E-Books of Remembrance

The meaning of a Book of Remembrance is changing in our digital age.

SCRIPTURE: “But the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works; consequently, the books spoken of must be the books which contained the record of their works, and refer to the records which are kept on the earth.” --Doctrine and Covenants 128:7

Joseph Smith was explaining Revelation 20:12 in a letter to the Saints in 1842, where he was talking about directions on baptism for the dead and it began to clarify what these "books" were.

THOUGHT: Those of you who have done some family history research have used some of these books or records to identify a specific individual in order to provide temple ordinances for them. These books or records might include census records; birth and marriage registries (these once were actually recorded in large legal registry books;) death records as well as church and cemetery records; land, probate and county court records; and lastly family bibles, histories and biographies.

            You, as a member of the Lord’s church, will be judged from your own books  (journal, personal and family histories) and your compiled Book of Remembrance. Remember, Nephi wrote more than what we find in the compiled record that appears in our Book of Mormon.

            Now, ponder the name of my Blog. Notice the rest of the verse from Malachi 3:16.

            “Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.”

            There is a very important concept to remember in our day. A book can be made using more than paper and can be written with tools other than pencil, pen, ink or print. The plates Joseph translated from were engraved on metal. The Mayans and Egyptians carved into stone tablets, stele, or onto tomb walls.

            No longer are books hand copied by monks in monasteries or printed with a hand operated printing press by a publisher, as when the first edition of the Book of Mormon was made. It was only a couple of decades ago when most of us were using a typewriter to make a document and then ran off copies on a copy machine at the local quick print shop.

            Now we have the convenience of sitting in front of a computer in our own home, entering our stories into digital format via word processing software, and printing it off on our own inexpensive printer.

If we had no fingers to type with, there is voice recognition software we could use that will translate our spoken words into a printed digital format. I have often thought how much easier it would be to read selected journal entries from over the years and family stories that I have only in print form, into this type of software program. How much faster than typing would this be?

            The rich text software that allows us to scan a printed document then allows us to edit that text, is another fabulous tool we can use. What an amazing time to be living. I suspect there will be more and more advanced technology that will help us. Perhaps some of our Latter-day Saint youth will soon be on the cutting edge of this technology, discovering and creating concepts that we, the older generation, could never have thought of in our wildest “star-trek” dreams.

CONSIDER THIS: What is a modern book? A book can now be in the form of a CD or DVD or read on an ipad, iphone, enotebook, Nook or Kindle; it can be a digital full media video presentation; it can be a website; it can be a story told in blog form; it could be found posted on a social networking site shared with other members of the family; and it might also take the form of a family tree on Ancestry.com.

            The format of a book, our books, are not what matters in the eternal scheme of things. It is the fact that we’ve compiled them…in remembrance.

QUOTE: “Let all the records be had in order, that they may be put in the archives of my holy temple, to be held in remembrance from generation to generation, saith the Lord of Hosts,” (the archives formed to hold temple records in our day is NewFamilySearch, its format is digital, and it is accessed via the internet in cyberspace.)

            “Let us therefore, as a church and as a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness; and let us present in his holy temple, when it is finished, a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation.” –Doctrine and Covenants 128:24

This is just the beginning and I have no doubt the youth will be creating things we never dreamed of to communicate. In early February a conference called RootsTech will be held at BYU, and experts from all over the world will be sharing and dreaming and creating the future of books of remembrance...E-Books of Remembrance. For those of you young people who have the Spirit of Elijah, Go visit Helping in the Vineyard at vineyard.lds.org