28 Aug 2021, Saturday

Prioritized Daily Tasks

Ljubica Jelicic's 70th Birthday

Notes from Jared Halverson's Come Follow Me podcast on YouTube, D&C 94-97 for week Aug 30 - Sep 5: He drew 3 circles that overlapped each other. One he named, Students Needs; the second, What is the Prophetic Intent; and the third, Prompting of the Holy Ghost. The teacher wants to be in the area where all three circles overlap.

The scriptures are boring only when they are not relevant.

If you want to profit from your scripture study, find its relevance in your life. "liken the scriptures unto yourself" As our lives are wholely dedicate to God we are building a temple after the pattern God has given.

I talked to Debbie and Beth. Alex called Beth about 3 AM to open the entrance gate at Timber Lake. Debbie and Cooper are going to watch Libby bike race. Jody took the girls.

I walked for about 45 minutes around the neighborhood waiting for Debbie's electric bike to be delivered.

I called Brother Rob Naylor, ward executive secretary, about getting Bishop Yates to assign two Aaronic Priesthood brothers to help administer the sacrament tomorrow to the residence and staff at Abbington Memory Center.

I soaked my feet in Black Oxygen while I ate breakfast and listened to Tom Pettet discuss D&C 94 -97 Come Follow Me podcast.

"One of the individuals who played a big role in the early days of the Church was John Tanner.

It was the middle of December in 1834 when John Tanner, a recent convert to the Church in Lake George, New York, “received an impression by dream or vision of the night, that he … must go immediately to the Church” in Kirtland. He disposed of his property—several flourishing farms, a hotel, and orchards—loaded his numerous family and several neighbors into wagons on Christmas morning, and traversed the five hundred mile distance to arrive in Kirtland on a Sunday, January 1835.

He had indeed been needed. A mortgage on the temple site was falling due and, according to some accounts, the impoverished Prophet Joseph and some of the brethren had been praying for assistance.

John Tanner did not hesitate. He loaned the Prophet two thousand dollars and took his note, loaned the temple committee thirteen thousand dollars, signed a note for thirty thousand dollars with the Prophet and others for goods purchased in New York, and made “liberal donations” toward the building of the temple.

There is no evidence that any of these loans were repaid. Later, when he moved with his family to Missouri to build up Zion there, they had a “borrowed team and one old broken down stage horse, and an old turn pike cart, a cag [keg] of powder, and $7.50 in cash,” according to his son, Nathan. (George S. Tanner, John Tanner and His Family, Salt Lake City: John Tanner Family Association, 1974, pp. 74–77. Subsequent references, unless otherwise noted, will be from this volume.)

It was the beginning of generations of Tanner service to the Church, service not only to the Church as a whole but also at ward and stake levels wherever they lived.

John Tanner was born in Rhode Island just two years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He would probably have stayed permanently in upper New York where he was one of the area’s leading entrepreneurs if he had not met the missionaries. By then, his family consisted of his second wife and six children. They would have seven more children; then, after the death of his second wife in 1835, he married Elizabeth Beswick, who added eight more children to the family. Fourteen of the children grew to maturity and all but four of them affiliated with the Church and moved to Utah: Sidney, John Joshua, Nathan, Louisa Maria, Albert Miles, Myron, Seth, Freeman, Joseph Smith (born in 1833 after the family joined the Church), and David Dan (p. 27).

John Tanner was a Bible-reading Baptist who, hearing rumors of Mormons in the neighborhood, went to the meeting so he could protect his Baptist brethren. For some months, his leg had been afflicted with open sores, a condition apparently without remedy. Propping himself up in his cart, he drove to the meeting, listened to the preaching of two redoubtable elders, Simeon and Jared Carter, and brought a Book of Mormon home after warning his Baptist friends that “they had better not fight against [the truth].”

A few days later, Jared Carter visited the home, administered to John, and commanded him to rise and walk in the name of the Lord. He never used his crutches again. John and Elizabeth were baptized on 17 September 1832. (See p. 52.)

From then on, John Tanner never looked back. From Kirtland, the family moved to Missouri, where they shared fully in the persecutions of the Saints. John’s son Myron remembers going with his father to grind wheat for the hungry family. Spotting some state militia on the way home, John gave twelve-year-old Myron quick orders to hide in a pile of brush, an action that may have spared the boy severe harm. One Missourian hit John in the head with a rifle, opening a seven-inch gash to the bone. Covered with blood, he had “such a horrifying appearance” that his captors turned him loose. Another son, Nathan, standing guard that night, confessed that “when I let my father through … I did not know him only by his voice as he was so covered with blood” (pp. 92–93).

Without freedom to work their land in peace, the Tanners were poor when they joined the rest of the Saints in the forced exodus to Illinois. They settled first in Montrose where, Myron remembers, “our diet consisted almost exclusively of corn bread and milk”—and they sometimes ran out of corn (p. 101).

During their six years at Montrose, they not only established a good living for the family again, but paid off a portion of the $30,000 note that John had cosigned with the Prophet Joseph (see p. 102).

John showed the same kind of loyalty over money matters just before he left on a mission in 1844. Meeting Joseph Smith on the streets of Nauvoo, he gave the Prophet his note for $2,000, signed in Kirtland in 1835 to redeem the temple land. The Prophet asked what he wanted him to do with it, and Father Tanner said, “‘Brother Joseph, you are welcome to it.’ The Prophet then laid his right hand heavily upon Father Tanner’s shoulder and said: ‘God bless you, Father Tanner, your children shall never beg bread.’” (p. 103.)." This promise sound familiar to a promise the Lord made to me in my patriarchal blessing.

"That prophecy was amply fulfilled. When the family moved west after the martyrdom of the Prophet, John Tanner sent two of his sons with the Mormon Battalion; was able to care for his own family and the seven plural wives and children of his son-in-law, Amasa Lyman, who was with the advance company; and had time to see his family settled and thriving in Cottonwood, a few miles south of Salt Lake City, before his death in 1850.

His ten children who came west fulfilled the Prophet’s prediction as they participated in the colonization, not only of South Cottonwood, but of San Bernardino, California; of such Utah communities as Beaver, Fillmore, Payson, and North Ogden; and of Arizona.

The nine Tanner men were big—near six feet and over 200 pounds, generous, plain-speaking, and long-lived as well. (Those who came west averaged a lifespan of eighty-two years.)

Each has a separate story to tell, but in the activities of the family as a whole, we can see their contribution to the Church. They consistently contributed to the growth of their communities; they served long and faithfully in their local wards and provided children and grandchildren who sat in the highest councils of the Church. Consistently devoted and hard-working, they gave their families economic and spiritual security and left an honorable legacy of commitment that has not decreased with time.

Sidney, the oldest son to come west, had fought in the Battle of Crooked River in Missouri, then settled in Montrose, Illinois, with his wife and five children. In the exodus from Nauvoo, his wife and the three youngest children died.

Despite his sorrow, he wrote an unwavering defense of his faith to his unbelieving parents-in-law: “In your letter you wanted to know what we wanted to move for. It was to go to a land of freedom, where we could enjoy the peace of society and our liberty.” He related his wife’s illness and death, then added: “She requested me to write to you and tell you that she died in the full triumph of the faith of Jesus Christ and her most desire for living was for the benefit of her family and friends and [to] do what she was afraid they would not do for themselves, that they might arrive to a glorious salvation in the kingdom of God, where she expects to meet them and enjoy their society.” The John Tanner Family by Leonard J. Arrington

There is something that seems to pull me to the Tanner Family. This is the second Tanner that has touched me; the first Dr. Henry Smith Tanner who served as a mission president in California when the church was considering closing the mission. He asks the First Presidency not to send any new missionaries to the Californa Mission that did not have the finances to support themselves. It was because of the success with which the Lord blessed him that the policy was changed for the missionaries going without purse or scrip.

Ryan, Stephanie, Carter, Mckay, and Andrew got back. Abbey is spending the night with her cousin, Clara Gourley.

I talked to Debbie and had prayer with her.

Libby won her bike race. Really a special day; it ment more having her family, cousins, and grandma there.