Visitation Dream

Last week, I dreamed about my grandmother. She passed away in December of 2000 when I was a teenager. Her death affected me profoundly and played a role in my conversion as a Latter-day Saint.

The story there is that she was killed by a catastrophic stroke 13 months after my dad was killed in a car accident. Both deaths had me questioning the purpose of life and the possibility of life after death. Being agnostic, I struggled with the possibility of nothingness after life. The event that was a turning point in that struggle was attending one of my first LDS church meetings which just so happened to be a testimony meeting. A woman stood up and spoke of her grief at losing her mother to a stroke recently and she bore her testimony of the after life and the promise of being reunited with her mother again. She had the testimony of the knowledge that I wish I could have. At that point, I sought it and believed that sisters testimony was a sign to me. The similarity and the message given was exactly what I needed and seemed evidence that God was leading me to where I needed to be to find peace and comfort.

A couple of years later, I was a baptized member of the CoJCLDS and was attended the temple to perform her baptism by proxy. It was a commonly held belief in my family that the person who would have had the hardest time accepting my Mormonism would have been this grandmother. It was with some trepidation then that I approached the ordinance where I offered her an LDS baptism. The spiritual experience I had was unexpected. She is the only person for whom which I have preformed a temple baptism and felt it manifested to me at that moment their pleasure and appreciation at that opportunity being extended to them. The feelings I had were a unique combination of joy and elation that the next time I felt it was when I prayed to confirm my choice of marrying my husband. Both of these experiences are special, spiritual experiences that highlight my testimony.

In a way the dream I had was an extension of that impression I got from her baptism. Again it became clear to me of her happiness and joy at accepting an LDS baptism. (In life, she had been a devout Episcopalian).

I dreamed that I was visiting with a friend in a store where we had happened to run into each other. We were chatting and our conversation turned to the LDS belief in the afterlife. I shared with her how strongly I wished to be visited by my father or grandmother in a dream or vision. During the conversation, a person unknown to me came up to me and mentioned that someone was going to be coming to speak with me soon. This person, a young man slightly older than me, mentioned that he needed some help finding something nearby that he had been missing. In fact, it was a Subway sandwich. He was very excited about the idea of a Subway sandwich since according to him it had been years since he had an opportunity to eat one. I excused myself from the conversation with my friend and set out in search of the nearest Subway. Then, strangely, I realized that I had left my shoes behind so we had to return to the store where I left them before setting out again.

As I turned around to walk outside, I saw my grandmother walk through the door. She was wearing a bright turquoise tunic over ivory linen pants. Her hair was in her characteristic white teased shaped do (anyone who knows her know what I'm talking about) yet she looked younger than how I knew her in life. The sparkle in her eye was the same and she seemed so happy and healthy. I exclaimed, "Grandma!" and we embraced joyfully and then started chattering with each other. I caught the eye of my friend who realized the significance of this moment and cheered that I was seeing my grandmother again.

In the course of our conversation, I asked my grandmother a couple of questions about the afterlife and she communicated to me that the young man so excited about Subway was a guide from the spirit world to help make sure that she and I found each other. She told me about other men and women who were in the spirit world and how their bodies are made up of matter. At the end of our conversation, she held out a tray of cookies that she had made and offered them to me. This led to another series of questions about whether food existed in the spirit world. Obviously it did but something was lost in translation as it was difficult for her as a spirit to manipulate the matter of the cookies properly. She told me that it was done using the power of mind and visualization (similar to the concepts described in the book What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson). Because of the travel required from one plane of existence to another (spirit to temporal), the cookies did not materially appear the same to me as they did before she left. Not that this was an important bit of information, but it was still an interesting concept to learn.

As I began to think of other questions that I could ask her and wondered at how long I would be able to visit with her, I hugged her again. As I pulled away from her to ask her more questions, she disappeared from my presence, just as my father once disappeared mid-hug in a dream I had about him.

I woke up feeling so very happy to have been visited by my grandmother. I greatly miss her and feel at a detriment that I have not been able to learn from her as the last role model in my family to be a stay at home mother. I find myself similar to her in many ways especially as I show my love to my children through cooking with them and buying them toys. Those are my fondest memories with my grandmother and I find myself recreating those memories with my young ones.

As I pondered the dream, I realized the young man was a guide and I noticed the many similarities to how the afterlife was described in What Dreams May Come and how compatible those concepts are to the LDS understanding of the spirit world.

I am so grateful for this dream and for the happiness it brought into that day and the memory now that I can cherish.

Freedom of days

A member of the church, an MBA in accounting, started a business with some friends and it did unexpectedly well. When the business was sold, the man was able to retire. After a while of spending 8 hours a day on the gold course, he became bored with his retirement and wished that he could do something different. He went to his bishop and asked to get a list of ward members who had not been visited the month before. He dedicated his days to visiting members of his ward, often visiting families who had been visited by home teachers that month. He sought a job at BYU to teach accounting but wasn't hired because he didn't have the education required. By volunteering, instead of seeking payment, he taught at BYU. He later went on to become a mission president.

Doesn't everyone wish they could retire early and have the freedom to do whatever during the day? If you could have that situation, what would you do with your days?

My husband and I love to ask ourselves questions like this. There is so much we wish we could do in our lives and we often feel limited by financial responsibilities and of course financial resources. We're a young student family so it comes as no surprise.

If that could happen for our family, my husband would love to spend as much as time as possible with me and our children at home. He would do a great deal of woodworking with the tools he's collected in the last few years. We would go on many day trips in our area to go hiking because we get sick of being at home. We live in a beautiful area of Washington where its easy to drive for a couple of hours and then explore some amazing places. We have this dream that we could homeschool our children and the world would be our classroom.

Want to learn about castles? Off to Europe.

Learning about the forest? Go camping for two weeks in the forest.

Hike, backpack, travel, camp.

That would be our life for a few years.

Then we would probably settle on an homestead property, grow and raise our own food and medicines. My husband would go back to his woodworking and photography. I would go to school and get my PhD. My husband might try to make some money by selling his arts. I would be practice in a community or ward as a midwife and general wise woman. I might run for public office and put my education in family studies and public policy to use as a decision maker in government.

Maybe we would adopt. We would certainly contribute and volunteer for organizations that teach family values to children and young adults, that address social issues that distress families. Likely our travels would be in conjunction with humanitarian efforts like Habitat for Humanity and other international community building non-profits. We'd likely volunteer to work in the temple or perform church service wherever we live.

When our children went to college, my husband and I would serve missions for the church. We dream of being missionaries in Nauvoo, church campsites and properties, humanitarian and family history missions. We'd pretty much be excited to go anywhere and hope that we would have opportunities to put our skills, knowledge, education and passions put to work.

One thing I love about my husband is that he is happy to stay home and care for our children an equal amount while I pursue personal development and social service opportunities. Its his professional development that is keeping him from doing that now and will likely keep him from doing much of that in the future but we hope that once he is settled in his career that he will have a flexible enough schedule where that could work for us. He's pretty adamant, however, that he never wants me to run for public office because he doesn't want to deal with the public life. I don't blame him...

Jenneology and the Spirit of Elijah

I was asked to submit my experiences with family history and temple work for an article in the ward newsletter, and this is what I wrote:

My conversion to the gospel was very dependent on understanding and knowing about the temple. I was looking for the way that I could be reunited with my father who had died when I was 15. The doctrine of sealing ordinances was a joyful relevation for me. After I joined the church, I had to learn how to do family history in order to get my dad's name ready to go to the temple. That was when I was introduced to the Family History Centers and genealogy. I started looking up ancestors and got hooked really quickly. As the first latter-day saint in my family, I was really excited to put together the family information that relatives had shared with me.

Growing up, my family had been very proud of their Swedish and Italian ancestry so I knew some information. One of my friends realized how interested I was in genealogy and one time wrote me a note that joked that my name could be "Jenneology." I loved it and it became my screen name, email address, etc. My family history has truly become part of my identity.

Once I transfered to BYU, I felt like I was in the Vatican City of family history research and one semester I was very lucky to be able to spend 6+ hours a day collecting family history in the BYU Family History Library. I loved living 10 minutes from a temple and attending once a week, sometimes more. I loved calling home and telling my mother the information I discovered. I had a relative on the Mayflower, soldiers who fought in the Revolution and the Civil War for both the Union and Confederacy. One ancestor was a contemporary and friend of John Calvin and immigrated to Switzerland with him. I found a connection to a Danish prince from Shakespeare and traced one line back to 457 in France. It was truly fascinating and exciting work. I was proud to have been swept up by the Spirit of Elijah.

It was during that time that I learned that I really like to research and data entry is relaxing to me (strange, I know!). I became skilled at using Personal Ancestral File, Temple Ready, familysearch.org, ancestry.com, census records, requesting records from vital statistics and reading microfiche. As a product of the technological revolution and the information age, I loved all the digital resources the LDS Church had compiled and how easy it was to find out so much using the internet.

Although I loved the work I was doing, I also realized that it is an imperfect system and I began wishing that Temple Ready could be done using the internet instead of going into the Family History Center. I heard rumors that the Church was working on that project. When the new Family Search was announced in church last year, I almost jumped out of seat and yelled for joy because I have been looking forward to it for so long.

I'm at a different stage of my life now so I don't have as much time as I once did to work on my family history. I have checked out the new Family Search and it is really nice to be able to submit names to the temple from home. The system works well, especially for a stay at home mother and graduate student. I have had some frustrations with the new system; like when I discovered that you can't delete a mistake. I accidently transcribe the wrong wife for an ancestor and found I couldn't delete it. So it is different that using the old PAF program. It is a welcome adjustment for me to make, but like learning most new things, there is a learning curve. I think there will probably be improvements made to the system as more people use it, but right now I'm excited to learn how to use it and help others as they learn too.