The following is the text to a series of videos I produced to expand upon the meaning of First Nephi 1:1.
25. Brick Walls
Getting past the brick walls littering your life.
View the Video (6:13)
Ever meet a brick wall? I mean, not one you can walk around, tunnel under or climb over, but a real barrier to your forward progress? One where you no choice but to stand there staring at it or to just walk away?
Nephi faced many brick walls, more than most of us: Murderous leaders, neighbors and brothers. Impossible tasks. Impassable deserts. Starvation. Doubt, fear, resentment, weariness. Despair at his own continuing failures. What did he do with them?
Let’s see what you can do to get beyond your own brick walls.
The first verse in First Nephi has two parts, both giving a master class in motivation, each marked by the word “therefore”.
The first occurrence models achievements when things are just given to us. “I had good parents, therefore they taught me.” He didn’t have to do anything to merit their teaching; they were goodly parents, so they did it. They taught him life skills, languages, business skills, management principles, and people skills. They gave him or he earned money, food, respect, and a pretty good destiny. They taught him how to get through life. From all accounts, he did well with them.
This is extrinsic motivation. He achieved things because people gave him stuff. Those outside influences pushed him forward.
The second occurrence of the word “therefore” personalized Nephi’s motivational experience. “I went through tough times but was highly favored of the Lord and gained a great knowledge of His goodness and mysteries; therefore I made a record.” This is a model of intrinsic motivation. Apparently kicked off by his parents’ teachings, these blessings came to him because he sought for them. He was motivated. He wanted to achieve. Something inside him accepted the possibility of a higher power, humbled him to the point where he could ask for assurances enough to receive them and powered him to move forward through very trying times to attain rare knowledge.
Because of his motivation, the Lord trusted him to do impossible things, like seeing angels, hearing the voice of God clear enough to master the practical things we mentioned before, to cross oceans, found civilizations, and speak for God. The results were world-changing across millennia.
But the most important thing he did was to make his record. Although it sounds trivial, he wasn’t just jotting notes in some throwaway diary. Under inspiration of God, he was creating scripture, words of complexity, depth and poetical majesty that have eternal consequences, real power to reach into hearts across the globe and change lives. He wrote words that fulfilled prophecy and are even now preparing the world for the second coming of the Savior. To meet such a task, he had to go through all he did.
Brick walls exist to show how badly we want something. Said another way, they exist to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. Nephi found that he couldn’t get past the brick walls of his afflictions alone. He had to learn to rely on God. Time after time, his response to life-ending challenges was to ask his Father in Heaven, in faith, for help. Each time, God heard, listened, and crushed those walls.
The promise is identical for you. You have hit many barriers in your life: heartache, disappointment, illness, age, birth, prejudice, ignorance, impatience, unmet expectations, sin, guilt, the actions of others, their indifference, their hate. You will hit many more. They are part of life.
The point to barriers is not that they exist but that they provide opportunities for you to reassess yourself, your motivations and your methods. They are neither good nor bad; they exist to help you decide whether or not you want to get past them. The promise is that, if you decide to, when you partner with others and especially with God, you can. It will take creativity, work, and will, but each wall you pass strengthens you to meet every other one in your way. And you change lives as you do.
Next time, we will discuss what this Book of Mormon he was writing is really all about.
26. Telling Stories
Getting your life story right, owning the words, and fashioning it after God’s life.
View the Video (5:41)
“I make a record.” This phrase introduces what the Book of Mormon is all about: Telling stories. It paints Nephi as an author relaying an epic adventure, one that starts with a small desert family and ends a thousand years later, spanning the globe and including a cast of millions. It begins with a peaceful, prosperous family being driven from their home for their beliefs. They overcome impossible odds, hike deserts, span oceans, found nations in exotic lands, overcome internecine wars and natural disasters, and sacrifice all they have to follow supernatural guides and achieve eternal joy, all the time while speaking directly to their future kin.
And it all starts here, with Nephi flatly stating his mission: To tell this story. And he wants you to do the same. Why? Let’s take a look.
Writing must have been crucial to Nephi. He put a great deal of effort into it. With his personal knowledge of the goodness and mysteries of God, Nephi labored to help his audience understand and benefit from that knowledge. Writing allowed him to summarize, analyze, and teach from his experiences, good and bad. The process taught him that God had given him these experiences not only for his personal growth, not only to prepare him to build that sprawling, Christ-centered civilization, but also so that he would have something to say to his people and to a global audience thousands of years into his future: Us.
So how does this relate to you? The Lord values your journey as much as anyone else’s. Recording what happens to you not only tells your story, it testifies, like Nephi, of His relationship to you. Those discovering your history will see the impact God had in your life and will be impacted by it. Whether you bear fervent testimony of His reality or dismiss Him, your words will form another part of the infinite mosaic of His love and care for us, showing how and why He sacrificed His son for you. They will accompany us as we stand before Him at the judgement day, testifying to us and everyone else that every event in this life was filled with mercy and designed for our benefit, and any reward for our responses to those efforts, whether we recognized them or not, would be just. We will praise Him for His fairness and equity.
The process will be fair even for those who keep no record, because His works are written in our hearts. Every event affects us in some way, as they were designed to, forming the creative motes that, moment by moment and event by event, yield who we are.
James E. Faust said, “Each one of us has been given the power to change his or her life. As part of the Lord’s great plan of happiness, we have individual agency to make decisions. We can decide to do better and to be better. In some ways all of us need to change; that is, some of us need to be more kind at home, less selfish, better listeners, and more considerate in the way we treat others. Some of us have habits that need to be changed, habits that harm us and others around us. Sometimes we may need a jolt to propel us into changing …
“I testify that through repentance and subsequent righteousness and by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, the ultimate change can come to our bodies so that they ‘may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself”
The Apostle John saw the final effects of our records, whether written on tables of stone or in our hearts: “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
My prayer is that, when we stand before God at that final day, and every day in this life, we can reflect His countenance in our lives and be fashioned like unto him.
Next we’ll discuss personalizing the journey.
27. Powered Perspective
How to recover your life’s lost stories.
View the Video (6:21)
Public figures want to control their narratives. As a prophet-warrior-king, Nephi was a kind of rock star in his day and spent a good deal of time trying to keep the record of his life and messages straight. He knew that many people would be eager to twist his exploits for their own purposes.
Nephi knew his words would form a testimony and warning to both his people and to today’s global audience. As such, keeping his message pure was important to him, so important that he alluded to it four times in his book’s opening paragraph. His phrase “I make a record of my proceedings” emphasized that his story was about him and would contain no perspective but his own.
Even so, we ended up with two versions of his story: The one he wrote, which we have been discussing, and another version told by his father, Lehi, which went missing.
Wait, what?
Let’s see what happened to Lehi’s story and also focus on the missing parts of your story, and how their loss and recovery can impact your search for happiness.
In previous episodes we touched on the value of keeping records. We also discussed the value Nephi placed on telling his own story. He had a rare life characterized by pain and a resulting great knowledge of God. He yearned to tell others about what happened to him.
His desire was understandable. Still, why did he feel such a strong need to tell his story himself? We have almost no record of Christ’s actual words in the New Testament. If Jesus didn’t need a firsthand account, why did Nephi?
For the same reason, I suppose: Multiple interpretations multiply errors. There are hundreds of versions of the Bible today and hundreds of Christian churches, yielding an almost infinite number of different interpretations of that story.
I’m adding another interpretation here, but only as commentary, not doctrine.
With such a tight desire for control, I’m sure Nephi must have wondered how his message would be translated. He was, after all, writing in ancient Egyptian. As a prophet, he may have seen Joseph Smith in the 1800’s and wondered how that unlearned 23-year-old farm boy could interpret it. The task would have seemed—well, impossible.
Nephi received assurances from God, however, that the entire Book of Mormon would be translated in its purity and would achieve the promised effect. And that is what happened. The words of each inspired author in the book were translated by one inspired translator, directed by God. That is direct revelation, the best way to preserve God’s message. It is one of the great strengths of the Book of Mormon. As such, it is another testament of Jesus Christ, backing up and nailing in proper place the Bible’s truths.
Even so, part of the story went missing. Someone stole 116 manuscript pages containing Joseph’s translation of Lehi’s history. While Joseph could have retranslated them, God told him not to; a different solution had been emplaced.
What parts of your story are missing? Your childhood, perhaps? Those parts you have forgotten or wish you could? What about those parts of your story that were stolen from you, ripped away by tragedy, abandonment, disease, abuse, or physical limitations? What about relationships, including children, that you did not have but wanted?
Two millennia before Lehi’s story was lost, Heavenly Father enabled a remarkable series of events that would restore it. The solution involved God commanding Nephi to record his own story, which included parts of Lehi’s life, forming a sort of backup. A thousand years later, God pointed out that record to another prophet and instructed him to bundle it beside Lehi’s. Although the translation of Lehi’s story was lost, Nephi’s abridgment preserved Lehi’s message. Eventually, we will again access the original.
The same holds true for you. No story is ever lost. Your story will be told according to your faith. Your destiny will be fulfilled; every promised blessing will come true. You will lack nothing that you righteously seek, no relationship, no health, no offspring, no strength. What you have lost will be restored to you.
If you are faithful, your blessings will be realized in full, far beyond anything you can now imagine, giving you joy in this life and a fullness of joy in the next.
That is God’s promise, that is His perspective, and that is what eternity is about. We will discuss this more, next time.
28. Eternity From My Hand
When viewed from eternity’s perspective, what will your life’s story look like?
View the Video (5:20)
In his book’s opening paragraph, Nephi includes the phrase “my day” three times. He knew that immersing us in his world would help us understand his perspective.
What is your world like? You live in the end times, the most coveted period in all ages of the world, when the Savior will return and cleanse the Earth, heal all wounds and wipe away all tears. Nephi detailed his amazing days. What will you write about yours? And how will your story look when viewed through the lens of eternity?
If you tell your story from your perspective, what will it contain? Births, deaths, school events, first dates, frustrations, fears, diseases, wars, failures, awards? Will it track your personal progress as you meet challenges and grow? How about that of your spouse, your children, your grandchildren, your friends? Your jobs? Your time in the service? Your time in school? Your time in church?
Will it detail your loves, your hates, your frustrations, your triumphs, your fears? Will it reveal your judgements of others and their judgments of you? How about buying a new home, taking vacations, traveling, special events with your peers and loved ones, adversities you have met and overcome?
Perhaps it will reveal your hobbies, your obsessions, your likes, or your loves. Will it include stories of you growing older, advice you wish you had taken, advise you wish you had given, advice you wish you had sent to your loved ones, advice you wish others had taken?
Will it detail your hopes for the future, your plans for retirement and old age? Will it show your pains, your sicknesses, your sacrifices? Will it tell us your regrets?
Will it contain your testimony? How about testimonials? Will it rage against the darkness, against personal and professional failings and weaknesses? Will it celebrate your strengths?
Will you write it for others, or for one certain other? Will you want it burned, memorialized or celebrated? Do you expect it to be ignored? Do you want it published?
How will you end it? With a cry, with a laugh? With tears? With rage? Will you end it with hope, with faith, with charity, with love? Will you forgive or condemn? Will you hide others’ names or billboard them over every page? Will you wish to start over, wish you had done better, or be content with what you have done? Or will you celebrate your marvelous successes? Will you have regret, or joy?
As your story closes, will it be a love story, a comedy, or a tragedy? Will it be an epic journey, a farce, a thriller or a mystery?
Consider the world-changing impacts and the lost potentials that fell from others’ choices and may fall from yours. Consider that your everyday choices are linked with God’s eternal plan for you and that you were placed here, at the greatest time in history, at the wrapping up of everything that has gone before, for a reason.
What will you do with that opportunity?
Work on taking time in your worldly struggles to take the occasional spiritual deep breath. Ask God to help you gain an eternal perspective and see yourself, life, and others the way He sees them. Partake of eternity today from His outstretched hand. Doing so will help you move more gracefully through the difficult times and empower you to harvest joy from life’s inevitable pain.
Next time, a concluding word.