More from A Mormon Great Grandma
I always wanted to serve a mission for my church. I even had my own plan worked out! I thought if I could just get people to scan through The Book of Mormon and read some pages that I would mark they would say “Wow, I need to find out more about this.” The Book of Mormon contains a complicated historical record of three Israelite civilizations that lived on the American continent but what impresses me is not so much the history but what is recorded of the lives and teachings of their prophets and other leaders, and of the Savior. I would ask them to read:
2 Nephi chapter 2
Mosiah chapter 2 verses 5-13
Moroni chapter 7 verses 12-19
Moroni chapter 10 verses 4-7
And some say that Joseph Smith or one of his contemporaries wrote this!
I know that Joseph Smith’s story is quite fantastic but if you believe the New Testament it should seem reasonable that the Savior would be involved if His church was to be restored. Joseph Smith was a very young man, uneducated, untraveled, and living in a frontier community when he translated the Book of Mormon and organized the church. His contemporaries at that time were also mostly uneducated and unsophisticated. Conditions were chaotic, the church was persecuted, members fell away, Joseph Smith was martyred but the church survived and continues to grow. All of this is recorded in our histories, in the writings of those early church leaders and the journals of members. It seems impossible to me that under such conditions the church could have survived and thrived as it has without the direction of the Lord. I believe with all my heart that Joseph Smith was what he professed to be, that the book of Mormon was translated from plates that were given to him by an angel, that it is another testament of Jesus Christ just as we professes it to be, and that this is a divinely restored church. It seems to me that it deserves to be investigated.