When the Gathering of Israel Feels Impossible

By Hollie Wells

I was in a recent Sunday School class when a comment caused me to reflect on some of my own thoughts and attitudes. We were sharing personal experiences of temple and family history work, and a sister shared that when she goes to the temple to do proxy work, her custom is to pray for the individual whose name she has that they will have a soft heart and a desire to accept the ordinance being done. This was a wake-up call for me, because much of the time I am simply praying “I hope this is a real person, not a duplicate, and that their work hasn’t been done already.” 

This attitude probably stems from the small amount of time I have dug into my own family tree looking for names and have been frustrated by the messy tangle of lines and records that it can sometimes turn into. While we should do our due diligence when researching our family members to do their temple work, mistakes will happen no matter how vigilant we are. Some work will be done for people more than once or people will be skipped. Not to mention the numberless crowds of people who have no kind of record for us to find them by. 

Getting caught up in these thoughts always makes me realize this work is too big for just us! And perhaps that is the point. We have to rely on the grace of Christ to make more of our efforts than we can on our own. We offer our loaves and fishes, which sometimes include someone’s name being mispronounced or the ordinance prayer being off by a word or two. He makes it perfect and He is mighty to save. The millennium is a long enough time for us to accomplish the work for all who desire it. 

He knows He is working with imperfect yet earnest individuals with very limited capacities. 

This mighty and slightly overwhelming work of gathering Israel is a type of our own efforts to gain salvation– we can contribute all we want (and the Lord wants us to!) but we will never be able to accomplish it on our own. Jesus made salvation possible through His suffering, death, and resurrection, now we are just helping hands moving His great work along. We can keep all the commandments and try to do it perfectly, but it’s Jesus’s mighty work to save us. We must rely on Him to do so. 

When it comes to becoming celestial, there is so much beyond my ability. I can’t even scratch the surface on my own. I need Him to work in me and change me. Then I hope to have the privilege of being united with those I am working to help gather through my participation in temple and family history work.