Our Journey to Our Promised Land
From a commencement address given at Brigham Young University–Idaho on July 22, 2020.
No matter how hard the journey may be at times, there is always a promised land waiting for us.
As young adults looking toward the future, you may be looking out ahead and wondering what awaits you. The COVID-19 pandemic has probably changed your immediate prospects in ways that may not yet even be apparent: The employment marketplace has shifted dramatically. Unemployment has become a much larger problem. Social distancing has changed the face of nations, cities, supermarkets, and Church services. Social upheavals, riots, and accusations of discrimination figure prominently in the news.
The world may not seem the same to you now as it did on January 1, or even on March 1. Things change, and sometimes they change fast. We are all witnesses of that fact this year.
And yet, perhaps things are not as new or as different today as news headlines may make it seem. A moment’s reflection teaches that the world is—and always has been—unstable and unpredictable.
Think of the last 100 years or so. The 20th century began with horses and buggies and ended with astronauts walking on the moon and later living in space stations. Vaccinations prevented the infection of countless people with dreaded diseases, but a virulent flu pandemic still killed tens of millions. Two world wars killed tens of millions more. A depression in the 1930s brought the entire world to its economic knees. New diseases like AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19 filled the voids left by diseases that were cured. The phones in our pockets allow us to call and even to view acquaintances across the globe whenever we wish.
Some Things Never Change
So, yes, things do change. But things don’t change that much. The central issues of life continue year after year, decade after decade, and century after century. The immediate challenges we all face vary in complexion but not in substance.
The most important things never really change. Across the world, people marry and raise children, they worry about where to live, how to feed and protect their families, and how to stay safe and healthy. They hope to be happy and to be loved. They want their marriages to be happy and their children to have better lives than they did. They want to find their way through the challenges of life. At root, we worry today about basically the same kinds of things our grandparents did, and their grandparents did.
Not surprisingly then, just as the basic issues of life don’t change, neither do the keys for successful living. They are constant.
Prophets anciently taught the truths that if applied bring joy in this life, whatever our immediate circumstances may be. Prophets today do the same thing. Their promises come from God. They are perfectly designed by our loving Father in Heaven, to deliver to all who choose to follow Him a soul-satisfying and joyful pathway through life regardless of the immediate challenges we may encounter.
There Is Always a Promised Land
Consider three similar stories from the scriptures: Moses and the children of Israel, Lehi and Sariah and their family, and the pioneers.
In each we see a group led by prophetic guidance on a trail marked by time, distance, and hardship. In each we see examples of joy and of suffering. In all three we see a promised land beckoning in the distance and a pathway to that destination that required faithful obedience and hard work.
In all three we find that there was indeed a land of promise waiting after the travail, and that new challenges and opportunities would come to those who had just arrived.
This pattern applies to all of us. We follow a trail through life marked by prophetic guideposts. When we stay on that prophetic or covenant path, we are sustained in our trials along the trail. We reach lands of happiness and abundance, and then we turn to new challenges and opportunities and new promised lands. We see that things work out if we choose to follow the Lord and His prophets.
The recurring promised lands pattern is an example to guide our lives. It teaches that if we “keep [God’s] commandments,” we “prosper in the land” (Mosiah 2:22). It ultimately reminds us of the great and final promised land in the next life.
Positively Pursuing the Path to Peace
The experience of Lehi and his family has the additional benefit of a Liahona, which provided the guidance of God for them both physically and spiritually as they wended their way along the trail and across the seas. In the Book of Mormon, Alma teaches us of a particularly relevant concern for our day from this experience:
“[The Liahona] did work for them according to their faith in God; therefore, if they had faith to believe that God could cause that those spindles should point the way they should go, behold, it was done; therefore they had this miracle, and also many other miracles wrought by the power of God, day by day.
“Nevertheless, because those miracles were worked by small means it did show unto them marvelous works. They were slothful, and forgot to exercise their faith and diligence and then those marvelous works ceased, and they did not progress in their journey;
“Therefore, they tarried in the wilderness, or did not travel a direct course, and were afflicted with hunger and thirst, because of their transgressions.
“And now, my son, I would that ye should understand that these things are not without a shadow; for as our fathers were slothful to give heed to this compass (now these things were temporal) they did not prosper; even so it is with things which are spiritual.
“For behold, it is as easy to give heed to the word of Christ, which will point to you a straight course to eternal bliss, as it was for our fathers to give heed to this compass, which would point unto them a straight course to the promised land” (Alma 37:40–44).
To be slothful—which Alma repeatedly warns us against—means to be indolent, lazy, spiritually apathetic and inactive.
Spiritual sleepiness is a temptation that catches too many in its quiet, unobtrusive trap today. When people pick the least demanding course among commandments and teachings, they fail to give heed to the compass of the covenant path and do not travel in the direct path outlined by prophets. Miraculous experiences begin to pass by them unnoticed. They do not progress in their journey toward the promised land, but instead make their way toward other seemingly attractive destinations. They become spiritually hungry and thirsty but seek refreshment by turning away from their God and toward the doctrines and philosophies of men.
The opposite of sloth, of course, is to positively pursue the only path that leads to “peace in this world, and eternal life in the world to come” by “[doing] the works of righteousness” (Doctrine and Covenants 59:23). The most fundamental works of righteousness are comprised in the first two commandments, to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” and to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:37, 39).
Think what the entire world would be like overnight if men and women kept those two basic commandments. Imagine what your marriages, families, and homes will be like as you choose to obey the first two commandments and to make doing so the essence of your lives. These two commandments merge when we love God by serving our neighbor (Doctrine and Covenants 59:5; Mosiah 2:17).
Blessings and Joy Are within Reach
You will have seasons of health, prosperity, and joy. You will confront this pandemic and other sorts of problems big and small throughout your lives. You will prosper “according to the heed and diligence which [you] give unto [the Lord]” as you seek your own promised land (Alma 12:9). Your joy will come from Him who is the source of joy, our Eternal Father in Heaven.
The blessings of heaven and joy, which together constitute a promised land for each of us, are available to all who seek to please God by keeping His commandments. Those blessings and that joy are within your reach. They aren’t hiding from you, and they aren’t far.
Faith and daily determination to stay on the covenant path are required for the journey. You will be blessed and helped and supported along the way and all the while.