Saturday, January 11, 2020

1 Nephi 4:1-3 -- On Leaving Room for Miracles

"And it came to pass that I spake unto my brethren, saying: Let us go up again unto Jerusalem, and let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; for behold he is mightier than all the earth, then why not mightier than Laban and his fifty, yea, or even than his tens of thousands?
Therefore let us go up; let us be strong like unto Moses; for he truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither, and our fathers came through, out of captivity, on dry ground, and the armies of Pharaoh did follow and were drowned in the waters of the Red Sea.
Now behold ye know that this is true; and ye also know that an angel hath spoken unto you; wherefore can ye doubt? Let us go up; the Lord is able to deliver us, even as our fathers, and to destroy Laban, even as the Egyptians."
1 Nephi 4:1-3


I think this is something that we have a hard time with too.  Laman and Lemuel were understandably reluctant to try again to talk to a man who had robbed them and tried to have them killed.  Without the commandment-from-God detail, the whole idea has now become crazy.  They tried to do as their father asked.  They tried to reason with the guy, and they tried to buy what they needed.  They did what they could, within the limits of law and sanity, right?

And so it is with us.  When we reason things out with our limited perspective, many things might seem not to make sense.  Paying tithing when we are in debt, perhaps, or loving our enemies, or commandments about marriage that seem to be discriminatory from the world's perspective.  In this case, Laman and Lemuel couldn't see into the future and know what would happen to their posterity if they failed.  And they didn't trust God to do something miraculous.

Trying to follow Nephi's example rather than Laman and Lemuel's requires a few things.  First, we have to trust God without reservation, second, we have to have faith that he can solve any problem in the way of doing his will, and third, we have to act on that trust and faith.  Going back to the tithing example, for instance, we have to trust that God has a reason for asking us to do so, no matter the circumstances of our finances.  Studying and reading more about the commandments that we are having trouble with can help, and God is more than willing to teach us as we are able to understand, but to start, we just need to believe that God knows what he is doing.  Then we have to believe that God is going to make a way for us to be able to pay our tithing.  Then we have to do it.

Not saying it is easy.  It certainly wasn't easy for Laman and Lemuel, and I'm betting it wasn't easy for Nephi either, not knowing what he would be asked to do, or how it would work out, but moving forward anyway.

Today, let's stretch our minds a little bit and leave room for miracles.  No matter what we run into in life or how impossible any of it seems, if God asks us to overcome it, we *can.*  Let's practice on little things, and when we see the hand of God working in our lives, perhaps our faith will be strengthened enough that we can graduate to bigger things, eventually becoming impossibly perfect over time, hand-in-hand with God.

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