OH NO!

I am grateful for the Holy Ghost in my life. I don't think I would have survived otherwise. I have been saved from errors big and small, and I also think my life has been saved. 

But there's the other side: Sometimes the Holy Ghost has a message for me that are unanticipated and maybe even unwelcome.

Such as what happened to me today.

Elder Lewis and I went to Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearsal and broadcast, and instead of sitting in our usual place toward the front, we found it reserved for someone and moved toward the next section back.

I slid in next to a youngish man, smiled, sat down...

And he struck up a conversation.

Turns out he is a professor of Yupik languages at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. And he is in Salt Lake working with the translation group translating Gospel Essentials into one of the Yupik languages. He had started it on his own, but finished here, in connection with getting his PhD.

Now it so happens that in my first year as a linguistics graduate student at the University of Arizona I did a paper on Yupik, specifically on Central Siberian Yupik, which is spoken in Siberia and also on some of the islands in the Aleutians.

So we had much to talk about, and did. He illustrated for me some of the Yupik languages, including their prosody. It so happens that the rest of my linguistics career was spent studying prosody...

Then I asked him if he had been to the Family History Library, which he had not. And unfortunately he is leaving in 3 days and won't have time.

The follow up question was whether he had done any family history research, and essentially neither he nor the Yupik people he knows had done any.

This man was warm and friendly and concerned deeply for the language of his people, and the culture that goes with it. But not with his kindred dead.

And then the Holy Ghost spoke to me. It is a work to be done. And it appears that we may be the people to do it.

Until recently I have been compelled within myself to go to set up a regional family history center in Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. I have had no understanding of why, it was just there. Dear Elder Lewis's comment about this compelling desire was, "I'll miss you". 

But just recently it was spoken in our presence that lawlessness had taken over in Mongolia. That did damp down my enthusiasm.

So maybe I had misinterpreted the location for that effort. Or maybe thinking through what it would be like to do a big family-history project like that in Mongolia prepared me to consider such a thing in Alaska.

In any case, many arrows drawn in the past point to it:

1. Study of Yupik and even prosody! 

2. Serving on the International floor at the FHL.

3. Being courageous (?) about learning and speaking languages.

4. Having prepared to serve in the same capacity in Mongolia.

5. Being filled with the Spirit of Elijah.

6. Knowing from my own experience how easily the knowledge of a family can be lost with the passing of just one person, and how rapidly any culture can be lost without knowing the life and struggles of our kindred dead.

7. Knowing that we can't be saved without them, nor they without us - and a whole culture could perish in unbelief without such a work.

Well, we'll see what happens next. Many many layers of effort must be made to bring about such a project, and if we are not on the right track with these thoughts, those efforts will not bear fruit. 

But I have begun. I have checked the library's holding in Yupik genealogies and they are sparse or non-existent (depending on how narrowly Yupik is defined). Next: where are the centers of membership in Alaska?

Crazy or inspired? I don't know - yet. But my friend from the Tabernacle and I really connected, I have his email address, and now it's a matter of letting the Holy Spirit guide.