President Hinkley

Tonight at about 7:00 Utah time, that's 9:00 my time, the prophet Gordon B. Hinkley passed away at his home in Salt Lake City.

This is a very sad and very happy thing.

It is a very sad thing for people like me who have come to love this man so much over the last 12 years that he has been president of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints. It is also sad, I am sure, for his family who loved him.

For him, I believe, this is a very happy time. He is finally able to lay this mortal by, leave behind his imperfect body and rejoin his wife, Marjorie, and enter the presence of the God who he served all 97 years of his life.

I will copy a page from his own book, Stand a Little Taller, where he himself comments on death.

For April 23,

A Better Life

"Consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness." -Mosiah 2:41

What a wonderful thing is death, really, when all is said and done. It is the great reliever. It is a majestic, quiet passing on from this life to another life, a better life. We go to a place where we will not suffer as we have suffered here, but where we will continue to grow, accumulating knowledge and developing and being useful under the plan of the Almighty made possible through the atonement of the Son of God.

-G. B. Hinkley