Witness

I was reading of the first members of the church in this dispensation and the challenges Joseph and Emma Smith faced trying to expand the church while attempting to build a family and a livelihood and I was struck by this scripture in D&C 24 :

7 For thou shalt devote all thy ^aservice in Zion; and in this thou shalt have strength.

8 Be ^apatient in ^bafflictions, for thou shalt have many; but ^cendure them, for, lo, I am with thee, even unto the ^dend of thy days.

9 And in temporal labors thou shalt not have strength, for this is not thy calling. Attend to thy ^acalling and thou shalt have wherewith to magnify thine office, and to expound all scriptures, and continue in laying on of the hands and ^bconfirming the churches.

Joseph and Emma were told in the scripture above that they would never be wealthy but they, especially Joseph, were to focus on building the church and they will have 'wherewith' (sufficient for their needs) to accomplish their calling.

 

This scripture impressed me because I was simultaneously reading Witness, the autobiography of Whitaker Chambers, who found a belief in God that compelled him to leave the communist party. He was an Amercan Soviet spy in the Washington, DC area during the years leading up to WWII. He related this experience he had while having second thoughts about endangering himself and his family by breaking from the underground communist party Apparatus.

I thought: “You cannot do it. No one can go back.” As I stepped down into the dark hall, I found myself stopped, not by a constraint, but by a hush of my whole being. In this organic hush, a voice said with perfect distinctness: “If you will fight for freedom, all will be well with you.” …. Perhaps there were no words, only an uttered meaning to which my mind supplied the words. What was there was the sense that, like me, time and the world stood still, an awareness of God as an envelopment, holding me in silent assurance and untroubled peace. There was a sense that in that moment I gave my promise, not with the mind, but with my whole being, and that this was a covenant that I might not break. On one side of that moment were nearly forty years of human waste on all the paths and goat paths of 20th-century error and action. On the other side was humility and liberation, the sense that the strength would be given me to do whatever I must do, go wherever I must go. The moment itself was something which to deny would be a blasphemy. It was decisive for the rest of my life, and incomparable in that I never knew it again.

Something happened in the hall at Mount Royal Terrace. I experienced something.” From that hall, I walked into life as if for the first time. I do not mean that I was exalted or conspicuously changed. I was still an erring, inadequate man, capable of folly, sin and fear… But … Henceforth, in the depth of my being there was peace and a strength that nothing could shake. It was the strength that carried me out of the Communist Party, that carried me back into the life of men. It was the strength that carried me at last through the ordeal of the [Alger] Hiss Case. It never left me because I no longer groped for God; I felt God. The experience was absolute.

 Chambers, Whittaker. Witness (Cold War Classics) (p. 57). Regnery History. Kindle Edition

This is an example of the the Holy Spirit moving someone to do something important, not just for himself and his family, but important for keeping the freedoms we enjoy in the United States. In recent training we had with Pres Broadbent, he stated that the Holy Spirit communicate better with our spirit than with any of our five senses.