The First Vision

In response to President Nelson’s recent invitation to prepare for the next general conference, one of the questions I’ve been asking myself is this: What does the First Vision mean to me?  I remember years ago as I was a 19-year-old preparing to depart on my mission, I was driving in the car pondering why it was that I was leaving for two years to preach the gospel in a foreign land.  The feeling that overwhelmed me was that the answer was simply that I knew—I knew that God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ had visited the boy prophet Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove and because I knew that, I had to go and declare it where the Lord called me too.  And what I knew then I know now still too—the Spirit bears witness to us that these words are true: “Wherefore, I the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the earth, called upon my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., and spake unto him from heaven, and gave him commandments” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:17).    

My testimony of that event and the Prophet Joseph Smith only increased on my mission as I sought to declare it to others and faced surprising opposition in many forms.  I referred to them as the “famous interruptions” in my mission journal—if you want to invoke a car to loudly pass on the street or the phone to ring in a home or a child to start crying, just bear testimony about Joseph Smith and the First Vision and you’ve got a really good chance of that happening.  One time in particular we were teaching a lady about Joseph Smith in her home and her young child in another part of the room who was certainly not paying any attention started saying out of nowhere, “Ce n’est pas vrai, ce n’est pas vrai!” (“It’s not true, it’s not true!”)  The child didn’t even seem to be addressing it at us but it was enough to interrupt our testimony of the prophet Joseph Smith.  Over and over again I came to the realization that there is an unseen adversary who does not want us to talk about the prophet of this dispensation whom the Lord called and certainly not the First Vision in which he failed to stop the light from coming.  Indeed, Joseph proved to be “a disturber and an annoyer of his kingdom” and we are too when we bear testimony of the reality of the glorious First Vision that brough so much light to the world (JSH 1:20).

               For me one of the messages of the First Vision is that if we seek the Lord with all our hearts, He will answer.  And the two most important ways that we seek Him daily, prayer and the scriptures, are exactly what Joseph used to reach out to the Lord.  He not only read the Bible but he pondered it deeply and allowed its words to penetrate his heart; he wrote this of the passage in James directing him to pray: “Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again” (JSH 1:12).  He studied the word of the Lord and then sought to follow its counsel, going into the woods to pray.  And once there he did not just say a quick halfhearted prayer and give up when the answer didn’t come right away.  Rather, he wrote that when he was overcome with darkness, he was “exerting all my powers to call upon God” until finally the light came (JSH 1:16).  This was how the Restoration got started—soul-filled seeking in the scriptures and unwavering persistence in prayer, and that’s the example for us to follow.  Joseph’s experience shows us that God will answer and invites us to seek the Lord ourselves in the words of holy writ and fervent prayer.