Sabbath Devotional :: Building a Zion Community

These are my four great-grandmothers — Gladys, Grace, Lucy, and Marie. I had the rare privilege of knowing all of them in this life. Their personalities were all very different from one another, but each was so strong and interesting in her own way. Recently, while working on some family history, I came across several photographs of these women at various family and community functions; a few even captured multiple grandmothers in the same photographs.

Maybe for the first time, I began to give serious thought to how these women might have interacted with one another as peers in the community, long before I came along. I remembered that a couple of them ran competing local businesses. At one point, two of their husbands were the town’s barbers. Some of their children went to school together. Some were neighbors. Surely, in all of those interactions, there must have been opportunity for at least occasional competition, conflict, maybe even contempt? Whether they realized it or not at the time, whatever good or ill they wished or inflicted on one other would end up directly affecting their own posterity.

Fortunately, the women I knew and loved were builders. They recognized the unique opportunity they had to influence and strengthen their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and the community in which I and many other family members were raised. Much of the way my grandparents and parents continue to build me and my family is a direct result of the influences of these great-grandmothers.

As I uploaded these and other photos and memories into the Church’s Family Tree program, I couldn’t help but also think of the MWEG tree. Like all of our ancestors, none of us can quite grasp the magnitude and magnificence of the full potential of our efforts. How would it change us if we could see exactly what we were building (or tearing down) with our words and actions? If we each truly envisioned ourselves as those light-gathering leaves of the same grand tree, would it change the nature of our interactions?

It brings additional clarity and proximity to these words from Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Paul taught the same lesson to the Corinthians when he described us all as feet and hands and eyes and ears of the body of Christ: “That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Cor. 12:25-26)

Like the mother of the sons of Zebedee, we “know not what we ask” whenever we seek to elevate ourselves above others, even if we somehow think our intentions are pure.” (Matthew 20:20-28) Instead, we must all practice seeing ourselves as fellow joint-heirs with each other and Jesus Christ. It requires taking on a different kind of worldview, one we have made covenants to develop and which we strengthen every time we sincerely mourn or rejoice with one another.

As we work toward building a Zion community — in the Church, in our families, in our communities, in MWEG — we should consider the possibility that consecration is not so much about sharing earthly possessions as it is about developing a mindset of unity, of mutuality, of oneness. (D&C 78:5-6)

“And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul: neither said any of them that [any] of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus; and great grace was upon them all.” (Acts 4:32-33)