(25 Aug 2020) I am in a spirit of fasting and prayer this morning for an ecclesiastical matter, lending my assistance to our branch president in making a decision. However, the Lord has seen it fit to bless me with some additional help in personal family affairs at the same time, which have pretty much derailed my morning activities from what I assumed them to be. (This is a semi-frequent occurrence for me – the derailment because of spiritual impressions.)
What is not a frequent occurrence is the nature of present communications. Much as was the series of impressions that lead us back to Arizona from Utah.
The first impression came two or three weeks ago. I have it recorded as being somewhere around the 13 or 14 of August this year (2020). This is how I’ve recorded it:
0.0 Grandpa Brigham says he’s sending help.
I don’t know what that means, but I trust him if he says help is coming.
I cannot even recall now if this impression came at the end of a prayer or morning study or fasting, but it surprised me. I think at the moment I was struggling with my weaknesses as a parent and the troubled dynamics of our marriage and wayward children.
This morning, in prayer and fasting (as mentioned above), my mind was brought back to this topic.
Now I have mulled over in my mind several times since then, who or what the nature of this help would be that Grandfather Brigham (Young) would be sending to me or my wife or children. I’ve thought that it might be Emily Dow Partridge (Rachel’s 3rd Great Grandmother), but my mind shifted to another of Brigham’s wives: Eliza R. Snow. But I don’t have an answer to this question, rather just a musing.
This morning however, as I contemplated this question, I felt as if a great Matriarch from the Eternal Realms was enlisting upon an Errand of particular importance to me. (That a woman occupied such a position in the Unseen World is a topic for exploration that I had never even begun to consider.) That is the best that I can put into words what I had felt.
I then proceed to search online and located an autobiography of Emily Dow Partridge Young which I proceed to read for the next hour or so.
More than being an autobiography of her life, the account gave a great deal of understanding into her father’s life, Edward Partridge, and the great ordeals that he was called to pass through for the cause of Christ. My personal history pales in comparison to his personal sacrifice, but we do share one thing in common: having left a comfortable position in this life because of our faith. I find myself slowly returning to that, while he never had the privilege of returning to that place of comfort in this life. Emily did, eventually.
I am only making note here of all these spiritual impressions so that when I figure out what is really going on, I can have a reference point from whence it came.
See also another Autobiography of Emily D. P. Young