Twenty one years ago today, my husband and I gazed at the face of our newborn son and knew that the name we had intended to give him was not his name. We didn’t have a backup name so that was the topic for the days following his birth. We combed over our family trees, suggested our favorite people and places and were surprised to find ourselves coming back to a name we had not considered.
Willard Richards is my husband’s fourth great grandfather. We were newly engaged and at a Richards family event when someone asked great grandfather if he had anything to say. He did. In his deep, powerful voice, he said he wanted to bear his testimony and the testimony of his great grandfather, Willard Richards, that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, he translated the Book of Mormon and restored the Church of Jesus Christ and it was true.
At great grandfather’s funeral, President Gordon B. Hinckley gave this charge, “The greatest responsibility resting upon the posterity of Lynn Richards is fidelity to the testimony of their illustrious ancestor, Dr. Willard Richards, who was with the Prophet at Carthage Jail that sultry afternoon of June 27, 1844 when Dr. Richards offered to give his life in place of the Prophet. His knowledge, his conviction, his certainty concerning the validity of the Prophet’s calling as a man of God, as a leader brought forth in this last dispensation was the hallmark of his life. It guided everything which happened to him for the remainder of his life. And he has passed that inheritance down to his family.” (June 1, 2001). Though the name of Willard Richards carried so much weight and expectation, it seemed to us that this little boy wanted that name.
There is another name far more illustrious that we are given, an inheritance passed to us from our Father. “I would that ye should take upon you the name of Christ…And I would that ye should remember also, that this is the name that I said I should give unto you that never should be blotted out, except it be through transgression; therefore, take heed that ye do not transgress, that the name be not blotted out of your hearts” (Mosiah 5:8, 11).
“Do we realize how blessed we are to take upon us the name of God’s Beloved and Only Begotten Son? Do we understand how significant that is? The Savior’s name is the only name under heaven by which man can be saved.” (Elder M. Russell Ballard, October 2011). He wants to save us, reedem us, and enable us as we choose to be called by His name and carry it in our hearts.