Give Me This Mountain

To my daughter,

When I was born, the president of the Church was Spencer W. Kimball. Today in Church someone referenced a talk he gave in which he sought for mountains to face. I looked up his talk and was impressed by what he said. He related told the story of Caleb in the book of Joshua. He was one of the most faithful of the Israelites who had helped them obtain the promised land after wandering forty years in the wilderness. President Kimball quoted these verses with the words of Caleb after they had finally entered the land: "And now, behold, the Lord hath kept me alive, as he said, these forty and five years, even since the Lord spake this word unto Moses, while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness: and now, lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me [at least in the spirit of the gospel and its call and needs]: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, … both to go out, and to come in" (Joshua 14:10-11). He had proved faithful and despite his old age of 85 was still confident in the Lord and in the strength the Lord gave him. President Kimball continued, "Caleb concluded his moving declaration with a request and a challenge with which my heart finds full sympathy. The Anakims, the giants, were still inhabiting the promised land, and they had to be overcome. Said Caleb, now at 85 years, 'Give me this mountain' (Josh. 14:12)." President Kimball added, "This is my feeling for the work at this moment. There are great challenges ahead of us, giant opportunities to be met. I welcome that exciting prospect and feel to say to the Lord, humbly, 'Give me this mountain,' give me these challenges." What an attitude he had! He was welcoming difficulties and trials from the Lord, knowing that if he was given mountains to climb that he would be stronger for it when he got to the top. Caleb showed great faith in the Lord in asking for a mountain to tackle even in his old age, and so did President Kimball. Their attitudes should encourage us in whatever trials we face and help us know that in all the hard things we must tackle that we do not want to, we will be stronger for it if we do so with faith! I hope you and I will never be afraid of something just because it is hard--it is in doing the hard things that we will grow the most and become the people God wants us to become! 

I have mentioned to you before the fact that missionaries who go to foreign lands and live in different cultures are sometimes required to eat things that seem very strange to us. I, for example, had a plate of snails one Christmas Eve in France, and it certainly would have been very impolite for me to have refused them. Because of this you told me that you definitely do not want to serve a mission! You are afraid that it would be uncomfortable and hard to eat foods very different from what you are used to. I certainly understand at your age that you would think that, but I hope that you come to understand that just because something appears difficult or strange or challenging, that should not be the reason that we choose not to do it! Sometimes it is indeed those hard things that are most important and good for us to do. The Book of Mormon teaches us this in one of the very first stories. Lehi and his family had fled Jerusalem and were in the wilderness south of Israel. Lehi received a commandment that his sons were to return to Jerusalem to retrieve the plates of brass from Laban. Lehi said to Nephi, "Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brothers should go unto the house of Laban, and seek the records, and bring them down hither into the wilderness. And now, behold thy brothers murmur, saying it is a hard thing which I have required of them; but behold I have not required it of them, but it is a commandment of the Lord." Laman and Lemuel understandably felt that such a task would be a hard one, and surely it was! They didn’t want to do hard things. But that was not a good reason to not do it. Nephi, on the other hand, replied this way: "I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Nephi 3:5, 7). Later when they struggled to accomplish the mission, he said this to motivate his brothers, “Let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; for behold he is mightier than all the earth, then why not mightier than Laban and his fifty, yea, or even than his tens of thousands? Therefore let us go up; let us be strong like unto Moses” (1 Nephi 4:1-2). Even though the task proved harder than they expected, Nephi was not about to give up because he knew that the Lord had commanded them. He trusted that they could do hard things with the Lord’s help, and that’s exactly what happened. I hope that you always remember that you can overcome any challenge and figuratively climb any mountain with the Lord’s help. 

Love,

Dad