The Words of Mormon

I am in awe of Mormon.  To me, he is simply amazing.  What a task to be given, to abridge all those plates.  What a hard time in history to be striving to be righteous and do what Heavenly Father asks.  Mormon is one of those people I think of when people talk about how wicked the world is right now, and how hard it is to be righteous.  I think of Mormon and Moroni and their family living as the Nephites turned to wickedness and were destroyed.  I also think of Noah and his family working on the ark day after day, living righteously while everyone around them were not keeping the Lord's commandments.  I think of them, and then I figure that living in this last dispensation isn't so bad.

In this chapter, Mormon tells us that he has already made "an abridgement from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake"(v.3)  when he found the small plates of Nephi and decided to include them even though they cover the same time period which he has just finished abridging. He says he is including them because it appeals to him that they contain the prophecies of the coming of Christ that his fathers know have already been fulfilled.  He writes that he will "take the remainder of [his] record...from the plates of Nephi" and continue the abridging process, but these plates he is just going to keep in his records as is.  In verse 7 he says:

"And I do this for a wise purpose; for thus it whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me.  And now, I do not know all things; but the Lord knoweth all things which are to come; wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to his will."

This is very much like what Nephi said about the small plates when he wrote them--I don't exactly know why I'm doing this, but the Lord wants me to, so I will.  We, of course, know why.  We know the story of the 116 pages that were lost by Martin Harris and were not retranslated because Joseph Smith was told by the Lord not to do so.  Because these prophets obeyed, we still have the stories of Lehi's family, the Tree of Life and others.

I am so grateful for the example of these faithful men.  They are a wonderful example to me of the importance of following the promptings of the Holy Ghost.