While visiting the northernmost part of Utah a few weeks ago, I saw a beautiful sunrise across a lake and beyond the mountains to the east. As is my nature to do, I took a dozen mediocre photos from my phone to inadequately capture the feeling of awe I had in the moment.
I told my family what they had missed, and they were understandably underwhelmed by both my description and my photos.
Later I learned that something had contributed to the beauty I perceived that wasn’t so beautiful somewhere else. The gradation in the sky from purple to red to pink to blue was caused by wildfires a thousand miles away. The winds overnight had brought smoke into the valley that had been perfectly clear the night before.
From where I was, the smoke was nearly imperceptible. All I noticed from it was the pretty sunrise.
But where the wildfires originated, the sunrise was anything but pretty. There, the smoke was a sign of destruction, and its thickness left many in the dark, hidden from the light of the sun.
That day, 93 wildfires were being attended to around the United States. They burned nearly 2.5 million acres and required the help of nearly 30,000 individuals to help control them.
This week we studied the first chapters of the Book of Helaman in the Book of Mormon as part of our collective “Come, Follow Me” study in the Church. In chapter 5, we read about needing to build our foundations on “the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ.” We need to do that to withstand the storms that will cause us to fall if we are not secured to the rock.
Nephi and Lehi remembered those words from their father, Helaman, as they went out to preach the gospel to the Lamanites in Zarahemla.
A dozen verses later, the record shares about something other than the storms that can disorient physically and spiritually — darkness. But the darkness in these verses wasn’t meant to cause confusion. It caused people to stop what they were doing, to pause, to evaluate what was happening.
A voice came from “above the cloud of darkness” with instructions to those who were surrounded by the temporary cloud. Three times the voice spoke to the Lamanites, whose fear had incapacitated them in the moment.
A man named Aminadab saw the faces of Nephi and Lehi in the cloud. He was a Nephite who dissented from the Church and now lived among the Lamanites who now had to turn to him for an explanation of what was happening. They wanted instructions from him on how to make the darkness go away. Nephi and Lehi had preached to them, but they turned to the person they knew to ask him for advice.
Aminadab’s reply was simple. He told them to do as they had been taught by Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Amulek and Zeezrom. He told them they had to repent, cry unto God and have faith in Jesus Christ.
They did as instructed. The darkness left, but they then saw “a pillar of fire.”
The 300 Lamanites who went through this experiences were only a small part of their community. After it was over, they shared what had happened with the rest of their people. The scriptures say “the more part of the Lamanites were convinced … because of the greatness of the evidences.”
I don’t know what those evidences were, but the evidences and testimonies caused those Lamanites to give up their weapons of war, the hate they had felt toward the Nephites, and the land they had taken from them.
In the days that followed, I wonder if there was lingering smoke from the darkness that had been there or from the fires that had surrounded them. Did they wake up with new gratitude to a beautiful sunrise and remember what the light was first like when the darkness went away?
Whatever the evidences, whatever the memories, those Lamanites were then recorded as having a “righteousness [that] did exceed that of the Nephites, because of their firmness and their steadiness in the faith” (Helaman 6:1).
As for me, I look at the smoky sunrises in life and remember my own times of feeling the relief that comes from repentance and the joy that comes from feeling God’s love when I commit to follow Him.
We all experience darkness at times. And we all need to do as the voice commanded those Lamanites in calling them to repent before we can see the light and move forward with our lives.
— Jon Ryan Jensen is editor of the Church News.
