Continuing from previous posts, Lessons from Liberty Jail and Lessons from Liberty Jail II Elder Jeffrey R. Holland shared from his book “To My Friends”—Messages of Counsel and Comfort:
In selecting these lessons I note yet another kind of blessing that came out of this adversity. To make the points that I am now going to try to make, I’ve drawn directly upon the revelatory words that came from the lips of Joseph Smith during this heartbreaking time, words that we now have canonized as sacred scripture in the Doctrine and Covenants. I guess we’re not supposed to have favorite scriptures, and I have enough of them that you won’t be able to pin be down on one or two, but certainly any list of my favorite scriptures would have to include those written from the darkness of Liberty Jail.
What we instantly learn is that God was not only teaching Joseph in that prison circumstance but He was teaching all of us, for generations yet to come. What a scriptural gift! And what a high price was paid for it! But how empty would our lives as Latter-day Saints be if we did not have sections 121, 122, and 123 of the Doctrine and Covenants. They are contained in total on a mere seven pages of text, but those seven pages will touch your heart with their beauty and their power. And they will remind you that God often “moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.”12 In any case, He certainly turned adversity into a blessing in giving us those sacred writings and reflections, so pure, noble, and Christian in both tone and content, yet produced in such an impure, ignoble, and unchristian setting.
The first lesson of Liberty Jail is inherent in what I’ve already said—that everyone, including (and perhaps especially) the righteous will be called upon to face trying times. When that happens we can sometimes fear God has abandoned us, and we might be left, at least for a time, to wonder when our troubles will ever end. As individuals, as families, as communities, and as nations, probably everyone has had or will have occasion to feel as Joseph Smith felt when he asked why such sorrow had to come and how long its darkness and damage would remain. We identify with him when he cries from the depth and discouragement of his confinement: “Oh God, where art thou?. . . How long shall thy hand be stayed. . . .? Yea, O Lord, how long shall [thy people] suffer . . . before . . . thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them.
That is a painful, personal cry—a cry from the heart, a spiritual loneliness we may all have occasion to feel at some time in our lives.
Whenever these moments of our extremity come, we must not succumb to the fear that God has abandoned us or that He does not hear our prayers. He does hear us, He does see us. He does love us. When we are in dire circumstances and want to cry “Where art Thou?” it is imperative that we remember He is right there with us—where He has always been!
We must continue to believe, continue to have faith, continue to pray and plead with heaven, even if we feel for a time that our prayers are not heard and that God has somehow gone away, He is there. Our prayers are heard. And when we weep, He an the angels of heaven weep with us.
When lonely, cold, hard times come, we have to endure, we have to persist. That was the Savior’s message in the parable of the importuning widow.14 Keep knocking on that door. Keep pleading. In the meantime, know that God hears your cries and knows your distress. He is your Father, and you are His child.
