Just Sittin' Around...

Tonight at dinner, a few of us were just sitting around talking. That's one of the things I like most about being here, being able to sit and visit with some really great men.

Our conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to our work here. Only this time we talked about how we could compare our situation here to that of the people of the Book of Mormon. You've already heard me tell you about what it's like working with the Gadianton's so I don't want to bore you, but that was our first topic of discussion. I mentioned that I was going to skip ahead in my reading to read those chapters to try and gain some insight into what the Nephites and Lamanites did to purge them from their society. As I remember, it took the combined effort of the righteous people as well as calling upon the Lord to get the job done. That's what it's going to take here. There's a quote, and I don't have the exact wording, but it goes something like this, "for evil to prevail good men must do nothing" or something like that. I'm sure if I were to Google the saying, I'd find it.

OK, here it is, English philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing." Or as another web page quotes him, "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing."

Regardless of the exact quote the message is the same. Right now I'm praying that a few good men will do something. It will take those few good men as well as a lot of prayer to get rid of the cancer that plagues the Afghan government, military and society.

Merrill either read or saw on the news a piece about a church that teaches that if you follow the teachings of the Bible you will become economically rich. He related how he was reading about Alma and his mission to the Zoramites and how they were casting out the poor because they were poor. I then thought about the people who profess to believe one thing but their actions say otherwise. I thought of the people who do things in the name of religion but again, their actions are not in accordance with what their religion teaches - Islamic terrorists to be precise.

I don't mean to sound negative because that's not how I felt after our discussion. Rather, I felt a spark of renewed testimony of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. How many times have we been taught and how many times have we read within its pages that this book was written for us. I can testify that it was. I feel like what I'm going through right now have direct parallels to what the people of the Book of Mormon went through. As I read it this year, I hope that I can draw out the lessons that I need to learn to be the most effective that I can be.

I never would have thought that being here would help increase my testimony of the Book of Mormon, but it has and I look forward to a continued renewal of that testimony.