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Photo by Scot Facer Proctor
As news of President Hinckley’s
passing began to circulate Sunday night, 200 students on the BYU
campus spontaneously gathered and began to sing hymns, notes of
appreciation and sorrow began flooding the Internet, Utah governor
Jon Huntsman ordered flags to put at half-mast, and Latter-day Saints
knew that they had lost a giant.
The word spread through text messaging
among many high school students in Utah to wear their Sunday best
to school on Monday as a symbol of their respect.
With President Hinckley at the helm,
we eagerly awaited each General Conference session to see what new
announcement would be made. The Nauvoo Temple announcement took
our breath away, but there was always a surprise, a stride forward
as the Church not only enjoyed unprecedented growth, but also leaped
ahead in every area.
Even in the last year, when President
Hinckley for the first time began to show a few signs of frailty,
something came over him as he arose to address the Church, and he
spoke with power and conviction, the full force of his spirit overcoming
his age.
We, who have come so much to rely on
his goodness and vision, watched that bit of frailty with concern,
as it was so new, but when he spoke we could relax, hearing the
power and counsel, the essential Gordon B. Hinckley, and pretend
that he could continue to defy time.
We wanted him to, because we would
never be ready to let him go.
He was never without a quip, a warmth
and wittiness, that was sometimes a bit self-abnegating. When, during
temple dedications, he came out for the coverstone ceremony to put
the mortar in the joints, he often laughed, “We’ve had
a lot of experience at this, but I never get any better.”
As he aged, his doctor finally told
him that he had to carry a cane. Obediently he did. Often, he just
carried it — using it to wave or as a pointer and last General
Conference gave us a light moment when he used it to dub Elder Eyring
as a new member of the First Presidency.
Mitt Romney told reporters on Monday
that he was planning to be at the prophet’s funeral and mentioned
that on the eve of launching his presidential campaign, he visited
with President Hinckley — who told him a presidential run
“would be a great experience if you won and a great experience
if you lost.”
President Hinckley managed to be great
and inspiring, and human and personal at the same time. We followed
him with camera and pen all over the world to temple dedications,
to member meetings, and into the White House when he received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom on his 94th birthday, which gave us
an upfront and personal view.
We counted every encounter to be a
privilege, and learned to observe even small things about him.
When President Hinckley is moved to
tears, he coughs or clears his throat to quell the emotion. The
day of the Nauvoo Temple dedication in 2002 was bright and hot,
and President Hinckley, with his love and understanding of history,
had set the hour of the dedication for the exact hour and day when
Joseph and Hyrum had been martyred at Carthage Jail on June 27,
1844. The Spirit was so remarkable during the dedication that President
Hinckley had to stop frequently to cough. He had said earlier that
this was Joseph’s temple and said that he expected unseen
presences to join us that day. We surely felt them and heard them
as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang “Come, Come Ye Saints.”
After the dedication, on a surge of
joy all of us burst out of the west door of the temple as the last
light of day touched the façade. Then on that peak, we turned
to see someone who had pulled back the curtains in the top window
of the temple. It was President Hinckley, who waved to us all —
a transcendent moment.
On one trip he rededicated the temple in Freiberg, Germany, on a
Saturday morning, traveled to Paris that night for a meeting, dedicated
a temple on Sunday in The Hague, Netherlands, flew to Ukraine on
Monday, and was in Moscow on Tuesday in preparation for a member
meeting on Wednesday.
We had been in Freiberg and then drove
furiously to The Hague, then caught a plane in time to catch his
first steps in Moscow, the first president of the Church in this
dispensation to come to Russia. Having seen us in Freiberg and The
Hague, he asked, “What are you doing here?” “We’re
following you,” Scot said. “How are you doing that?”
he asked.
“It isn’t easy,”
Scot had to admit. “It’s hard to keep up with you.”
Russia is vast, covering 12 time zones.
For that member meeting in Russia, more than 2,000 Saints found
their way to Moscow to hear the Prophet. They took all night trains
to come to the conference with their children sleeping on their
laps. They carried bread and fruit in sacks to eat. They took days
off work. They saved up for their transportation costs and slept
on hard benches.
When President Hinckley got to the
stand, he turned and invited Marjorie to join him. “This is
my babushka,” he said. “We’re both getting old.
She’s the mother of five children, a grandmother of 25 grandchildren,
a great grandmother of 35 great grandchildren, and the end is not
yet. Well, I just want you to take a look at this dear, elderly
lady to whom I’ve been married for 65 years. We’ve had
a good marriage, and we hope that it will go on.”
In a country where marriage and family
had waned, he was modeling for the Saints, customizing his message
so that they would understand. And Sister Hinckley was laughing.
President Hinckley told the Saints
there, “Be not faithless, but believing.” Believe in
God the Eternal Father. Believe in Jesus Christ.
A Man of Experience, A Man
of Wisdom
In 1995, in his first year as the President
of the Church, he was interviewed by Mike Wallace, known as a reporter
who liked to slice and dice his subjects. President Hinckley, a
master in communications, was bold to take the reporter on, and
later admitted that interviews with the media “were always
a worrisome undertaking because one never knows what will be asked.
These reporters are men and women of great capacity and ask questions
that come at you like a javelin. It is not exactly an enjoyable
experience, but it represents an opportunity to tell the world something
of our story. As Paul said to Festus and Agrippa, ‘This thing
was not done in a corner’” (Acts 26:26).
President Hinckley’s bold willingness
to take almost anything on for the gospel and his boundless, infectious
optimism, far from being confined to a corner, expanded to fill
the whole earth — where he dedicated or rededicated 95 temples
from Finland to Brazil to Nigeria to Hong Kong.
When Wallace said with a note of disdain,
"There are those who say, 'This is a gerontocracy ... this
is a church run by old men." President Hinckley, responded,
"Isn’t it wonderful — to have a man of maturity
at the head? A man who isn't blown about by every wind of doctrine?"
He knew firsthand the advantages of
long, steady learning in the art of leadership.
When President Hinckley became the
prophet in 1995, he had been seasoned by nearly sixty years of service
in the Church. Coming home from his mission, he had hoped to attend
Columbia’s acclaimed journalism school, but all that changed
when he stopped by the Church office building to carry a plea from
his mission leader for an information program to lift the missionary
efforts.
That resulted in assignments that would
find him leading public communications for the Church for 20 years,
and then, beginning in 1951, he managed the entire missionary program
of the Church. From the time he was called to be a General Authority
on April 6, 1958, he became a fixture in our lives.
He would never get that journalism
degree from Columbia, but was prepared by his natural skills to
be interviewed by major national media including CNN’s Larry
King, Time, U.S. News and World Report, and The New
York Times.
Scot remembers as he grew up during
every General Conference, his father would lean over and whisper,
“That Gordon B. Hinckley is right on.”
Like a Clydesdale, he had this endless
capacity for work, and it isn’t surprising that some of his
first conference talks as prophet emphasized work: “This Work
is Concerned with People,” “This is the Work of the
Master,” “We Have a Work to Do.”
Those who were going to stand for something
had not only to have integrity, but the capacity to roll up their
sleeves and work.
In July of 1981, Gordon B. Hinckley
was called to be a counselor in the First Presidency. President
Spencer W. Kimball, President N. Eldon Tanner and President Marion
G. Romney were all ailing with problems incident to age, and so
much of the burden of leading the Church fell to him. Then in 1982,
he became second counselor to President Kimball, then first counselor
to both Presidents Ezra Taft Benson and Howard W. Hunter, carrying
a heavy load in every instance. He had already served in the First
Presidency being the go-to man for 14 years when he became President
of the Church.
Wasn’t it wonderful — a
sage man of experience, of wisdom, bringing decades of seasoning
to the work.
A Builder
President Hinckley was a builder. We
attended a meeting in the Kirtland Temple with him, hosted by the
Community of Christ, where he was invited to ask any question he
wanted. Every question was about the care of the building. How was
it faring structurally? Were there termites? How was the heating
system, how were the beams?
He sketched out the plan for the new
smaller temples on a piece of paper when he was leaving Colonia
Juarez, Mexico. On a sleepless night, he awoke to sketch out the
Hong Kong Temple that would arise straight up from an existing structure.
So he built — temples that dot
the earth and the Conference Center. He restored Church history
sites and shored up the Tabernacle. More important, he built families
and people. He gave us something to remember and hold on to.
A lover of history, he connected us
to our past with a temple in Palmyra that had the only clear glass
window of such a holy structure anyplace in the Church. This one
had to have a clear view of the Sacred Grove.
Under his leadership, hundreds of Latter-day
Saints relived the pioneer gathering in 1997, walking across the
plains with oxen and wagons. Yet at the same time, he always pointed
us to the future.
The Nauvoo Temple dedication gave us
a brush with our history, but it was attended by 3.5 million Church
members in a satellite hookup that pointed toward tomorrow.
He was a man for all seasons, and we
loved him, a leader like few we’ve ever seen.
The Prophet is Coming
When we arrived in Ghana in January
2004 for the temple dedication, the Latter-day Saints there were
all in a flutter. This was the season of the Harmattan winds —
the dry, African winds that blow sand from the Sahara, tainting
the sky red and covering the buildings with a heavy dust. But that
day all were thrilled because they had had an unexpected rain that
had washed the earth and the temple clean. “It is because
the prophet is coming,” they said with trusting faith. We
believed them.
The day of the dedication, they gathered
in an undulating line leading toward the temple, dressed in their
splash of African color, looking particularly beautiful. Behind
them lay hard lives, a city with no sewage treatment plant, litter-lined
streets and unemployment. But it was what lay before them that mattered
— the temple that would forever change their lives and tell
them that whatever kingdom they had belonged to before — now
they were part of the kingdom of God.
President and Sister Hinckley were
there. He had built this temple, this jewel in the midst of the
city, against great opposition, with laborers who had never worked
on such a building before, against all the snags and corruption.
He had inspired the vision and the perseverance that brought it
about.
Maurine stood in line that day for
the dedication by Ghanaian pioneer William Billy Johnson, who said,
“I cannot stop my tears.”
When the prophet came to Ghana, he
brought the temple with him.
God Be With You
We’ve also seen the prophet leave
from many meetings. The pattern is much the same. In Moscow, for
instance, the members had all brought white handkerchiefs to wave
at the prophet. When it came time for him to leave, knowing he would
never visit them again, they pulled out their handkerchiefs and
thronged his path and hung over balconies singing, “God be
with you ‘til we meet again.”
One woman followed President Hinckley
to his car and with tears streaming down her face said in broken
English, “We luff you, President Hinckley. We luff you.”
We’ll always remember what he
told the press just outside of the White House after he received
the Presidential Medal of Freedom about where the Church is going.
He said, “I see an unbounded future. This work will spread
across the earth. When you look at what’s happened thus far,
you just have to realize that as we keep going it will grow exponentially
and wherever it goes it will touch for good the lives of people
across this whole broad world.”
It was an echo of his sentiments when
he first became the prophet. “I do now know why in His grand
scheme one such as I would find a place. But having this mantle
to come upon me I rededicate whatever I have of strength or time
or talent or life to the work of my Master in the service of my
brethren and sisters.
“This Church does not belong
to its President. Its head is the Lord Jesus Christ, whose name
each of us has taken upon ourselves. We are all in this great endeavor
together. We are here to assist our Father in His work and His glory,
‘to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man’”
(Moses 1:39).
He said, “The time has come for
us to stand a little taller, to lift our eyes and stretch our minds
to a greater comprehension and understanding of the grand millennial
mission of this The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This is the season to be strong. It is time to move forward without
hesitation.”
And so we will, with the memory of
President Hinckley’s drive, vision and twinkle to warm us.
If we had a handkerchief we’d wave it. “God be with
you, President Hinckley, ‘til we meet again.”
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