In the Spring of 1846, the Latter-day Saints were a people in exile in a wilderness. Their leaders were somewhere up ahead on the prairies of Iowa looking for a new home in the West. The rest of the Saints, most still in Nauvoo, left as they could following after Brigham Young and the Twelve. Now, when Brigham Young’s company left, it was under something of a tight organization, but those who came after left pell mell, desperate not to be left behind. Among those was Lucius N. Scovil and his family. Yes, he has once owned a bakery in Nauvoo, but now he too was preparing to take his family “into the wilderness.”

Then May 6, 1846, Lucius received a call to go to England as a missionary. Hmm – how could he do that? How could he go to England and leave his family to find their own way across more than a thousand miles of wilderness?

Well, on May 14, 1846, Lucius proceeded to cross the Mississippi River with his family, and begin that long trek west to a new home. He did not know where he was going. Over the next two weeks the Scovil family journeyed slowly across Iowa, Latter-day Saint refugees scattered as far as the eye could see in all directions.

Then, “…a day long to be remembered…” Lucius wrote – May 30, 1846: Three men came into camp from the West just at breakfast. They were going back to Nauvoo. And you’ll recognize what happened next. Lucius felt that familiar tug – that pull on his conscience, and knew his duty. He “resolved then and there to start on [his] mission to England.” It was “a painful duty,” he said “to leave my family to go into the wilderness, and I turn and go the other way.” Nonetheless, Lucius was determined to fill his mission he said, “if it cost me all that I had on this earth.”

And accordingly, he took leave of his family without purse or scrip and set out on a journey of some 6000 miles to England, while his wife and little ones turned to the West and into the wilderness.

Now, of that day Lucius wrote this, “Never since I have been in this Church have I seen anything in comparison to this trial. To think of leaving my wife and children to go into the wilderness without my being with them to look after them, and they weeping to think of my leaving them and going to a far distant country, but I left them bidding them God speed. By this time, I was completely overcome by my feelings and could not keep from bursting into a flood of tears, and thus I left them and started on my mission for England.”
I am reminded of a powerful scripture: “let every man learn his duty and act in the office in which he is appointed” (DC 107:99).