Let This Desire Work in You
By Jim Hannah
Occasionally I wonder how my life would have been different
had I not been baptized into the Community of Christ. I was twenty at the time,
between my junior and senior years at Graceland College. I spent that summer
working the graveyard shift at a steel foundry in Keokuk, Iowa, scooping sand
for molds and molten steel. The work was hot and dirty, mind-numbing. In the
early morning hours each day I fled from the dark and the smoke to drive the
winding curves of Highway 96, following the Mississippi River at sunrise to the
church’s campground in Nauvoo. The road trip and the campground were my summer
sanctuary. I usually slept until early afternoon, when I joined the meals and
activities of whatever camp or reunion was in session that week.
I remember well the ongoing work project during that summer
of ’67—construction of a frontier fort and Indian village for the district’s
camping program. I was surprised (and honored) to be asked to oversee carving of
the totem pole. Great pains had been taken to acquire a forty-foot utility pole
for the project, which through the summer ever so slowly began to take shape.
But one day toward the season’s close, in a moment of discouragement, I took a
handsaw to the top few feet of what I viewed as only a badly weathered section.
At the time, I had no idea how disappointing this was to the
appointee minister who had acquired it. Dick Hettrick was his name, well known
for his outspoken nature. But there were no recriminations. Instead, I recall
the day when he said, “Jim, let’s talk,” and as we each flopped down on a cot
and stared up at the cabin ceiling, we began to explore the meaning and purpose
of life.
Until that time I’d never thought much about my gifts, or how
they might contribute to that dream so evident in Dick’s entire being, “the
cause of Zion.” But I had begun to recognize several related things in my
growing association with the Saints: I knew they were committed to each other as
“brothers” and “sisters” in Christ, that they had a personal relationship with
their Creator, and that they were committed to make the world a place of peace
for all. These things were absent in my life, and appealing to me, even if I was
largely unaware.
It was at Nauvoo that Sharon (my then-girlfriend and now
spouse of thirty-seven years) was prompted to share with me the passage from
Alma 16 that speaks of faith as a seed, and how if you plant and nurture that
seed it will grow to yield delicious fruit. At the time, I was rather proudly
agnostic, claiming that there may or may not be a God, but no one could possibly
know. Alma’s words, however, pierced my façade with an invitation to experiment
in faith, urging, “Even if you can no more than desire to believe, let this
desire work in you” (Alma 16: 151). In that reading I had to confess that while
I certainly didn’t believe, I just as certainly desired to
believe, knowing that something in the lives of the Saints was missing in my
own.
And so that summer I was baptized, down the hill from the campground, at an
outdoor waterfall named David’s Chamber. Here David Smith had come to write
hymns for the Restoration, and here a group of reunion-goers gathered to express
their joy and support as I entered the waters of baptism. I have only faded
photographs of that day, but in my mind’s eye nearly forty years later is a
clear recollection of my entrance—however feebly understood—into the Beloved
Community. I am eternally grateful.
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