Jerusalem



Gordon B. Hinckley


Church President: March 12, 1995 - January 27, 2008





VISITING THE HOLY LAND, WALKING SACRED PATHS

Desert News, Salt Lake City, UT - July 6, 1996
Walking in the footsteps of Jesus along unpaved paths and over stone floors, President Gordon B. Hinckley revisited the most sacred of sites in the Holy Land.

The prophet was accompanied by his wife, Marjorie, during a stay in Israel June 16-22, that immediately followed their five-nation European visit. (See Church News, June 15, 1996.) President Hinckley spoke June 21 at a fireside in the BYU Jerusalem Center.





General Authorities Historical Notes concerning the Holy Land


In September 1972 newly ordained President Harold B. Lee asked Elder Hinckley, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, to accompany him on a historic trip to Europe and the Middle East. It would be the first visit to the Holy Land by a President of the Church in some two thousand years.

“On that trip President Lee became quite ill,” President Hinckley recalls. “Late one evening Sister Lee rang our room and asked if I would give her husband a blessing. President Edwin Q. Cannon of the Swiss Mission was traveling with us on this assignment, so I asked him to join me in administering to the President. We did so, and then, with a good deal of concern about President Lee’s health, I went to bed.

“Later in the night President Lee began to cough. It was a deep, terrible cough, and it went on for some time. Situated as we were in adjoining hotel rooms, I could hear him. He coughed and coughed and coughed. Finally all of that stopped and I went off to sleep, grateful he had been given some relief.

“Brother Lee said nothing at all of the matter the next day, but on the following day he said to me, ‘We had to come to the land of miracles to witness a miracle within ourselves!’ He then told me how in the most violent of the coughing, he had coughed up a very large clot of blood. Just a little more than one year later, he died from what was spoken of as a pleural embolism.”

source: "Grampa Bill's G. A. Pages "


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