said something similar to what I said in last week's email about finding the people you're meant to find.
So I decided to go for it. There's an audio clip at the bottom of the email. Here's what I said.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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