Nephi's Focus

I’m impressed by what Nephi did not write in his account in the Book of Mormon.  Despite the incredible hardships that he went through, he chose not to focus on those.  We learn in 1 Nephi 17:4 that he spent 8 years in the wilderness, which was a harsh desert.  Laman and Lemuel complained about the difficulty of the journey saying that it would have been “better that they had died before they came out of Jerusalem than to have suffered these afflictions” (1 Nephi 17:20).  To them their suffering was so bad that it was worse than death, and yet Nephi simply said that the Lord “did provide means for us while we did sojourn in the wilderness” (1 Nephi 17:3).  Nephi would later spend more than a dozen chapters simply recording the words of Isaiah, and yet all we get about the eight years that they spent in the wilderness are four verses, mostly describing the blessings of the Lord.  If someone in our day was stuck for eight years in the Arabian desert and lived to tell about it, they would quickly put together a 1000 page biography outlining their suffering to the minutest detail and immediately seek the praise of the world.  But, unlike our society today, Nephi’s goal was not that we learn about him and praise him for his heroic achievements: “For the fulness of mine intent is that I may persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved” (1 Nephi 6:4).  He gave this instruction about those who would write on the plates after him: “I shall give commandment unto my seed, that they shall not occupy these plates with things that are not of worth unto the children of men” (1 Nephi 6:6).  He focused his writing on the things of the Lord and had no other motivation for the record than to bring souls unto Christ.  In his last chapter he wrote, “I, Nephi, have written what I have written, and I esteem it as of great worth, and especially unto my people” (2 Nephi 33:3).  I think Nephi’s writings as a whole invite us to ask the question, do you value the things of the Spirit more than the distractions of men?  Nephi could have surely told us countless more stories about the difficulties of his life, the sufferings on his journey, and the awful treatment he received at the hands of Laman and Lemuel.  But he sought “the welfare of Zion” and not the “praise of the world,” and he left us instead powerful scriptures meant to help bring us unto salvation (2 Nephi 26:29).