I Think You Can Do This

In Ether 2, the Brother of Jared approaches God after building boats according to the Lord’s exacting instructions, but he has noticed two problems: Problem 1: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time breathing. Problem 2: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time seeing.

God meets him at the top of the mountain tells him to go ahead and cut holes in the top and bottom of the boat that can be very tightly stoppered when the sea is calm, and that way they can get fresh air. (This solution terrifies me, but the Brother of Jared seems to have been chill with it.) Jesus didn’t tell him what to do about the light, though, so after making the tightly stoppered holes, the Brother of Jared hikes back up the mountain to say, “And about the light?”

“What do you think?” God says.

I think, had I been the Brother of Jared, I may have been annoyed by this. I might have thought, “I don’t want to have to keep climbing this mountain when you can just tell me the answer already.”

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Holiness Will Come

It may be that we’re not supposed to have favorite prophets, but I do. Isaiah speaks to me, Moses is my dude, but Alma the younger is probably the one I want to talk to most.

After a youth of moral experimentation and rebellion, Alma had one of those (literally) earth-shaking encounters with divinity. God moves in mysterious ways, like, in Alma’s case, a temporary coma in which he came to know mercy. Afterward, he became a missionary. In one particularly wicked city, he encountered Amulek, a lapsed man of God, who fed him and began preaching with him.

If you’re familiar with scripture (this one or others), then it won’t surprise you that this didn’t go over well. All the people who came to know God through Alma and Amulek’s teachings were eventually cast out or burned alive. It was horrendous in ways that the sparse details of the scripture allow us to skip over—the screams and the smell of burning flesh of people you know and love, the flames lit by your neighbors. This is the kind of thing that leaves soul scars, the the kind of thing that wakes you up years later, sweating and shaking.

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