Trust your journey - and love

So I felt like I had permission to go back to the Book of Mormon today. I haven't always felt like this, but since I started this reading and writing thing I just find the Book of Mormon so much more uplifting. My coach Makay says it comes and goes - I guess I'm too new in the game for that to have happened yet to me.

Moroni will forever have my respect. Great man, born in what the rest of us might conclude to be the wrong time. Greatness surrounded by poison sludge. He has no reason to live that he can decipher, but he doesn't want to die. He waits for God to make that decision for him, but it doesn't happen. He ends what he thinks will be the Book of Mormon as a whole when he ends with Ether, who he quotes as saying "Whether the Lord will that I be translated, or that I suffer the will of the Lord in the flesh, it mattereth not...".

But it has to have been a life filled with boredom, loneliness and fear - improved only by the bouyancy that the Lord may have gifted him. He certainly identified with Ether - he is Ether, just in another century. It's a poetic way to go out.

But he doesn't die. There he is, still there. Ether was saved to be a testament to the Nephites what happened to his people. Moroni was saved I believe because he had to write more. To me, some of the greatest chapters in the book of Mormon happen in this last book, after Moroni thought his life and meaningfulness were over. This might be like the lives of so many of us. Joseph Smith in Carthage jail mourned deeply and to me, poetically about the horrible state of affairs he experienced. And in that pitiful state, he received some of the greatest chapters in the D&C.

Sometimes we think we're doing all the right things and the Lord has just left us - forgotten. And that's the time for faith. He may need us to go through that well, so we can experience and become the greatness he has in mind for us.

Just gotta mention that after a life of killing and having his life threatened by lamanites, he didn't hate them. He felt love. In modern wars that I've been somewhat involved with, the enemy is generally hated. This makes it easier to do one's job and kill them if you're a soldier. It happened in Japan and Germany, in Vietnam and in the middle east. To a soldier, they need to die just to make the world right. Not to a soldier named Moroni. In Moroni 1:4 he said he's writing more not necessarily for our generation, but "that perhaps they may be of worth unto my brethren, the Lamanites".

That's a love and a greatness that I can only attempt to perceive.

I had intended to write about what I saw in chapter 7 - that's another treasure chest. But mixing too many subjects just doesn't feel right.

May we trust in the Lord whether our lives are up or down. If we are truly his disciples, then we are where and how He needs us to be. It may or may not be comfortable, but it will be perfect for us at that moment. We can fight against our conditions, or learn and grow from them. May we choose the latter.