Yet Willing to Suffer More

Continuing my thoughts from yesterday about the pioneer Amanda Smith, another powerful story of a faithful mother from the time of the expulsion from Missouri was that of Emma, Joseph’s wife.  With the prophet in jail, she had four young children to care for by herself, ranging from eight years old to seven months old in February 1839.  She traveled with friends in the bitter cold across Missouri until they reached the Mississippi River that was frozen over.  The book Saints records, “With Frederick and Alexander in her arms, Emma stepped out onto the ice. Little Joseph clutched one side of her skirt while Julia clung tightly to the other. All three walked carefully across the slippery path until their feet at last found the far riverbank.”  What an incredible image of a mother protecting and caring for and suffering with her children!  Once on the other side in Illinois, she wrote these incredible words back to Joseph in a letter, “I still live and am yet willing to suffer more, if it is the will of kind heaven that I should, for your sake…. No one but God knows the reflections of my mind and the feelings of my heart, when I left our house and home and almost all of everything that we possessed, excepting our little children, and took my journey out of the state of Missouri, leaving you shut up in that lonesome prison.”  She, like Amanda Smith, was a determined “mother in Israel” who persevered with her children through the severest trials.  And she was willing to suffer even more—which she did—for the latter-day work and her children. 

               These stories show why the Lord chose to use mothers as the ultimate example of His devotion to us.  Isaiah recorded, “For can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee, O house of Israel” (1 Nephi 21:15).  His determination to save His children is even greater than the commitment of a mother to her child, a commitment unparalleled anywhere else in life.  The scriptures similarly use mothers as the example par excellence of suffering—to express extreme pain the scriptures use childbirth as a comparison.  For example, Isaiah prophesied to Babylon, “they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth.”  He quoted Babylon using similar language: “Therefore are my loins filled with pain: pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth” (Isaiah 13:8, 21:3).  Jeremiah prophesied to another people: “O inhabitant of Lebanon, that makest thy nest in the cedars, how gracious shalt thou be when pangs come upon thee, the pain as of a woman in travail!” (Jeremiah 22:23)  Micah spoke of latter-day struggles to bring forth Zion using similar language: “Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail” (Micah 4:10).  The Psalmist spoke in these words, “Fear took hold upon them there, and pain, as of a woman in travail” (Psalm 48:6).  The scriptures chosen example for both devotion and suffering come from mothers—no other examples are so ubiquitous and powerful.         

            Amanda Smith gave a synopsis of her life, saying it was a “checkered scene of joy and trouble. I have drank the dregs of the cup of sorrow and affliction, as well as partaken of the blessings of an all-wise merciful God.”  That is perhaps a summary common to all devoted mothers—a life mothering children is filled with both pain and joy, intense suffering and love, tears of both anguish and happiness over her children.  I pay tribute to my devoted wife who now is in the midst of both the “joy” and “misery” Lehi spoke of in relation to children (2 Nephi 2:23).  I’ve seen her devotion in the intense struggle of a particularly painful and prolonged, natural childbirth.  And I’ve watched her subsequent faithfulness to that child and our other children over these past several years despite significant daily difficulties in caring for five little ones.  But I’ve also seen her pure joy caring for our little ones and nurturing them in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I thank God that she continues on that joyful and painful path, “yet willing to suffer more, if it is the will of kind heaven that [she] should.”