Strengthen and Nourish

I’ve often turned to verses 3 and 13 in 1 Nephi 17 to read again the great promises of the Lord to those who will keep His commandments.  In verse 3 we read the promise that the Lord will strengthen us as we strive to live as He asks: “And if it so be that the children of men keep the commandments of God he doth nourish them, and strengthen them, and provide means whereby they can accomplish the thing which he has commanded them.”  Verse 13 gives us a more global promise about how the Lord will ensure that He takes the faithful to where He ultimately wants us to end up: “And I will also be your light in the wilderness; and I will prepare the way before you, if it so be that ye shall keep my commandments; wherefore, inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall be led towards the promised land.”  I love that promise.  We may have to symbolically pass through the desert for eight years like Nephi’s family, but if we keep the commandments of the Lord He will lead us to our promised land.  

                I remember a specific instance as a missionary sharing these scriptures with a man from the impoverished country of Chad.  He was in Europe seeking a better life, and while I don’t know remember much about the details of his situation I remember the feeling that he had lived a terribly difficult life.  We went to his “home” which was an abandoned building he was squatting in with electric wires hanging from the ceiling.  We read together in the Book of Mormon and I remember feeling the power of these words from 1 Nephi 17 as we shared them with him.  There was really nothing we could offer him; we couldn’t help him with his difficulties back home or his financial troubles, and we knew that the possibility of continuing to teach him long-term was slim given his transient state.  But we could offer him the promises of the Lord: if he could find a way to keep the commandments of God and seek to live as God wanted him to, then the Lord would “nourish him, and strengthen him” and would “be his light in the wilderness.”  I have to think that as Nephi wrote those words in 1 Nephi 17 decades after the experience he thought to himself, “How did we ever do it?  How did we endure such insurmountable hardship in the desert for eight years?  How did we survive the terrible dangers that could have stopped us?”  But in pondering these questions the Spirit surely testified to him again of just how much the Lord had strengthened and supported and guided them.  We know there must have been some kind of experience like that because the Lord told him, “After ye have arrived in the promised land, ye shall know that I, the Lord, am God; and that I, the Lord, did deliver you from destruction; yea, that I did bring you out of the land of Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 17:14).  It is harder to see the Lord’s hand in our life in the moments of difficulties than when we can sit back and see later on from another perspective how much the Lord has guided our path.  And of course some will never see it—Laman and Lemuel saw only trials and hardship as they reflected on their time in the wilderness (see 1 Nephi 17:20).  We must have “eyes to see” and a “heart to perceive” in order to recognize how great things the Lord has done for us (Deut. 29:4).