The Tabernacle Choir on Temple Square sings a song so rousing that you become so caught up in it that you just have to move.  It is called “Bound for the Promised Land.”  The lyrics say, “Oh, who will come and go with me, I am bound for the promised land.”

Listening to it I excitedly looked at Marjorie and said, “Will you go with me to the promised land?”

She locked her eyes on mine and emphatically stated, “We're in the promised land!”

Wow, I thought, she's right!

She then showed me what she'd just read in Teachings of Presidents of the Church—Wilford Woodruff.  He and the Saints were expelled from the United States of America, and were forced to set off for their promised land.  Joseph Smith had seen it in vision 13 years before the Saints ever went there.  In 1834 he prophesied that the Church would go to the Rocky Mountains, build temples, and that the gospel would spread from there.

In 1847 Brigham Young led the Saints across 1,000 miles of uninhabited wilderness and entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake on July 24^th.  He lay sick in Wilford Woodruff's carriage.  As the carriage came over the last rise, Wilford turned it so that Brigham could look to the west and have a view of the valley.  Brigham raised up and silently gazed at the scene for some minutes.  He was having an update of a vision that he'd had earlier.  When the vision passed, he simply said, “This is the right place.  Drive on.”

This promised land as seen by everyone else was barren, and the very definition of desolation.  Wilford said that the only things naturally growing there were grasshoppers, crickets, and coyotes.  The soil was so hard that the Saints broke nearly every plow on that very first day.  Only by diverting the streams and moistening the soil were they able to work the ground and plant the first potatoes.

Jim Bridger had a visit with Brigham Young when they met on the plains.  Bridger told Brigham that they wouldn't be able to live in the valley of the Great Salt Lake because frosts occurred there every month of the year.  He said that he'd give a thousand dollars for the first bushel of corn raised there because it couldn't be done.

Brigham knew otherwise.  Before ever leaving Nauvoo he had seen in vision what the Saints and the Church would become in the Rocky Mountains.  It was their promised land; but Brigham was also aware that promised lands don't come easy.

Wilford said that “The stranger comes into Salt Lake City and sees our orchards and the trees in our streets, and he thinks, what a fruitful and delightful place it is.  He does not think that, for twenty or twenty-four years, almost every tree he beholds … has had to be watered twice a week through the whole summer season, or they would all have been dead long since.”  (Teachings of Presidents of the Church—Wilford Woodruff, pg. 148).

Watering the trees wasn't just a matter of running a hose to the tree and turning the water on.  They didn't have hoses.  They watered the trees bucketful by heavy bucketful.

Promised lands don't come easy.

To reach their promised land Lehi and Nephi had to spend eight years crossing the most formidable desert on earth.  They lived on raw meat.  They had to build a seaworthy ship.  They had to cross the Indian and Pacific Oceans.  When they reached their promised land they began with nothing.  Only hard work and unimaginable toil enabled them to eventually build homes and productive farms.

Promised lands don't come easy.

The Jaredites experienced the same hardships, as they had a many-year trek through uninhabited lands, and a 344-day float across the Atlantic Ocean.  Their promised land, upon arrival, similarly consisted of nothing—no homes, no farms, no food except what they could build or make or grow.  To be sure, the opportunities were there, but everything depended upon their faith and hard work.

The children of Israel had to exist in a desert for 40 long years with nothing but manna to eat, day after day, and year after year before they entered their promised land.

Our American pilgrims reached their promised land in November 1620.  It was cold and stormy.  A plague had just gone through the local Indians, killing most of them.  The Pilgrims lived off the stores of corn left by the deceased Indians.  Disease and cold so affected the Pilgrims that half of the hundred were dead by spring.

Promised lands don't come easy.

My 11^th great grandfather and grandmother were among the 50 surviving Pilgrims.  It was them and their descendants who created this promised land that I'm in.  Their descendants crossed the plains or came around the Horn in the mid 1800s and, Lehi-like, or Jaredite-like, or Latter-day Saint-like, built homes and farms in the wilderness that was the Pacific Northwest.  These were my great, great grandparents.

My beautiful, fruitful, comfortable promised land is what it is because of them.  Promised lands don't come easy.

These promised lands are just stepping stones to the real one.  We've yet to reach our ultimate promised land.  We've been promised a place which exceeds our imaginations:  “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”  (1 Corinthians 2:9).

But promised lands don't come easy.  There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to get there.  The journey and the effort aren't for the faint-hearted.  The end result, however, is, oh, so worth it.  It is worth every sacrifice, every covenant, and worth the keeping of every commandment.

And maybe best of all, we have the opportunity of returning thanks to our progenitors who prepared our earthly promised lands.  We have the privilege of preparing an eternal promised land for our progenitors, and of taking them with us.

As our hymn says,

“For there we shall be taught

The law that will go forth,

With truth and wisdom fraught,

To govern all the earth.

Forever there his ways we'll tread,

And save ourselves

  With all our dead.”

(Hymns, High on the Mountain Top, pg. 5)

Unlike with all these earthly promised lands, we'll arrive in that heavenly promised land and find  mansions already prepared for us.  We'll be where there is no more sorrow, hardship, illness, or sin.  There will still be a great deal of work to be done, but we'll be extremely happy to do it in that land where peace, happiness, and joy never cease.

Promised lands don't come easy, but they're worth every effort to get there.

There is a profound need, in the difficult times that we find ourselves in, to express gratitude.  It needs to be expressed to our families, to our leaders, to our progenitors, and especially to our Savior for all that we have, for all that we can become, and for all that we have been promised.

And then we need to live for the promise.