Living Waters from the Temple

Thankful for the Watchman on the Tower

I love Thanksgiving and the opportunity to pause and count our blessings. I hope that your Thanksgiving is bounteous and that you enjoy all the wonderful family traditions this time of year brings. As you do, I pray that you will reflect on your gratitude for our Savior Jesus Christ and the blessings received as we put Him at the center of our lives.

A Watchman on the Tower

I’m particularly grateful this year to be on the other side of a global pandemic and for the lessons learned and the growth, despite challenging experiences. I am grateful to know that we are led by a prophet, who clearly is our “watchman on the tower.” I have often heard people remark how he foresaw the coming pandemic through the inspired Come Follow Me and home-centered, church-supported focus of gospel learning. Looking back, we see that he could “warn” us of impending danger. I hope we do not become complacent and feel that was just helping us through a pandemic. Home-centered gospel learning will be even more vital as we continue to do our part in gathering scattered Israel and preparing the world for the second coming of the Savior.

That experience should cause us to consider “what is next?” What is President Nelson currently seeing from the tower and trying to warn and prepare us for? I have felt and heard him speak often of the importance of temple and family history work as a spiritual foundation in our lives. Through faithfully making and then keeping temple covenants, we can put Christ at the center of our lives and have the power necessary to overcome the world.

To more fully appreciate the blessings of a prophet in these latter days, you might consider, as our presidency was recently challenged, rereading or re-listening to all President Nelson’s conference and other addresses since his calling as a prophet. I invite you specifically to find a quiet place and read or listen to a special message from President Nelson in the October Liahona (this is not the conference edition) about ”The Everlasting Covenant.” As you do, pray for revelation regarding what this watchman is trying to get us to do so we can overcome the world and have peace through Jesus Christ.

Living Water that Heals All

For the past three years my research projects, funded by NASA, have been focused on helping countries in the Amazon, including Ecuador, Columbia, Brazil, and Peru, manage their water resources. My projects gather and analyze data from satellite technologies and global models that provide information about the earth’s water supply that were previously non-existent and difficult to obtain, especially in developing countries. All of a sudden, these countries go from being data-poor to data-rich because of the volume of information now accessible to them. You can view a map that provides a current forecast for every river of the world, along with a 40-year record for what has occurred here.

Recently I took five students who have helped develop this information for Ecuador to Quito to share our project’s results. We were there to support Ecuador’s national water agencies and share the tools we have helped them develop with top officials in disaster management, agriculture, municipalities, and other government entities. It was exciting to share with them and see the pride they felt in being able to take greater ownership of their responsibility to provide valuable hindsight and forecast data about water, so important for managing crops during both wet and dry seasons, and for preparing for floods and droughts.

At the same time we were in Quito, an open house for a new temple had just finished and preparations for the dedication on November 20 were being made. While I know the work we have been doing there is extremely valuable for those agencies and expands to benefit the entire population, it pales in comparison to the blessings that flow in the lives of those who make and keep sacred covenants in the temple. A few weeks ago in our Come Follow Me lesson we read from Ezekiel 47 about the water that flows from the temple doors and goes out to create a massive river so wide and deep that it becomes uncrossable, healing everything it touches, including the Dead Sea. Elder Renlund speaks of this parable and elaborates the blessings we receive in this powerful video.

An Opportunity and an Invitation

This coming year a traveling tabernacle will come to our community. With it comes the chance for all of us to learn more about the origins of temple ordinances and covenants and their importance in binding us to Jesus Christ. Our youth will participate in first learning about and then playing host to visitors that come to it on April 3. Other stakes will have their own day of playing host, and people from the community can come and visit throughout a six-week period from the end of March to the first part of May. It will be a major focus of our youth activities during the first months of the new year.

As we engage in this, I invite you individually and as families to consider how you can drink more fully of the living, healing waters that proceed from family history and temple worship. Do you have an active recommend? Are you making time to use it? Do your children have an active recommend? Are you finding family names and taking them to the temple? Will you have discussions in your families about the tabernacle and temple covenants? Will you love, share, and invite friends and family to come and participate when the tabernacle is in our area? These are things that today’s watchman on the tower is asking us to pay attention to and I pray that we will take heed so that we are prepared for whatever he sees in the distance.