Chastened and Tried, Even as Abraham

One of my goals in preparation for general conference was to read the second volume of Saints that was recently published and which tells the history of the Church from 1846 through 1893.  I finished it this morning and was amazed at the stories I read—I express thanks to all those who labored so diligently to bring us this inspirational narrative.  The challenges the early Saints faced during the half century after the Prophet Joseph was killed were intense and seemingly unending.  There was the crossing the Missouri River in freezing winter as the Saints were kicked out of Nauvoo as well as the enormous sacrifice of sending hundreds of men desperately needed on the trail with the Mormon Battalion to fight Mexico.  There was the desperate situation at Winter Quarters in the winter of 1846-7 with sickness and freezing cold and numerous deaths.  In the Valley there were locusts and droughts and the raging elements.  There were challenges with the Indians and building communities in a desert with almost nothing to start with.  Of course there was also the heartbreaking story of the Martin and Willie Handcart Companies in 1856 and the struggles of many other overland pioneers.  Thousands of missionaries were sent all over the world, from Hawai’i and New Zealand to Norway and South Africa during this period, and their departure often left young mothers with small children to fend for themselves for years on end.  There were apostates who led away members of the Church in Utah and even one who took over the Church in Hawaii completely.  There were intense persecutions from governments at home and abroad as well as the complicated challenges inherent with the practice of plural marriage.  In the 1880s due to the Edmund-Tucker Act many Saints, including the whole First Presidency, had to go into hiding to escape prison for living their religion.  Women were often separated indefinitely from their husbands and the future for them and their families seemed hopeless.  In short, the first decades of the Church in Utah were not a season of peaceful prosperity as we might sometimes think but this was a time of desperate challenges when the Saints had to hold fast to their faith with all their might.
                One of the many poignant stories that shows the sacrifices and faith of these early Saints is that of Lorena Larsen, the second wife to Bent Larsen.  After the latter served a six-month prison sentence for unlawful cohabitation because of his practicing plural marriage, Lorena became pregnant and left to go into hiding to keep him safe. She had to keep her identity secret and keep the identity of her husband kept from her children, constantly worried about that fact that “informers were everywhere.”  Eventually she made the difficult 500-mile journey from Utah with her husband and with her children to Sanford, Colorado to continue hiding along with other plural wives who had gone underground.  She nearly died from childbirth right after arriving in Colorado but somehow survived the birth of a very large baby boy after the strenuous trip.  As they sought to set up their lives there, “Lorena knew that her family and the Church would remain fractured and fearful as long as the government continued to deny the Saints their religious rights.”  

After “months of struggling to make a living in Colorado” without much success, and while trying to keep from being captured by the law, Lorena and Bent decided to return to Utah in 1890.  It was shortly after Wilford Woodruff published the Manifesto putting an end to knew plural marriages in the Church, and Lorena found out during her trip back “that the Church had stopped performing plural marriages and intended to submit to the laws of the nation.”  The narrative records, “Lorena could not believe what she was hearing. She had embraced plural marriage because she believed that it was God’s will for her and the Saints. The sacrifices she had made to practice the principle had brought her heartache and trial…. Why would God now ask the Saints to turn away from the practice?...  Darkness flooded Lorena’s mind. ‘If the Lord and the Church authorities have gone back on that principle,’ she thought, ‘there is nothing to any part of the gospel.’  She had believed that plural marriage was a doctrine as fixed and immovable as God Himself. If that was not the case, why should she have faith in anything else?”  She felt that she and her children would now simply be cast off like Hagar and her husband would return to his first wife.  The account continues, “Lorena collapsed into her bedding. The darkness around her became impenetrable, and she wished the earth would open up and swallow her and her children. Then, suddenly, she felt a powerful presence in the tent. ‘This is no more unreasonable than the requirement the Lord made of Abraham when He commanded him to offer up his son Isaac,’ a voice told Lorena. ‘When the Lord sees that you are willing to obey in all things, the trial shall be removed.’  A bright light enveloped Lorena’s soul, and she felt peace and happiness. She understood that all would be well.” 

The themes of this story capture much of the spirit of this whole time period in the church: sacrifice, persecution, struggle, and ultimately faith in the commands of the Lord.  The revelation she received suggested that her trials were a part of what the Lord had promised for us all, “Therefore, they must needs be chastened and tried, even as Abraham, who was commanded to offer up his only son” (Doctrine and Covenants 101:4).  Her example along with so many others showed the great lengths the Saints were willing to go to follow Jesus Christ and His word given through His prophet.  Their sacrifices and faith stand as a testimony to us of the truthfulness of the work and a warning that we too will may called upon to pass through great trials in the coming years, to “be chastened until [we] learn obedience, if it must needs be, by the things which [we] suffer” (Doctrine and Covenants 105:6).