Captain Moroni

When I read about Captain Moroni, I can’t help but be in awe. He was such an incredible man. There are a couple instances that really impress me about him. One is in Alma 46: 12 where he creates the title of liberty, which says, “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.” He is a guy who has his priorities straight. He knows what is important to him. You can tell that he cares about God and he cares about his family. Another place is when he is writing a letter to Ammoron regarding Ammoron’s refusal to exchange prisoners on his terms. In Alma 54: 12 he says, “And behold, if ye do not this, I will come against you with my armies; yea, even I will arm my women and my children, and I will come against you and I will follow you even into your own land, which is the land of our first inheritance; yea, and it shall be blood for blood, yea, life for life; and I will give you battle even until you are destroyed from off the face of the earth.” He knows what he wants, he doesn’t give up, and he doesn’t let evil win. It is clear that he is on the Lord’s side. The strength and courage of this man is especially evident in Alma 48: 17, where it says, “Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men.” I think he is someone that we could all afford to be a little more like. 

The Atonement

In Alma 36 Alma tells his son Helaman about his repentance and conversion to the gospel. I think this story shows Alma as the epitome of the healing powers that the Atonement can bring. He wasn’t just on the edge of good and bad, he was farther away from God than I think most people ever come close to.  And yet, he repented and turned his life around. He moved on from his mistakes and moved the Lord’s work along. Alma’s life teaches us that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, or what you’ve done, the Atonement works for you. No exceptions. President David O. McKay once said that “The purpose of the gospel is to make bad men good and good men better.” Alma shows that it does just that. In Luke 5: 31-32, Christ says, “They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance." When we mess up, that is when we need Christ the most, not when we should feel like we aren’t worthy to go to him. He wants us to be happy. He wants us to reach our full potential and return to him. And more than anything he wants to help us with it. We are a fallen and sinful people so we need Christ, we literally cannot do it without him. Just like he helped to change Alma, he will help to change us. If we will turn our lives over to Christ he will help to mold us into the person we’re meant to become.

"Ye Shall One Day Rest"

This week in the Book of Mormon I read Alma 34:41 and it really stood out to me. It says, "But that ye have patience, and bear with those afflictions, with a firm hope that ye shall one day rest from all your afflictions." When I see something that says you need to have patience I am quickly reminded of the fact that I have very little. I usually think of patience in terms of being patient with people, but this scripture made me look at it in a different way. I think it is so easy to become frustrated with the situations that we are in, easy to think that everything is going wrong and nothing will ever go right. In the midst of a trial it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This scripture is both empowering and comforting to me. It reminds me that I need to keep working my hardest in this crazy thing called life, but that there is such an incredible reward at the end. Life is hard. There are so many trials and heartaches and distractions that can keep us from seeing that all these things are temporary, that there is an end to them. But as this scripture says, we need to have a firm, unshakable hope that one day we will no longer suffer, that one day all of our pains will go away. If we will patiently bear our afflictions we receive eternal life, and there is no greater blessing that we could receive. After all, “he never said it would be easy, he only said it would be worth it” (Anonymous).