Joseph, Joseph, Joseph
The Temple Has Returned To Nauvoo, Part 4
"Lift Up Thine Eyes"
Text by Maurine Jensen Proctor
Photography by Scot Facer Proctor

Those who can lift up their eyes are blessed in the covenant, renewed when everything else vanishes like smoke around them, when earthly possessions are vacated and other hopes are ruined. So it was that people with names like Bathsheba Smith and Lucius Scovil who walked the streets of Nauvoo were transformed by their temple on the hill, raised from the flats. In the building their glorious temple, in the lifting their eyes to it, in the sacrifice they would wear in the weariness of their bones, something glorious happened to their souls.

The stories of those people who lived in the Nauvoo flats amaze and warm us; we think of them in a heroic, golden light with a nostalgia whose meaning is bigger than we quite understand. Yet what really happened is that as they lifted their eyes to the temple, it transformed them. They built the temple and it became them. It seemed they were thrust from their beautiful temple, but in reality, they took it with them in the lift of their eyes and beat of their covenant pulse.

As she left Nauvoo, Bathsheba Smith said, "My last act in that precious spot was to tidy the rooms, sweep up the floor and set the broom in its accustomed place behind the door. Then with emotions in my heart which I could not now pen and which I then strove with success to conceal, I gently closed the door and faced an unknown future, faced a new life, a greater destiny as I well knew, but I faced it with faith in God and with no less assurance of the ultimate establishment of the Gospel in the West and of its true enduring principles, than I had felt in those trying scenes in Missouri."

The Saints began to stream out of Nauvoo in February of 1846, but Lucius Scovil, who had run one of Nauvoo's bakeries could not leave until May. He had lost everything when he was driven from Missouri; he arrived in Illinois penniless just in time for his family to be stricken with the bilious fever and malaria and his daughter Sarah to be afflicted with the black canker, which ate a hole through her lip, two teeth, and chin. He had worshiped and suffered with the Saints in Nauvoo, and then when it was time to go, even as his friends were packing out, his wife had died while giving birth to twins, Mary and Martha. Ten days later, as some of the earliest wagons were making their way down the road to the river, the twins died too.

The grief would delay his trip, but it would take him longer than he might ever have imagined to join the main body of the Saints. By May he was ready to travel, but while making final preparations, on the 6^th, he received a mission call to England. It is hard to conceive that in this hour of desperation, with the Church members scattered and homeless, missionaries were still being called, but Lucius was called. He had not gone this far to ignore what the Lord required of him. Thus, he traveled with his remaining family members a few days into the prairie "to get their property regulated." Having made arrangements for someone to care for them, he blessed them.

Joseph Smith Academy and the Nauvoo Temple

Then leaving them collapsed in tears, he turned back east to go on a mission six thousand miles away without purse or scrip. "This seemed like a painful duty for me to perform," said Lucius, "to leave my family to go into the wilderness and I to turn and go the other way. It cost all that I had on this earth...[but] I thought it was best to round up my shoulders like a bold soldier of the crop...and assist in rolling forth the Kingdom of God."

Lucius and Bathsheba had lifted up their eyes to the temple, and clearly they were never the same for it.

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