Wend Your Way

July is a special month for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is the month we celebrate Pioneer Day: July 24, 1847. This was the day that the first party of Mormon refugees arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and Brigham Young, then President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, looked upon the desert and proclaimed, "This is the right place!"

The Latter-day Saints had fled their city of Nauvoo, Illinois, in February 1846, about a year and a half after their prophet and leader, Joseph Smith, Jr., had been assassinated with his brother, Hyrum, in Carthage, Illinois. This was the latest of many migrations the Saints had made in their 16 years as an organised religion. They had moved from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and, after Joseph's death, sought to find a place where they could worship God "according to the dictates of their own conscience" in peace and freedom. (The Salt Lake Valley was, at the time, a part of Mexico.) After trekking across Iowa with teams of oxen and covered wagons, they settled in Winter Quarters, Nebraska, for the winter of 1846-47. In the spring, the first advance company left, arriving in present-day Utah in July 1847.

I do not have pioneer ancestors. I do not have pioneer heritage. I have some distant relatives who may have been a part of the pioneer companies, but even those relations are questionable, due to some poor genealogical work done nearly a century ago. (That is a story for another post.) What I do have is a rich spiritual heritage of the faith of these early Latter-day Saints. Growing up in Illinois, the son of Mormon converts, I loved the stories of the pioneers and I continue to find strength in their convictions. One of my favourite stories has to do with a man named William Clayton.

William Clayton was a member of one of the advance party. When Brigham Young asked him to leave Nauvoo, he left behind his family, including a pregnant wife, Diantha. As the Saints struggled to cross Iowa, Clayton worried about his wife and unborn child. It is reported that, while camping along Locust Creek, he received word from Nauvoo that Diantha had given birth to a healthy baby boy. In his journals, he penned this poem, reflecting that, despite all of their challenges, he and his family would be reunited and all would be well:

Come, come, ye saints, no toil nor labor fear;
But with joy wend your way.
Though hard to you this journey may appear,
Grace shall be as your day.
Tis better far for us to strive
Our useless cares from us to drive;
Do this, and joy your hearts will swell -
All is well! All is well!

Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard?
'Tis not so; all is right.
Why should we think to earn a great reward
If we now shun the fight?
Gird up your loins; fresh courage take.
Our God will never us forsake;
And soon we'll have this tale to tell-
All is well! All is well!

We'll find the place which God for us prepared,
Far away, in the West,
Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid;
There the saints, will be blessed.
We'll make the air, with music ring,
Shout praises to our God and King;
Above the rest these words we'll tell -
All is well! All is well!

And should we die before our journey's through,
Happy day! All is well!
We then are free from toil and sorrow, too;
With the just we shall dwell!
But if our lives are spared again
To see the Saints their rest obtain,
Oh, how we'll make this chorus swell-
All is well! All is well!

This song quickly became an anthem for the Saints as they trekked across the Great Plains, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and made their new homes in the Salt Lake Valley. In my mind, as the journey became tedious or challenging, a rich baritone voice would begin singing the first verse. Other voices would join in, until the entire company was singing, "All is well! All is well!"

One phrase, though, always grabs my attention: "wend your way." It is such an unusual word, "wend," that I looked it up. To wend is to go in a specific direction, usually by an indirect route. In other words, it is the dogged pursuit of a goal. Wending, to me, is not just making your way there, then; it is making your way there no matter how many twists and turns it takes. And that, to me, is a perfect explanation of what I admire about the early Latter-day Saints as they sought a refuge from persecution. It didn't matter how often they had to backtrack or how many times they had to pick up and leave. They knew what the desires of their hearts were and they sought after that.

As July draws to an end and the new school year approaches, I hope that I will continually wend my way, fearing no toil nor labor!