1-the-morning-breaksOne fine Sabbath day while sitting in Sacrament meeting, I started logging how many of our hymns in our hymnbook mention Zion. Although I don’t have my log here in front of me, I do remember that 5 of the first 10 hymns mention it. But, I wondered, “Is just singing about Zion enough to please God?”.

One hundred and fifty three years ago today, Elder George A. Smith gave a talk encouraging those 309 families who had just been called to assist in building up “the cities of Zion” by settling the St. George area. In that talk he made an interesting comment about the subject:

We can get up in our meeting and sing—“The cities of Zion soon shall rise.” but how are they going to rise? We are going to build them, so that they will rise far above the clouds; and to accomplish this we are going to build them on the high mountains. We are not only going to sing about building them, but we are going to do the labor requisite to carry out our designs.

Now, 153 years later, are we just going to keep singing about building Zion or actually do it?