Now is the Time

I read this morning the talk that President Nelson gave in general conference in April 2005, less than two months after his first wife Dantzel passed away suddenly. He described how just four days before her passing “our doctor’s report at a routine checkup indicated that her laboratory tests were good.” He was a medical doctor who had spent much of his life saving others’ lives, and yet he could not save her. They had been married almost 60 years and he said, “For a season, my grief was almost immobilizing.” Even though he was an apostle, her death still came without warning: “Her passing came suddenly and unexpectedly…. After my efforts to revive her proved fruitless, feelings of shock and sorrow overwhelmed me. My closest friend, angel mother of our 10 children, grandmother of our 56 grandchildren, had been taken from us.” We never know when death will call on us our our loved ones, and the lesson he wanted us to learn from her passing was this: “Now is the time to prepare to meet God. Tomorrow may be too late. Prophets through the ages have so declared: ‘This life is the time for men to prepare to meet God. … Do not procrastinate the day of your repentance.’”

                One of the aspects of his talk that impresses me is how focused he was on the scriptures at this time to teach us truth and lessons from her life. The footnotes for this talk reference over 60 scriptural passages, many of which teach us of our need to be ready now to meet God and not procrastinate. A lot of those come from Alma, and it is interesting to me how much Alma focused on this idea after his own repentance To the Nephites at Zarahemla he questioned: “Have ye walked, keeping yourselves blameless before God? Could ye say, if ye were called to die at this time, within yourselves, that ye have been sufficiently humble?... Behold, are ye stripped of pride? I say unto you, if ye are not ye are not prepared to meet God. Behold ye must prepare quickly;… Behold, I say, is there one among you who is not stripped of envy? I say unto you that such an one is not prepared; and I would that he should prepare quickly, for the hour is close at hand.” His message was simple to them and to us: “The time is at hand that [we] must repent or [we] cannot be saved!” (Alma 5:27-31) To the wicked people at Ammonihah Alma similarly taught that the time to prepare was now in this life: “This life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God; a time to prepare for that endless state which has been spoken of by us, which is after the resurrection of the dead” (Alma 12:24). He further urged them not to put off the day of their repentance: “And now, my brethren, I wish from the inmost part of my heart, yea, with great anxiety even unto pain, that ye would hearken unto my words, and cast off your sins, and not procrastinate the day of your repentance” (Alma 13:27). His companion at this time was Amulek who surely was echoing his mentor’s words when he taught with Alma at Antionum: “For behold, this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors…. I beseech of you that ye do not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end” (Alma 34:32-33). Alma urged his son Helaman with these words: “O my son, do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way” (Alma 37:46). We must not procrastinate our repentance or be slothful in our discipleship: now is the time to prepare to meet God. He emphasized to his son Corianton who was in need of repentance that the time was then to turn to God: “And thus we see, that there was a time granted unto man to repent, yea, a probationary time, a time to repent and serve God” (Alma 42:4). His final words recorded in the Book of Mormon highlight the urgency with which we should repent: “For the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance” (Alma 45:16). To return back to the presence of God we must prepare now by repenting and washing our sins clean through the Savior. President Nelson summarized it this way: “Now is the time…. Begin with repentance!... Now is the time to enroll our names among the people of God…. Now is the time to align our goals with God’s goals…. Death is premature only for those who are not prepared to meet God. Now is the time to prepare.”