The Basics Have Not Changed
David B. Haight April 1997 Priesthood Session
What a tremendous sight, my brethren. It’s thrilling to stand here and look out on this vast audience in the Tabernacle and then think of what is happening throughout the world. The songs that we have just heard, I think, are quite appropriate. “Where Can I Turn for Peace?” (Hymns, no. 129)—we could talk about that topic all evening. Before that, we heard the stirring song “Let the Mountains Shout for Joy,” written by Evan Stephens. As we reflect upon the sesquicentennial year of our pioneers’ arrival, you can imagine the thrill that the Saints must have felt when they sang that song or heard it for the first time. After they had made the trek across the plains and accomplished all that they had done—the suffering and the living in the wagon beds and sleeping out on the ground and walking barefooted and burying the dead out on the prairie—finally to arrive in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, there to establish Zion, you can imagine how they would later sing, “Let the mountains shout for joy! Let the valleys sing.”