Running Fast and Praying Always

 One of my favorite verses in the Doctrine and Covenants is this counsel from the Lord: “Pray always, that you may come off conqueror; yea, that you may conquer Satan, and that you may escape the hands of the servants of Satan that do uphold his work.” One of the most important ways to overcome the adversary in our lives is to continually pray and seek for the strength of the Lord. I have never really paid attention to the previous verse, though, which I believe is related: “Do not run faster or labor more than you have strength and means provided to enable you to translate; but be diligent unto the end” (Doctrine and Covenants 10:4-5). Certainly one of the reasons we “pray always” is to overcome temptations and the fiery darts of the adversary; but another reason is simply because of the difficult tasks we have to accomplish in our lives. Joseph had the monumental assignment to translate the Book of Mormon which must have simply seemed overwhelming, and the Lord encouraged him with three key pieces of counsel on how to accomplish it: (1) Don’t run faster than you have strength, but (2) be diligent, and (3) pray always. Surely this is counsel for all of us as we face difficult tasks in our lives that seem beyond our capabilities. We should not run so fast that we trust totally in our own strength and try to make it happen all on our own. But we still must seek to be diligent and mostly we need to trust completely in the Lord through continual prayer. Surely that was how Joseph and his scribes were able to translate nearly the entire Book of Mormon in a three-month period.  

               The counsel from the Lord here is of course reminiscent of the words of King Benjamin to his people: “And see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order” (Mosiah 4:27). The challenge, then, is to figure out how to be diligent and run fast without running faster than we have strength. Sometimes life can feel overwhelming and despite all the diligence we can muster we feel like we just cannot do it, that we will not ever be able to “win the prize.” When that happens, our only hope is to do our best to trust in the Lord, to “pray always” as He invited Joseph and to humbly forge ahead. In this same chapter King Benjamin invited us to do just that: “I would that ye should remember, and always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God, and your own nothingness, and his goodness and long-suffering towards you, unworthy creatures, and humble yourselves even in the depths of humility, calling on the name of the Lord daily, and standing steadfastly in the faith of that which is to come” (Mosiah 4:11). One of the messages of the Lord to Joseph at this time was that he needed to put his trust in God and not in man as he worked to accomplish the impossible: “Yet you should have been faithful; and he would have extended his arm and supported you against all the fiery darts of the adversary; and he would have been with you in every time of trouble” (Doctrine and Covenants 3:7-8). That is how we overcome every challenge that we face: praying always, trusting the Lord, and then running as fast as we can to do His will.