Tiberias is layered, mortared, bricked and blocked unevenly along the rocky shores of the Sea of Galilee. Here, in June of 1996, President Gordon B. Hinckley, accompanied by his wife, Marjorie, and their five children and spouses, on personal time and expense, toured the Holy Land. Stepping along the dusty paths seemed to erase two millennia and deepen a personal acquaintance with Jesus of Nazareth.

In Nazareth, they sat behind a rough wooden door in the hilltop city where the carpenter learned His trade.

As gentle waves cradled their small boat on the Sea of Galilee, the family read of fishermen, of storms and walking on the water. And the Hinckleys hiked a short trail through parched grass to the traditional site of the Mount of Beatitudes.

Told the Holy Land had been taken some 20-25 times by pitiless conquerors, President Hinckley later observed, "As I think about all of that bloody and terrible history of human suffering.... What a revolutionary thing it was to (teach to) do good to them that hate you."

Through visits to Megiddo, Cana, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and outlying Shepherds fields, President Hinckley noted the Savior's condescension: "He who had been Jehovah, Creator of the earth, condescended to come to mortal life in a manger in the humblest of circumstances."

After solemn, private moments in the Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha in Jerusalem, the family visited the Garden Tomb, the site of the Resurrection. Seated on a bench facing this empty stone room, their eyes and minds were filled with images and moments of the Savior's life in the Holy Land — His birth, His sermons, His miracles, His suffering in Gethsemane, the brutality of Caiaphas and the Romans, and His death while hanging on that cross — there at the tomb it all came together, so close, so real, so overwhelming. As they read verses about His resurrection, Sister Hinckley began quietly sobbing, then her husband, and the children in turn. They felt of His majestic love and rejoiced in His triumph over death.

"It was the redemption which He worked out in the Garden of Gethsemane and upon the cross of Calvary which made His gift immortal, universal, and everlasting," said President Hinckley, reflecting on this visit at a later occasion. "Because of Him all men will be raised from the grave." — John L. Hart