Temples Filling the Earth

I was listening to this song the other day and began thinking about temples filling the earth. Also, at the time this post was written there are two Temple Open Houses going on, one in Cedar City, Utah and the other in Meridian, Idaho. For most of my life, we have lived within a few minutes of one of the temples. But I some of my children live hours away from the nearest temple and a trip to the temple takes more than one day in some cases.

But rather than focusing on travel time, I have been thinking about the impact the FamilySearch.org Family Tree has had on the participation in temple work by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Back in October of 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley, President of the Church, observed the following:

Our people cannot partake of all of the blessings of the gospel unless they can receive their own temple ordinances and then make these ordinances available to those of their kindred dead and others. If this is to happen, temples must be available to them. I feel very strongly about this.

At the time of President Hinckley's talk in 1995, there were 47 working temples in the entire world. Today, there are 157, with 13 under construction and 12 more that have been announced. See Statistics. Now, to keep those temples busy requires either a complex name extraction program such as the one that began many years ago or the members themselves need to do research and bring or send their own family names to the temples. Earlier this year in a Deseret News article entitled, "Harvesting souls through family history, temple work is focus of RootsTech leadership session," Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is quoted as saying:

He recalled that in October 2014, Church leaders prayerfully requested that in the near future, Church members would provide all the names for temple work across the world. “We are pleased to report that in 2016 this request was achieved,” Elder Cook said. “We do not need to rely on extracted names for temple work.”

This achievement has only been possible because of the online tools we have been given and that most importantly include the Family Tree program. Rather than focus on the difficulties and imperfections of the Family Tree, let's focus on the vast benefit this program is and is still becoming in furthering the work of the salvation of our deceased ancestors. Elder Cook went on to be quoted as saying:

“One of our major, if not our principal emphasis this evening, is to have leaders not only teach what needs to be done (the doctrine is relatively simple), but also if we are to be successful, we need to teach the promised blessings that flow as a result of uniting eternal families by doing family history and temple ordinances for those on the other side of the veil,” Elder Cook said.

I wholeheartedly agree.