Promised lands aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.  Utopias don’t come ready-made.  We have to create them.

Moses led the Children of Israel to their promised land.  It was a good land, but they were under a mandate from God to first clear it of the degenerate and hopelessly evil inhabitants who were already there.  A good deal of blood was shed, and many lives were lost before the people could settle down and enjoy their inheritance.

On the way to their promised land the Jaredites spent many years trekking through areas where man had never yet set foot.  Surely some of those areas were choice lands, but the Lord wanted to plant them in a place choice above all the earth.  To get there they had to endure privations, exhausting work, years of weary travel, and finally a 344-day float on bouncing corks on a tempestuous sea where the fierce wind never ceased to blow.  Theoretically all eight of the cork-like barges that they were aboard all somehow arrived at the same place in the promised land.  The Jaredites were so grateful that they bowed themselves down on the land, gave thanks, and shed tears of joy.  Then they got up and went to work.  There were no houses or cleared land waiting for them.  It would have truly been a wilderness where their survival was dependent upon their faith, perseverance, and hard work.

Several millennia later my eleventh great grandfather, William Brewster, similarly fled his homeland seeking his promised land.  His voyage was shorter and a little easier than that of the Jaredites, but the destination was the same land that was “choice above all the earth” that the Jaredites had previously inhabited.

William Brewster and his band of Pilgrims sighted the American continent on 10 November 1620.  It wasn’t until Christmas day that they were able to start making shelters and places to live.  Everything about their promised land was inhospitable and even hostile—the weather, the land, the wilderness, and the Indians.  By spring fully half of the 102 people had perished because of the elements and disease.  Establishing homes and farms took years.

Lehi and Nephi and their family made a longer voyage than those of the Jaredites and the Pilgrims, crossed two oceans instead of one, and landed on the opposite coast of the Americas from where the Jaredites and Pilgrims had landed.  Rather than being challenged by cold, storms, and Indians, Lehi and Nephi likely landed in a tropical area where the hardships were heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and an excess of vegetation.  Their job was likely that of having to turn a jungle into an inhabitable promised land.

Promised lands don’t come easy.  I have been blessed to have spent my life in one, but those who came before me made it what it is.  My life has been easy compared to theirs.  My life has been easy because of them.

My 2nd great grandparents, Andrew and Maria McCornack, passed through my valley late in the summer of 1853.  The valley would have been full of smoke, sagebrush, and swamps.  I’m sure that it looked as inhospitable to Andrew and Maria as the Massachusetts coast looked to William Brewster in 1620.  It never occurred to Andrew and Maria to stop here.  It was unthinkable.  It never once entered their minds that one day their posterity would be happily living here.  This valley was so cold and snowbound in the winter that neither Indians nor big game could survive.

In the spring and summer the valley was so swampy that it was uncrossable until the year that the railroad was built in the early 1880s.  Perhaps the climate softened, but I prefer to think that the farming practices of the settlers along the foothills diverted enough water for irrigation purposes that the lower valley dried up enough to allow for the establishment of even more farms.

Fields were laid out, and ditches were dug by hand and by horse-drawn fresnoes to every one.  I personally would never have had the foresight, vision, or strength to have constructed the Wilcox Ditch that made the living on my place possible.  And someone cleared this ground which must surely have previously been a pine forest.  Would I have had the energy to do that?

I owe my promised land to the foresight and work of my predecessors.  I am grateful to them.

And I’m grateful to the Mormon pioneers who were kicked out of their comfortable homes, chased off their farms, ejected from their nation, and who set off into the wilderness to find their promised land in the West.  When they arrived there, their leader declared, “This is the place.”

The “place” was dry, barren, cold, and forbidding.  Frosts occurred in every month of the year.  The mountain man, Jim Bridger, warned the saints that corn couldn’t be grown there.

Incredible toil and hardship turned that desolate area into a promised land and a safe haven for the saints.  It required years of work.

The prophecy was that the nations of the earth would make their way to that area, and that the people would become so mixed that it would be difficult to tell the face of a saint from that of a sinner.  The saints’ promised land would become like unto other wicked places in the world.  It would then be time for the Lord to pave the way for the opening of another  promised land in the place where everything began in the first place.  The saints will be asked to go back to Jackson County, Missouri, from which they were expelled in 1838; and to Adam-ondi-Ahman, where Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden.

Jackson County will have been wiped clean.  That already happened during the Civil War, but I suspect that it may happen again.  If so, there won’t be any houses there to move into.  The Saints may have to start from scratch if they’re to again establish their promised land.

Our promised lands become what we make them.  Our homes become what we make them.  Our families become what we make them.  Our lives become what we make them.

There is a promised land and a promised life ahead where we will rest from all care and sorrow, but it will require a lifetime of faithfulness and toil to achieve that goal.