Milestone day

At about 11:30 this morning I got the last files successfully uploaded to Lulu.com for what has become a three-volume work on our Lewis ancestors going back to John Lewis and Elizabeth Sams and also including their descendants, and ordered a proof copy of each of these three books. I hope to see these books within a week or so to be able to check out whether I have put them together right. I reached a stopping point with the research about Labor Day, and since then have been working on the manuscripts. I think back in some amazement that there were so many issues to resolve--formats, organization, wording, editing of the text, compiling indexes, page numbering, etc., etc.. I had a lot of file troubles, which I think now had to do with trying to work with the text as a single manuscript of about 1600-1800 pages. WordPerfect just didn’t seem to function well with that big a document. Finally I determined a way to break the volumes up logically. I had problems in using Lulu also. I lost a week or so working with the Help-line for Ancestral Quest, WordPerfect, and Lulu.

Thinking back over the last few months, it was a time that required higher levels of faith and prayer–faith that this was a project that the Lord wanted me to finish and prayers asking for solutions to the specific problems of the day. Again, thinking retrospectively, there were an amazing number of instances where I felt some kind of spiritual insight or direction. Often this would happen in the night, and the next day I carry out the insight, and it would work, so that I could move to a new step. Also in these night-time sessions, wording of particular passages seemed to flow when I needed to write about such things as future research issues or book purposes or how to thank people as contributors. I feel a little like the Lamanites mentioned in 3 Nephi 9:20, who received of the Spirit, but at the time “knew it not.”

It is now comforting and gratitude-producing to have arrived at the sense that the Spirit had a lot to do with my finishing these volumes and perhaps that they have an importance beyond my understanding.