Loving your neighbor at a time like this can be difficult, especially when your neighbor is BLM or Antifa. I continue to be amazed at the synchronicities of the Church's "Come, Follow Me" study guide with events going on in the world today. This week's reading is Alma 23-29. I found my self humbled after expressing frustrations and doubts about our nation's domestic enemies yesterday. I was feeling like, "OK, let's get this over with. It's time to take the country back. If they want a civil war, let's give them one. After all, our side has all the guns!"
Then, today I read in the lesson for the week, the passage from Alma 26 that said this:
24 For they said unto us: Do ye suppose that ye can bring the Lamanites to the knowledge of the truth? Do ye suppose that ye can convince the Lamanites of the incorrectness of the traditions of their fathers, as stiffnecked a people as they are; whose hearts delight in the shedding of blood; whose days have been spent in the grossest iniquity; whose ways have been the ways of a transgressor from the beginning? Now my brethren, ye remember that this was their language.
25 And moreover they did say: Let us take up arms against them, that we destroy them and their iniquity out of the land, lest they overrun us and destroy us.
Verse 25 was where I was at in my head yesterday. The threat is very real that these insurrectionists pose to our freedom and our country. The hardest thing to reconcile is that BLM and Antifa, these educated idiots, who have been indoctrinated by their college professors and the MSM, are our brothers and sisters. In my mind, I see no promise that they will repent and accept the gospel. They seem ripe for destruction as they violently advocate for socialism, defunding our police, destroying the traditional family, and erasing history. If we were surrounded by them in one of their riots, our lives could be in danger.
So imagine Ammon and the sons of Mosiah taking the risk to go live and preach the gospel among people like them. These preachers of righteousness said,
...[W]e have been cast out, and mocked, and spit upon, and smote upon our cheeks; and we have been stoned, and taken and bound with strong cords, and cast into prison; and through the power and wisdom of God we have been delivered again.
30 And we have suffered all manner of afflictions, and all this, that perhaps we might be the means of saving some soul; and we supposed that our joy would be full if perhaps we could be the means of saving some.
That sounds like the treatment we might get an an Antifa protest, doesn't it? Yet these missionaries carried on no matter what and they received divine power to touch and change hearts. Are we willing to undergo that? Would it work now as it did then? We know the gospel has power to solve these kinds of societal ills. How can the gospel change the world if we can't our enemies to repent?
Reading this passage has chastened me and made me reconsider how the best way to proceed. When we engage with these people, we already know what it's going to be like. The question is whether or not we have done enough to qualify for the miracles that accompanied the Book of Mormon's missionaries to the Lamanites. Not all the Lamanites were converted. The ones who did had to separate themselves from their brethren and they faced attack later on. Their pacificsm was in direct proportion to their former hostility.
Even then, the enemies, incited by dissidents (former members) from the Church, stoked feelings of Lamanite anger and war came. Those pacifist Lamanites who converted had to be protected by armed Nephites and their own sons, Helaman's stripling warriors. It will take exceptional insight to discern whether this is a time for preaching or whether it is a time for warfare.
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