Resurrection Shall Be Joyful

Dear Gramps,

As I have been reading some different blogs I have picked up on some different conversations talking about a husband calling his wife forth at the resurrection and that is why he needs to know her name, but no one seemed to know if it was doctrine and/or where it came from. I haven’t been through the Temple yet so I don’t really exactly what they are talking about, just some glimmer of something I heard a long time ago about getting a new name, and I wondering if this is doctrine and why we do it.

Thanks!

Sarah

Dear Sarah,

We have not been told exactly what will happen or how the resurrection will take place.  What we need to remember is that Jesus Christ has made it possible for each of us to be resurrected, or as stated by Amulek in Alma 11: 43  “The spirit and the body shall be reunited again in its perfect form, both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame, even as we now are at this time….”

The Prophet Joseph Smith, when talking about the resurrection gave us the following:

“I will tell you what I want. If tomorrow I shall be called to lie in yonder tomb, in the morning of the resurrection let me strike hands with my father, and cry, ‘My father,’ and he will say, ‘My son, my son,’ as soon as the rock rends and before we come out of our graves.

“And may we contemplate these things so? Yes, if we learn how to live and how to die. When we lie down we contemplate how we may rise in the morning. …

“Would you think it strange if I relate what I have seen in vision in relation to this interesting theme? …

“So plain was the vision, that I actually saw men, before they had ascended from the tomb, as though they were getting up slowly. They took each other by the hand and said to each other, ‘My father, my son, my mother, my daughter, my brother, my sister.’ And when the voice calls for the dead to arise, suppose I am laid by the side of my father, what would be the first joy of my heart? To meet my father, my mother, my brother, my sister; and when they are by my side, I embrace them and they me.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith [Deseret Book Co., 1961], pp. 294–96.)

Gramps