Arose a Mother in Israel

Teacher. Principal. School nurse. Cook. Lunch room monitor. Ground duty. Janitor.  These are a few of the elementary school jobs that my wife has had thrust upon her recently with everyone being homeschooled.  She has done her best to keep three kids on top of a lot of school work—with materials being dished out daily from five different teachers—and three other smaller kids alive and cared for in the process.  During the past several weeks, she (along with many other moms across the country) has been forced to drop a lot of other things and focus extensively on the education of her children.  I have watched her stay up late trying to motivate my son to finally take his spelling test or my daughter to finish her Utah county report or simply scanning in work from the day to email to their teachers.  It has been an exhausting and difficult task, but, like Deborah of old, she “arose a mother in Israel” and has been doing a fantastic job despite less than stellar behavior from her pupils (Judges 5:7).  I have seen in her an ardent devotion to our kids’ well-being and success as she has seen the areas they struggle in and gone the extra mile to try to help them progress in their learning.  I pay tribute to her for her unwavering commitment to our family as we celebrate our wedding anniversary today (as best we can at home with no chance of getting out on a real date)! 

               As I have pondered the current situation and thought about what scriptures stories may be similar to what we are experiencing because of the pandemic, the Nephite war with the Gadianton robbers comes to mind.  This must certainly have been a time of great upheaval to the standard way of life of the Nephites.  They were all forced to move and congregate in a relatively small area.  The chief judge “sent a proclamation among all the people, that they should gather together their women, and their children, their flocks and their herds, and all their substance, save it were their land, unto one place” (3 Nephi 3:13).  This must have been terribly stressful to uproot so many and move them somewhere else.  Whatever kinds of normal activities that Nephite families participated in, surely those were mostly changed as they left their homes and moved into close proximity with thousands of other Nephites. If there were Nephite athletic activities those were surely canceled, family vacations to other regions were undoubtedly out of the question, and any kind of formal education that Nephite children participated in outside the home was likely over.  Their focus was survival amidst the threat of the terrible Gadianton robbers and surely it brought families together to be with each other  more frequently like the current situation has done to us today.  Despite the difficulties and incredible new challenges they surely faced, to their credit they turned their energies to that which mattered most.  Lachoneus taught them what that was: “As the Lord liveth, except ye repent of all your iniquities, and cry unto the Lord, ye will in nowise be delivered out of the hands of those Gadianton robbers” (3 Nephi 3:15-16).  Though they wouldn’t be able to continue their normal way of life for many years, they could still turn to the Lord in repentance and prayer.  And ultimately that is what saved their society as “their repentance and their humility… delivered [them] from an everlasting destruction” (3 Nephi 4:33).  Though the record doesn’t give us these details, I am sure that the faithful Nephite mothers of that time made all the difference as they taught their children to trust in the Lord despite the ominous threat that hung over them.  These righteous mothers were surely principle voices among those who “did break forth, all as one, in singing, and praising their God for the great thing which he had done for them” when they finally overcame their enemy (3 Nephi 4:31).  And so it is today.  It is the righteous mothers in Zion—who teach not only how to subtract mixed fractions and write essays on the water cycle and identify letter sounds but also what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ and live the principles of the Restored gospel—to whom we owe the most.