Being a parent is hard. I am really bad at it. Trust me on
that. It’s hard to imagine that I knew what I was facing before I came to
earth, eager to bear children and raise them. I wonder whether I knew it would
be so hard and that I would face so much failure.
One of my favorite stories is the dramatic “rescue” of Alma
and the sons of Mosiah. They were young men with honorable parents who would
have been great teachers. These young men would have known about God and the
Plan of Salvation. They would have had Primary or whatever the equivalent in
their time to expand on the things their parents taught them. And still they
rebelled. Just like Laman and Lemuel, who had the very same honorable parents
that raised Nephi and Sam. Believe me, I do not place myself in the same
category as Alma the Elder and his wife or Mosiah and his wife or Lehi and
Sariah. I wish!
I have had the pleasure of teaching two Sunday School
classes a few years apart where the subject was the Book of Mormon. Add to that
the seminary class I took years ago as well as a couple of BYU religion classes
all about the Book of Mormon. It is one of my favorite subjects! The people are
fascinating and leap from the pages. Their lives were hard, and they lived
passionately, some for good and others for not so good.
Back to Alma the Younger. I’d always assumed that because
God knew that Alma and the sons of Mosiah would be great missionaries, he
pulled them off their path of destruction and redirected them, and they
delivered! They probably started out as wild young men who liked to party.
Oftentimes getting involved in stuff like that so fully draws the Spirit from
you that you lose the light you might have once had. I think Elder Maxwell
called it “Spiritual Anesthesia.” Then they went further and even started
drawing people away from the church. The Book of Mormon described their
behavior as “rebelling against God.” Scary, heady stuff!
That is when the Angel of the Lord came and spoke to these
five young men “with a voice of thunder, which caused the earth to shake upon
which they stood.” Not everyone listens, believe it or not, when an angel
appears, but this one sure got these guys’ attention!
The little part that had earlier escaped my notice really
became clear to me this time. The angel, after berating the young men for their
behavior, matter-of-factly told them “Alma, who is they father; for he has
prayed with much faith concerning thee that thou mightest be brought to the
knowledge of the truth; therefore, for
this purpose have I come to convince thee of the power and authority of God,
that the prayers of his servants might be answered according to their faith,” italics
my own.
Wait, what? So first, not everyone who behaves as these guys
did gets heavenly intervention; second, God sent the angel not to save them but
because of the faith and prayers of parents and loved ones. Oh, and He only
does things like that when they further His work. And anyone who has studied
the missionary efforts of these young men will agree that they were very
instrumental in furthering His work. Why was it again that we don’t do a better
job of listening to the Lord?
Being a parent is hard. I am really bad at it. And I’m not
so great at prayer, but I happen to have been working on that very thing these
past few months. That, I can do. And I will. Because I do have faith that the
Lord will bless my children and will help strengthen them in the areas where I
was weak in my parenting. That brings me great comfort. Who wants their
children to suffer because they are bad parents?
