I am a wife, mother, friend, writer, and course designer. I’ve served in Young Women, Primary and Relief Society, where I am currently a teacher.
I’m a researcher by nature, and I have recently become interested of learning about the lives of my ancestors, especially the lives of women. While reading the official minutes of a Relief Society meeting that my 3rd great-grandmother, Vilate Murray Kimball, attended in March of 1842, I found an amazing revelation, prophecy, and promise the Prophet Joseph Smith made to Vilate and the women gathered there.
He told them that he would make their newly-formed Society a “kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s day.” “Enoch’s day” is an ancient time that we believe that the faithful were so unified with each other that they were taken up into heaven without tasting death.
We learn through this teaching that the City of Enoch included male and female priests working and serving together in love, exercising the atonement of Christ so fully that they were taken directly up to God.
I don’t know why this promise to my 3rd great-grandmother and the women of the LDS Church has not yet been fulfilled to bring about the formation of a new Zion in our day, but I do believe as the 9th Article of Faith states, that “many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” will yet be revealed to us. As a 21st-century daughter of Vilate, I stand in her place, asking the men who stand in the Prophet Joseph’s place if now is the right time for inquire after revelation on the role of women as priests.