Dwelt in a tent

So I'm in 1 Nephi 2 today. I was on the trail toward researching mysteries of God, and of course I got hijacked with another subject as I was reading. The number of easter eggs in the scriptures just keeps getting bigger - this time I'd been through about 2 verses when I found this one.

I should probably provide some background to that - originally I was challenged to read the scriptures for half an hour, then write for 10 minutes. As I began writing, it turned into the opposite: read for a bit, then write for a long time. Today I felt inspired to write after about 1 minute, but then didn't want to do that because I felt the need to not rob myself the reading.

Background information done. So I ran across 1 Nephi 2:15 today: "And my father dwelt in a tent". This is not as short a verse as "Jesus wept", but it's pretty short. My first thought is why is this in the Book of Mormon in the first place, and why did it deserve its own verse? Of course he was in a tent! He's out in the middle of sand nowhere, and it's 600 BC. He has some sort of home that he left that was probably a mud castle, and that was high living to him. It's not that much of a step down, from my modern point of view, to go from a mud mansion to a tent. But it was pretty meaningful to Nephi. Why?

Because perhaps then, like now, people are measured by what they have. Society is not going to recognize greatness in a man who's homeless. If you're living in mommy's basement, nobody will hire you as a consultant.

This goes me back to an award Julie just received a few months ago. She got Doterra's highest award for some work she has done building schools in Madagascar. The only one of over 5,000,000 people to receive that award. I was brought up with her while tens of thousands of people, and the owners of the company, appreciated her work. The thought occurred to me then that whether or not she had received the award, the greatness still exists. The award didn't cause greatness, it only recognized it. And greatness usually goes unrecognized. It's still greatness whether recognized or not.

So Nephi was talking about how powerful his dad Lehi was. He wrote about how his dad talked with such power that he got his extremely wayward sons to let go of their personal poisons and listen. This is Nephi giving his dad his highest praise. Then he follows with "And he dwelt in a tent". Here is Nephi saying "Hey, my dad is one of the greatest individuals to roam the planet, and yet he looks homeless". Nobody who saw that family in the desert would have known from appearances about the greatness that they brushed past, nor the opportunities lost in travelling away from such great power.

It reminds me that greatness doesn't have a neon sign above it, pointing to the subject and saying "here's a great man". It doesn't come with a title, and riches are not guaranteed. It also reminds me that people with titles and money, who use those props to point out their greatness, are not and probably never were great. If you need to point to your title or money to prove you're a big shot, you might be an empty soul.

I believe that people who have true greatness may sometimes have titles and money, but those are gifts provided to the great to enable them to further the Lord's work. Lehi was great when he lived in his Jerusalem mud mansion with his gold and silver, and he was great while dwelling in a tent in the desert. May we all seek for true greatness.

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