The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Our Beloved and Holy Father in Heaven, Father of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and divine Father of Thine Only Begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, in His sacred name and with unfailing gratitude for His redeeming Atonement, we present ourselves before Thee in this holy house of righteousness, this sanctuary of spirituality.
Father, we acknowledge that the hallowed masterpiece in which we gather was originally built by weary but believing pioneer hands. As our beloved Spencer W. Kimball once said here, those valiant souls were “hardly settled from their long painful and distressing exodus across the plains, [when they] were again uprooted and sent to this desert place to colonize the valleys of the mountains and to build the first temple [in the] West.”
This morning we remember their disappointments and their tears as they labored in the heat, with alkali soil, malaria, and flooding streams to taunt them. We are grateful that they successfully met all of the difficulties presented to them by a rebellious virgin land and an uncontrollable Virgin River. Father, we desire to be more like those Saints of the historic Cotton Mission, who moistened these stones with their tears and lifted these beams with their strength. We know they did that in part for us and also for the legions of kindred dead who yet wait for us, the living, to see that their eternal possibilities are realized.
Father, it is with all of this and more in our hearts that we rededicate, reconsecrate, and make holy once again this sacred house of exalting covenants.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.