I gave this talk earlier this year, after spending a year in what felt like an inefficient and confusing place. I hope that it can provide a comfort to anyone frustrated with life's inefficiencies as it has for me.
Changing gears for a moment: the story of 1 Nephi has always been a strong example for me of a story that God guided. This family had to flee for their lives and wander for almost a decade in the wilderness to get where they needed to go, but along the way they experienced numerous moments of miraculous guidance, including a compass that appeared outside their tent one day and gave clear instruction on how to continue on their journey. In hindsight, it seems God must have guided that journey in full.
It is with these two seemingly unrelated pieces of understanding that I entered my most recent reading of 1 Nephi: one, that I love, and therefore God must love, efficiency, and two, that Nephi was guided by God throughout his life.
But let’s review how Nephi’s story actually goes down.
First, God commands Lehi to take his family, leave their home, and head into the wilderness. Nephi later describes this departure this way: (1 Nephi 2:4) “And it came to pass that he departed into the wilderness. And he left his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things, and took nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents.”
Nephi doesn’t directly say that his father was sad about this, but I am struck by the thoroughness of that list. (1 Nephi 2:4) “And he left his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things, and took nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents.” This could not have been easy for any of them, but they did what the Lord said.
Three days later, they make camp. I imagine that at this point that they are all emotionally and physically exhausted. For Laman and Lemuel, this manifests in murmuring. For Nephi, it manifests in desperate prayer. It’s not so clear what Sam is feeling, but he is humble enough to rely on the combined words of his father and brother, and continues without complaint.
In this place of only semi-stability, 3 days walking distance from Jerusalem, Lehi says, “Behold I have dreamed a dream, in the which the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brethren shall return to Jerusalem. For behold, Laban hath the record of the Jews and also a genealogy
of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass. Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brothers should go unto the house of Laban, and seek the records, and bring them down hither into the wilderness.” (1 Nephi 3:2-4). Wow – this to me is hard to hear. They’ve been walking for 3 days! They just left their home and all of their belongings behind, thinking they would never see them again. And now they have to go back. Nephi’s exhaustion again manifests in determination, as he says: (1 Nephi 3:7) “I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”
So the brothers gather together and off they go, likely relying on a pep talk from Nephi that the Lord will prepare a way. So they send Laman in to Laban’s house with a kind request, “Would it be okay if we took those plates? They’ve got our family history on them.” Moments later, running for his life, Laman returns. They didn’t get the plates, and they had journeyed for 3 days backwards to try. Nephi remembers that at this point they “began to be exceedingly sorrowful,” and that his brothers were ready to head back to their camp in the wilderness.
Unwilling to give up, Nephi pushes them to try again. This time, they realize that all of the gold and silver they left behind is still available to them, and they can use it to barter for the plates. Of course, we know that this failed too, and now Laban’s armed guards were out to get all of them. Where the first failed attempt lead to sorrow, the second led to fury. Laman and Lemuel were so full of disappointment, confusion, rage, and exhaustion that the best solution they could come up with was to try to beat Nephi with a rod.
Nephi, meanwhile, decides to give this one more shot. He leaves his brothers hiding in a cave outside of the city, and just starts walking towards Laban. He explains: “I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” (1 Nephi 4:6) Finally, it works. The boys take the plates and start on their multi-day journey back to camp, where their mother has been worried sick because what she expected to be a 1-week retrieval journey has turned into much more than that, and she thinks they must have died.
Fortunately, the family is all together at this point, and Nephi bears testimony of the plates: “And we had obtained the records which the Lord had commanded us, and searched them and found that they were desirable; yea, even of great worth unto us, insomuch that we could preserve the commandments of the Lord unto our children. Wherefore, it was wisdom in the Lord that we should carry them with us, as we journeyed in the land of promise.” (1 Nephi 5:21-22).
And yet, almost as soon as the brothers got back to their parents, scriptures in hand and ready to hit the road,, Lehi hears from God once more. Nephi explains “it came to pass that the Lord spake unto him again, saying that it was not meet for him, Lehi, that he should take his family into the wilderness alone; but that his sons should take daughters to wife, that they might raise up seed unto the Lord in the land of promise. And it came to pass that the Lord commanded him that I, Nephi, and my brethren, should again return unto the land of Jerusalem, and bring down Ishmael and his family into the wilderness.” (1 Nephi 7:1-2)
Oh man, the inefficiency is causing some physical pain for me at this point in the story. For the sake of comparison, let’s imagine what I like to call the drive-through version of 1 Nephi. I imagine it like this: God commands Lehi and his family to leave Jerusalem, and as they are leaving, he adds that they need two things: scriptures and wives. Lehi sends two of his sons into Laban’s house for the plates at the perfect time when all of the guards are in a drunken stupor, and sends the other two to swing by Ishmael’s house to ask Ishmael for his daughters’ hands in marriage. The whole group gathers outside the walls of Jerusalem a few hours later, and off they go.
Doesn’t that version feel more efficient? And isn’t it clear that God could have pulled that version off if he had wanted to? So at this point I am left with the clear realization that the story of Lehi’s family is not only led by God, but was also totally inefficient. It took a long time for them to get their journey off the ground, and they went on to wander for years through broken-bow hunger and storms on the sea. The story is jam-packed with inefficiency.
There’s good news in all of this for those of us who get to read their story, though. We can use this story as a way of understanding why what we see as inefficiency might be the best way for God to accomplish his purposes, and we can take specific learnings from it about how we might handle our own winding paths and setbacks. I’d like to highlight 3 key strategies that I learned from this most-recent reading of 1 Nephi.
The first is fairly straightforward: Recognize that inefficiency happens. I think we can all look back with hindsight and see that Lehi was being guided by the Lord, but the guidance he received came line upon line. He didn’t know when they left Jerusalem that they would need to come back for the plates, nor for Ishmael’s family. God guided him, but only one step at a time, and in a way that made for a much longer story than my drive-through version.
Similarly, we will all find moments in our lives where we look back and think we could have done things faster if only we had realized everything we would eventually know sooner. Andy and I often joke about this, because we were in the same ward for 4 years before we really spoke to one another, but then once we did, we were married less than a year later. If only we had known, we joke, we both could have saved time and energy and money spent on dates with other people. But we also feel strongly that those years prepared us for each other. However inefficient it might seem, we needed that time. Looking back, I see that our story started before we even realized it started, because all of our years apart were critical precursors to our years together. This in mind, I must acknowledge that sometimes what looks like inefficiency is actually the best path to success.
The second strategy that I learn from Nephi is to trust the overall trend of God’s goodness. I see this most clearly in the story of Nephi’s broken bow. At this point in their journey, the family has the Liahona, which Nephi describes as “leading [them] to the more fertile parts of the wilderness.” Thanks to this, they are finding much success in hunting... until Nephi breaks his bow. Suddenly, they stop being able to find food. Not long later, almost everyone in the group is both physically exhausted and extremely hungry, and on top of that, they’re scared that they will never find a way to stop being hungry again. Nephi says “they did suffer much for the want of food,” and adds that even his father “began to murmur against the Lord his God” and that they were all “exceedingly sorrowful” (16:19-20).
Knowing how I react to hunger on an average Tuesday when dinner is a couple of hours later than expected, I can really resonate with Nephi’s family here. They have given so much to this journey, they are exhausted, and now they are scared it’s all for naught and they’re about to starve. So how does Nephi rise above this fear and hold on to faith? I think he saw in the moment, as we can see in hindsight, that this wasn’t the end of their story. He knew that God had led them out of Jerusalem, sent them back to get scriptures for their posterity, and then sent them back for wives so that they could have posterity, and then led them for years towards the promised land. Would God do all of that, just to let this little family die of hunger due to a broken bow? I don’t think so.
Similarly, in our own lives, we can step back and see the overall path that God is guiding each of us on. We can see that he is leading us to good things, good work, good people, good faith. This overall trend can then serve as a reminder that even in the moments that seem to take us backwards, God is actually carrying us forwards. He will help us through the hard times. We might get hungry, but we don’t have to give up and starve.
The third strategy I took away for handling inefficiencies and setbacks is to develop my own testimony by going directly to the source. Nephi consistently goes to the Lord to humbly ask for more knowledge, where Laman and Lemuel, in the same situation, say that the Lord hasn’t explained enough to them for them to know whether the Gospel is true. It is clear throughout the story that these two opposing attitudes make a world of difference in these brothers’ lives. Nephi works to build his own testimony consistently, so that when the time comes and he needs to rely on it, he can. Laman and Lemuel, meanwhile, listen passively to Lehi and Nephi, sort of ignore an angel, and claim that it is the Lord’s fault that “the Lord maketh no such thing known unto us” (15:9). Clearly, it is our responsibility to study the scriptures and pray to know the truth!
In closing, I’d like to bear my testimony that this life is going to be inefficient, winding, and full of setbacks. But because of that, and more importantly, it can be a time of strengthened faith and miracles, if only we choose to make it such. In Nephi’s words: “the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.” (1:20). If it is by faith that we are chosen, then faith is our only requirement. I believe that the Lord can help us, and will help us, as we continue to take action and look towards him.
