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My Father in Heaven

BY MISS ELIZA R. SNOW

O my Father, thou that dwellest

In the high and glorious place;

When shall I regain thy presence,

And again behold thy face?

In thy holy habitation

Did my spirit once reside?

In my first primeval childhood

Was I nurtur’d near thy side?

When I leave this frail existence—

When I lay this mortal by,

Father, mother, may I meet you

In your royal court on high?

Then, at length, when I’ve completed

All you sent me forth to do,

With your mutual approbation

Let me come and dwell with you.

That cherished poem was written by Eliza R. Snow in October 1845. She wrote it some 15 months after the death of her husband, Joseph Smith the Prophet, and just a short time after the death of her own father, Oliver Snow.

If one studies carefully the words of this sacred hymn there is as one author said, a sense of “rootedness” of a belonging elsewhere—that we are strangers here and our home is heaven. And who would know and sense this better than Eliza?

Since her marriage, Snow had lived with Sarah Cleveland, Joseph and Emma Smith, Jonathan and Elvira Cowles Holmes, Leonora Snow Leavitt Morley, and Stephen and Hannah Markham. Her marriage was a secret, and wherever she lived in Nauvoo, Snow was always a guest. She composed the poem while living in the Markhams’ attic, where she moved on April 14, 1844, in a room where the ceiling was “so low that she could almost reach the rafters as she lay in bed.”

Sometimes it is in the moments of our greatest need and deepest yearnings that the greatest truths are revealed.

Source: https://www.churchhistorianspress.org/the-first-fifty-years-of-relief-society/part-1/1-14?lang=eng