First, the most important link: this week’s Come, Follow Me

We often read scriptures based on where we’re at spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually at the moment.

This is normal whenever anyone reads anything. It’s a form of recency bias. Things on our mind right now take precedence and seem more urgent and important than things from six months or six years ago.

But it means we may read into things that were never intended. My feeling on this is that it, too, is harmless if we take productive things away from our scripture study. That message from me is meant for me this week.

I read D&C 77-80 on their own and my heart is touched by how hard the Prophet Joseph Smith is working to make sure everyone is taken care of. Everyone — not just the faithful, not just the prosperous. He’s going to extremes to look out for the poor in particular. He’s doing it because the Lord instructed him to do so.

That should make all of us lean forward. He intends for us to be equal by choice. By our own free will. Not by force, but still equal.

I wonder how this would go over today, at a time when the Saints have prosperity beyond their wildest dreams, particularly in Utah.

But what amazes me most about what the Lord wants to accomplish through the Prophet is what is happening to Joseph Smith at the exact same time, as in, literally the same month. The Saints, Volume 1, paints the pictures very vividly.

He’s being tarred and feathered, nearly killed, along with Sidney Rigdon.

At a time when there should be so much despondence and pain and maybe even anger, the Prophet was ripped apart from his family to be assaulted while working on building the Kingdom and looking after the welfare of others.

It’s pretty extraordinary. The dichotomy is breathtaking.

We’re watching scenes unfold in the United States right now where families are being hunted down, tear-gassed, and ripped apart on the presumption of guilt, but based more on their skin color and location of employment. Parents are torn away from their children and carted off to jail, “Alligator Alcatraz,” or even foreign countries. Yet, some portion of our population laughs at it, revels in it, or extols the virtues of legal immigration.

It’s appalling.

The bad news is that too many of us, as Christians, now celebrate the very actions we despised when they happened to us. They happened enough that pilgrims sought refuge here in the 1600s. They happened to Mormon pioneers enough that they left the borders of the United States as they stood in the 1800s for the frontier.

The good news — and it’s important to seek out the good news — is that there are people who tirelessly “fight” for those treated this way. I use the term fight loosely because I believe Christ “fought” through his teaching and example, above all, to look out for the poor, the hungry, those who seek refuge...And we are called upon by His prophets to be peacemakers today.

Persecution is real. But it’s not a term that applies only to Mormons or Christians.

God gives peace, and knowledge, and light, to those who seek Him, even in the midst of agony. Joseph Smith was seeking and receiving revelation for the entire Church at a time when he was being hunted down, stripped from his family in the dead of night, and nearly killed.

I’ll take that example from 78-80 above all.

Photo courtesy of Chris Boese.