Transcript

I'm Marlin Jensen and I currently work for the LDS Church as a member of the Quorum of Seventy. And when I was a younger man and had just finished my education, I took my young bride and our first child and moved back to my hometown, Huntsville, Utah. At age 28 I was called to be the bishop of the ward in which I had grown up. It was a very unusual month when we didn't have a ward dinner and a ward activity of some kind and ward athletic events. It was a very close-knit society. So over the six years of my term as bishop, I became very close to a number of families and people. In the sixth year the members of the ward did a very wonderful thing. They organized a project where every family in the ward was asked to prepare a quilt block and the intent was that that block would represent either something about their family or be a reminder of some relationship that I had had with that family as the bishop of the ward. You can tell this is a tender thing to me. And so toward the end of my sixth year of service, unannounced one evening the ward Relief Society president came to our home and unbundled this absolutely huge and magnificent quilt on which was a block from about 150 families in the ward, each one sending me in a sense a little message from that family. In a way, it was an expression of appreciation. In a way it was a remembrance of those great years I had been privileged to be a part of the lives of these people. And I had been able to see them in their good times, in their sad times, in their times of accomplishment, in their times of trial, which is really a great privilege that a bishop has in the Church. So I have today, 40 years later, this tremendous piece of art, I'll call it, that conjures up wonderful memories, that brings back to my mind these experiences that we had. For instance one of the squares on this quilt features a steaming cup of coffee and a smoking cigarette. And it was presented by Fred and Mary Hislip. Interestingly, Fred, whose nickname was Jack, had for a long time been the proprietor of the most prosperous saloon in our community, had completely given up his past way of life and gone out of business as the saloon keeper and had begun to become a regular church attender. So this quilt block with that memory of their paths is an especially dear one to me, because it represents the tremendous strides they had made, and especially he as a person, in giving up an old way of life and transitioning to a new way. There's an interesting block on which the word "Deemons" is inscribed, which would seem like a little bit of an unusual term to give the bishop. But that came from a family named Deem and they had always referred to their children as the little Deemons. One other block I'll make specific mention of is one that came from the family where the father was our financial clerk and he also had not been a very active member of the Church, and this call to come and take care of the finances of the ward had been the stimulus to interest him in the Church, and his wife as well. And so we had a wonderful six-year association. And interestingly, on the block from this family, the Wilson family, they have chosen to put "Old bookkeepers never die, they just lose their balance." And again that little saying brings back a flood of wonderful memories and of a wonderfully competent person who quietly, without fanfare and without much recognition, fulfilled a very important role in the life of that ward over a six-year period.

Elder Marlin Jensens Quilt

Description
Elder Marlin K. Jensen shares a quilt given to him by ward members at the end of his years of service as their bishop.
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