I try hard to be like Nephi, and I love to “liken the scriptures” unto myself (1 Nephi 19:23). There is a journey to discipleship and the “straight and narrow path” isn’t just a clever nickname. The narrowness of the way means that each of us are going to go past some common landmarks on our path to discipleship, and when we read the stories in the Bible and the Book of Mormon, we can see the prophets whom we love go through the same kinds of trials and tribulations that we do. It’s helpful to me to know that guys like Nephi had to fight some of the same battles I am fighting.
1 Nephi 2:16 is a current favorite scripture of mine because Nephi says that when he prayed, the Lord “did soften my heart…wherefore I did not rebel against him [Lehi] like unto my brothers.”
That word; soften. It tells me something about Nephi. He wasn’t all that pleased to be dropping everything he had to start slogging off into the wilderness. But once he got the confirmation from the Lord, he did what he was told. It was a small first step for him, and one that prepared him for a bigger leap of faith later. His testimony got stronger, and it’s not long after this that the Lord asks him to go back to Jerusalem.
I’ll bet he wasn’t all that keen on this idea, either, but that is when he issues his famous “I will go and do” declaration that every primary child knows by heart. He had to start with little steps and trust. Then he takes a bigger step, and trusts some more. Then just when he figures he’s got a grip on this whole “follow the Spirit” thing, he comes to a real doozey of a step.
Nephi has been obedient, and before the words of his promise to “go and do” are out of his mouth, he gets tested with a string of faith building, perseverance testing circumstances.
Go get the brass plates. Laban says no.
Go try to buy the brass plates. Laban says, I’m gonna kill you.
Go get the brass plates anyway. His brothers turn on him and say THEY are gonna kill him.
At what point do you figure Nephi wanted to look at the sky and say, “Come on! Where are we going with this? ” He had to be wondering why the Lord was putting him through so many trials.
Couldn’t the Lord have struck Laban dumb, like Korihor, and then let Nephi take the plates the first time they asked? For that matter, couldn’t the Lord have provided a way for Lehi to go get them BEFORE they even left Jerusalem?
Of course he could, but He knew that Nephi needed these little trials of faith to prepare him for the really big jumps that were coming up.
It must have been tough to go back to Laban’s house. But Nephi had learned to trust the voice of the Spirit when it came to him. “I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do” (1 Nephi 4:6). That is not a particularly comfortable position to be in, not knowing what the Lord has in mind for you to do, but running toward it anyway.
And the Spirit leads Nephi right up to the figurative edge of a big, deep, bottomless cliff that is filled with fog and says to the boy, “Jump”.
Kill Laban and take the plates.
And this is where Nephi goes from just having a testimony to being a Disciple. Instead of saying “I don’t kill anybody, no way, no how”, he trusts the Spirit that he recognizes from that day weeks or months before when his heart was softened and he got his testimony.
He’s not all that happy about it, though. “I shrunk and would that I might not slay him.”
In effect, Nephi says, “That ain’t what you taught me in Sunday School!”
The Spirit then explains to Nephi that there are circumstances that require him to do this difficult thing, one that he never thought he’d be asked to do. And the reason was the spiritual well-being of his family; their need for spiritual nourishment versus Laban’s repeated refusal to obey the commandments of God.
It had to be this way, even though Nephi didn’t like it, the Lord didn’t like it, and Laban sure as heck didn’t like it.
And it is my opinion that the reason Nephi was able to jump into the abyss and do the things that were asked of him was because he had learned to hear and trust the Lord when he was asked to do little things, like leave home. His trust grew to the point that when the Lord asked him to do one of the things that he really, really didn’t want to, his faith and trust saved him from damnation.
Now I tell this, not because I want to hold an online Sunday School class, or preach a sermon. I tell it because the Boss and I got a chance to relate to Nephi in the early part of 2005.
As I explained in Part 1, work had been going badly and I was coming to the realization that I needed a change. I had mixed feelings about it, because I was only about one small raise away from letting the Boss quit her job altogether and be a stay at home Mom, which is all she has ever wanted.
Part, but not all, of why I wanted to leave was that when I went in for my wage review that January I was told I was doing a great job, but there would be no raise for me anyway. It meant the Boss wasn't going to be able to quit, and it shook my faith in just how far ambition and want-to was going to be able to take me. It felt like a kick in the face, and combined with the other things that were going on, I started looking for a tin beak.
The more I looked at the situation, the more convinced I became that I needed a change. The more I thought about change, the more I realized that one warehouse job is pretty much like the next. The day I asked my shop buddy for a tin beak was the day it dawned on me that the only way I was ever going to get out of the mess I was in was to go back to school.
We fasted, prayed, went to the Temple, and waited for an answer. Almost immediately, the Boss had a chance at a promotion and a big time raise. We prayed about that, and the Spirit led us right up to the edge of a big, deep, bottomless cliff that was filled with fog and says to us, “Jump”.
Let the Boss take the promotion and support the family, while you go back to school.
And our response? “That ain’t what you taught us in Sunday School!”
Just like Nephi, though, we got an explanation. The reason was the spiritual well-being of our family; our need for the spiritual and temporal nourishment that can only be provided by a full time mom versus the impossibility of this blessing coming to pass as long as I was minus a college degree. It had to be this way for me to get one, even though I didn’t like it, the Lord didn’t like it, and the Boss sure as heck didn’t like it.
To my mind, it was a whole lot like getting asked to slay Laban. In fact, “Slaying Laban” was nearly the title of this blog, but I didn’t think anyone would get the joke. Here was the Lord asking us (and in particular, the Boss) to do the one thing we absolutely, positively did not want to do.
Who knew the consequences of 1997 would come back to bite me nearly a decade down the road? (I mean other than my Father, Father-in-law, and pretty much every other responsible adult who knew me then?)
Just like Nephi, we weren’t all that happy to drop all that we had to go slogging off into an unknown wilderness just because the Lord said so. But we did what we had learned to do when the leap of faith wasn’t quite so steep.
We jumped.
I quit.
Surely, underneath all this fog, the Lord had provided a parachute, a trampoline, a big splashdown pool…something. Maybe it was going to be like Indiana Jones, and we’d step down onto a camouflaged pathway a foot and a half below the edge.
Yeah.
Riiighhhtt!
Next up: Part 3 Are You a Tank?
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