Follow Him: A Come, Follow Me Podcast - Joseph Smith History 1:1-26: Dr. Steven Harper: Part I

Episode Date: January 3, 2021

Did you know that the story of the First Vision is the second greatest story ever told?  BYU Professor, Historian, and Editor, Dr. Steven Harper, takes us on a deep-dive into Joseph Smith History.  From Joseph's humble beginnings to facing overwhelming odds, we see Joseph Smith as the hero of a great story, one that includes each one of us.Part I focuses on the context of Joseph Smith's childhood, family relations and religious influences that culminates in the first vision and Part II focuses on the First Vision.

Welcome to Follow Him, a week we podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John by the way. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, we follow him. My friends, welcome to episode two. John can you believe it? We came back for episode two. The longest running streak ever. Yeah. We uh I rarely got a second date in high school. So this is this is a big deal for me. Thank you for joining us on follow him. We are so excited for our interview today. John and I are gonna be the hosts each week, but we also are gonna invite a guest. And our guest is going to be what we would call an expert.

This week, we have Dr. Steve Harper. Thanks, Anna-Mont. It's great to be with you guys. I can't remember how many years ago, but I picked up this Joseph Smith's first vision by Steve Harper. And I'll tell you, by the end of it, I was so uplifted, and especially the last chapter

of called Seekers Wanted was just a mindset of being a seeker seeking truth. I just thought it was beautiful. In fact, I don't know if Steve remembers this, but I wrote him an email just to say, thank you for this contribution. I can't say enough about him. Someone should not be that smart and that good looking.

It's not fair. Now before we get started, we should say John that our podcast can be found on regular podcasting channels. I'm a dad. You're a dad, John's a dad. You know, here I am. I want come follow me to come alive for my family. I want to fulfill what President Nelson has in mind with this. And I come to this Joseph Smith history. And for a lot of people, they'll read these first, what, 26 verses. And they'll say, I don't know how to take this into my family. Right. I don't know how to make this new. I don't know how to make this exciting. So, for just a dad, how have you done it? Well, guys, all I know in answer to that question is how not to do it. I set my kids down and say, we're going to go for 50 minutes.

And I'm going to do the professor thing. And you're going to sit reverently and listen and enjoy it. And you're going to enjoy it. And my little eight year old, they're like, if you want dinner. So far that has never worked. Never. My advice is get out of Joseph's way.

This is the best story in the scriptures. And by that, I mean, not only that it's true. I mean, the consequential nature of this story is massive. Second only to the atonement of Christ, right? His suffering for us, his crucifixion for us, his resurrection for us. Second only to that, this story is the most consequential. Certainly, it's in the top two for storytelling as well, right?

The last week of the Savior's life is pretty compelling. The story has to have a protagonist, somebody who's inherently interesting, somebody who is up against enormous odds, somebody for whom the stakes are high and then as the story goes along they just get raised until they're extremely high and our blood pressure goes up and our heart rate increases, extremely high and our blood pressure goes up and our heart rate increases, forces of antagonism get stronger. And when all is on the line and when the bad guys have closed in, and there's a dark night of the soul, then the hero does something, makes a choice. Everything depends on the choice. Well, you can tell from that, Joseph Smith history, especially his first 26 verses. There are great stories. So the best

thing for a dad to do is get out of Joseph's way. Let him tell his story. I could start that with my kids. What's your favorite movie? Why? Why? What's a great movie got to have? I had a boss when I was working on the Saints Project. Rick Terley was my boss in Salt Lake at the Church History Library. And he said, we want to write something that will feel like you're in a grossing movie. And the worst thing we could do is come out onto the stage while the movie's playing and tell the good people, now I'm going to give you a lecture about what's happening in this movie. One thing I would say as a parent that I've tried to do, at least for my older kids, is

I've tried to use these first 26 verses as kind of a recipe to having your own experience with God. Let's look at what he does. What can we also do? I can read scripture. I can pray. I can attend my meetings. I can, you know, reflect and ponder. You know, Joseph, it seems to me, it was always saying, you need to have your own experience with

God, right? You need to, you need to do this. And this seems to me that it could be a recipe for having your, your own experience. I just love the fact that we can emphasize that he was a boy. He was a young man. I mean, a lot of adults just don't ask questions. And here he is, well, which one of these is right? They can't all be right, or can they? The reason that was a big problem for him is he said, I had become convicted of my sins. So he was looking for the place to find forgiveness, and he couldn't find it. And that resonates with a lot of teenagers, right?

They're looking for forgiveness. They want to know if they've done something so heinous that God will not love them anymore, and if they can possibly find forgiveness, where is it and how do they get it? When I learned that myself, it really connected me to Joseph Smith. In many ways, it's a very typical family, right? They didn't know that they were going to be the first family of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. They had no idea. Yeah, they're sitting around. Can't you wait, this is so excited. Nobody would have necessarily thought that of them either, although Grandpa Aisle Smith thought there was something that was going to be pretty special about one of his

descendants, but they didn't know what that was until they looked in the review mirror after the first vision. But in the meantime, one of the most interesting things about them is that they are the first generation that is Joseph's mom and dad, the first generation in their families for a long time that is unchurched, neither of them belong to a church. And I think it's common for us to think that all people back in the old days were more religious and church folks. And they're actually not, they're Christians.

They believe in Christ. They believe that redemption will come through Christ, but they don't agree with each other. Joseph, a senior and Lucy about how that will come, and whether you need a church to mediate that salvation through Christ. So there's a fair amount of agreement between them, and then there's a fair amount of disagreement.

And both of those things are actually quite important to the circumstances that lead to the first vision. I've read before that it was Lucy who felt, and I think Steve actually this comes from you, to Lucy, any church was better than... No church. ...to Joseph Smith Sr. it's the opposite. Better to not go to any church than to pick the wrong church. What do we know about the siblings? Joseph has two older brothers, an older sister,

and then as you can see several younger siblings. He idolizes his big brother, Alvin, thinks the world of him, and Alvin is that responsible, cool-headed, self-sacrificing brother that every family ought to have. Listeners may know if they've read saints that Joseph and William don't always get along real great. William comes to see Joseph as kind of a bossety big brother.

They actually have a fist fight in 1835. Is it Joseph Smith, the president of the church at that point? Yeah, oh yeah. To me personally, this is important. This is not a perfect family. They don't get together and say, let us pray. right, every moment of the day. And I think this might make a lot of day St. Family feel a little like, breathe a sigh of relief. These adult brothers got in a fist fight. So you imagine that in the childhood, there's gotta be some things like that happening.

For sure there is. This is a family that's typical. They're pious, God fearing, but they also believe in pop culture stuff. They believe in what the most critical people would call a cult, and what others of us would just call folk magic and so forth. They're like other people of their time and place. They get along well and then they don't always get along well, right? Even mom and dad, as we've seen, the tension is quite an important catalyst for Joseph. If everything is perfect in your life, you don't typically work very hard to seek and receive revelation. Joseph had a set of problems and that set of problems led to the sacred growth

and that set of problems comes from the particular family. He lives in at the particular time and place where he lives. My kids get along perfectly. They never fight. They never argue. And that's when they're asleep. But man, it seems like sometimes the moment my kids wake up, especially the younger ones, they're at each other.

And I'm going, what are I doing wrong? And it seems like sometimes the moment my kids wake up, especially the younger ones, they're at each other. And I'm going, what am I doing wrong? I like to hear that our first family was a normal family. And I bet Sephironia pushed Catherine. And I bet, you know, Hiram said something mean to Joseph or to William and said, you know, don't be so lazy. And I like to picture Lucy Maxx saying, don't, don't say that to him. You got to say, hey, stop yelling.

Hey, just go outside. One thing you notice from reading Lucy's memoir is that she's an anxious person, right? For those of you who have an anxious mother and you can imagine how that might contribute to Joseph's, pay close attention to his words, great anxiety, for example. And that's just one of many times where he uses words like that

to describe this situation. Well, some of that is inherited from his mom. And I don't just mean in the DNA, his mom is a warrior. She wears very much about how they're going to pay the bills and whether they're going to be respected by their neighbors and whether they're going to find salvation. She's a mom. She's a great mom and she's a worrisome mom. And some of that worry gets reflected in Joseph for better or worse. And Joseph also inherits a lot from his dad. He thinks in some ways more like his father thinks. He is an interesting mix of the two.

His father's anxious too, though. We shouldn't think mom's anxious and dad's not. Dad has anxious dreams. And he worries all the time about whether he's gonna be able to provide well for his family and whether he's gonna be able to lead them to salvation or not. What we've done here, I love this, is we've made them very relatable.

And I think this is the real story, is that you've got a dad who's, who's, how am I gonna pay the bills? Because that's a lot of the moving, right? Is we got to pay the bills? Gents, saying investment or whatever. And they lost a lot of money early on. And you know, like many of us,

it's an up or down thing. It's a roller coaster ride, right? When they're on the verge of having everything work out great, it all falls apart. And that happens over and over again. Devastating diseases come through and afflict the family and bankrupt sea, right? A few times. Then there's a volcanic eruption on the other side of the planet that they don't even

know about. The whole northern hemisphere, the temperatures drop. So is that the reason they move? It's nose and June. Yeah. It's Rexburg. And the crops in their part of the world are very devastated by it. Can you imagine that? Had three years in a row of losing all your income, my family couldn't survive. We'd have to do something else. You think, well, where is the grass greener? And the reports are in Western New York, the grass is greener. Literally, and it's easier to grow wheat on it.

So let's go there. And it's keeper, right? Isn't the land a little keeper out there? Well, you can get it in good terms. That is, you can get it over time. What do you have to invest? You don't have a lot of cash, but you have some strong backs. You've got some mom and sisters and brothers

and a father who all know how to work hard. Listen to Joseph tell you that part of the story. We know how to work hard and we did work hard. And so that's what they have to invest. So a little bit of money and a lot of hard work can turn into a hundred acres and a good house in Western New York and that's why they go. That's what lures them there. They're not thinking, well, we got to get over there because there's plates.

Look at the Lord working with their everyday lives to put them in the place they need to be in. You know, it might give us a bit of insight into opposition, right? I tend to view every bad thing that happens to me as a negative, where if I look at it the way you're talking about, it might be that I could see that the Lord is causing me to grow. And not only is he moving me somewhere I need to be, but he's also shaping me into the person I need to be when I get there. Right? So he could just tell him, hey, I need you to move to Western New York in a dream. But you're not going to be the person you need to be when you get there, right? So he could just tell him, hey, I need you to move to Western New York in a dream. But you're not going to be the person you need to

be when you get there. Sometimes with my students, I say, the Lord is playing chess with the Smith family. And he's just moving the pieces exactly right. And they're going, all right. And they have no idea until he goes checkmate and and the first vision occurs. We didn't talk about the leg operation at all. It's not in this part of the story, but you did talk about diseases that come through the family. If I'm Lucy's memoir, Mom's memoir tells us that Sepronia is saved by the family's great faith.

The pray and seek and receive God's blessing of healing Sepronia. And Lucy is a major part of all that, of course. And that's the story of her life. She's learned to pray in faith. She's devastated when her sisters are killed by tuberculosis and nearly Lucy herself. And she promises God early and often in her life that she will seek his ways and his church if he will preserve her life.

And Lucy wants to be saved, right? She's anxious and desperate to not meet God, not having been saved by Christ. And Joseph inherits that. This is where you can see where the disease and the concerns about salvation come together, right? These people, no people who die. Death is everywhere, and it will take you tomorrow, if not today. And that's the world they live in, and they don't want to meet God, not having been redeemed by Christ. That's a major pressure that is working to get Joseph into the Grove as well. There's a lot of mortality all the time. When everything's perfect in your life, you don't go seeking for help. I imagine Joseph often heard of mother expressed that idea of am I prepared to meet God.

So the same disease that goes to the family with Sephironia, Joseph gets it. And that's what results in the leg surgery. The disease is typhoid fever. It killed like hundreds of people in the Connecticut River Valley where they were living. It's not long after Sepronia's life is spared from Typhoid. Joseph gets a bone infection that doctors today call osteomyelitis. It lodges in his shin and it's excruciating. Interesting thing to notice here is this is not in his history, right?

And there is an appendix to Joseph Smith history. There's in the manuscript history book A1, if we were looking at the actual record book this is taken from, Joseph Smith history is taken from. We'd turn all the way to the back of the book and we'd notice that Joseph's clerk wrote in a version of the story about the leg surgery. Well, this tells us a couple of things.

It tells us that it wasn't the most important part of the story to Joseph. Right, and I remember hearing it a lot from my primary teachers as why not to drink alcohol, which I just think maybe that wasn't the whole purpose of telling the story. That's not the purpose of it at all, Sad. A lot of primary kids out there drinking alcohol. So we need that lesson for the primary. We're worried about the CTR's tippling

behind the church. Talk about mixing up storylines because someone said he didn't want to drink alcohol because it was against the word of wisdom. But it's quite a good clarification for us to make because it can lead to feeling disillusioned. And we sometimes have taught it as if it was a cautionary tale about the word of wisdom, but it's not in Joseph's history for that reason. Joseph never makes a point about not drinking alcohol. That's not relevant to him. It's his mom and her memoir who says, you know, that good boy of mine was so faithful. We wouldn't even take Brandy to dull the pain of his leg surgery. He just said, let that hold me and I'll be okay. He was telling us about her and her family and about her husband, actually even.

One of the differences between Luke and Joseph's senior is that Joseph's senior drinks to avoid the pain and the hard work and the struggles of the life we're talking about. The reason we know this is because he told us in a patriarchal blessing that he gave to Hyrum to his son. He said, I'm thankful to you for being good to me when I have in the past been out of the way through wine, right? Some people think that Joseph Sr. that means he's an alcoholic. It doesn't mean he's an alcoholic. People are confusing a disease of alcoholism

that is debilitating if the person drinks with someone who has drunk too much alcohol from time to time, yeah. Not the same thing. No evidence whatsoever that Joseph Smith, senior or junior are alcoholics. But there's evidence that both of them give to us that they both drink from time to time.

And that, as you noted, Hank is before the word of wisdom. And how common is drinking in their day and time? You would be weird if you didn't. Yeah. If you put it the latter day, Saint lens, of course, you're going, dad drinks, this is,

the word is going to be so concerned, right? And the bishops gonna want to come over and see our family, but it's completely different context. There's no word of wisdom for 20 more years. And then it'll be 100 years after that before we think of it in the way we think of it now. And some people are troubled by that, but it's just because they haven't learned

to think about change over time, the way a historian does. I do the same thing within my new testament classes. Jesus didn't drink real wine, did he? It was more like juice and I'm like, well, no, it was real wine. It was alcoholic wine. How could he do that? I'll have to try it.

Yeah, yeah. And I talk them through it. Like it's a different time, different context. It's good to realize that the word of wisdom is an unusual revelation. Many of the revelations were given for a problem then. The word of wisdom says, yeah, I'll address the problem you're having here. But the real value of this is warning and forewarn you about evils and designs, which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the future. You don't have tobacco,

company executives manipulating nicotine levels in 1833 and 34, but you do now. And by the time Hebrew J Grant is the prophet to really tell us we got to get to work on the word of wisdom, we need it now. He was the right prophet at the right time to give us emphasis on a revelation that was good for us in 1833, but we really didn't need full effects of till the 20th century. And I think we're going to see that throughout our study this year is the Lord getting things in place long before they're needed. And then when they're needed, they're there.

One of the things historically that I've enjoyed showing teenagers, I found at Barnes and Noble this fold out book that's got to be like 10 feet wide called the Wall Chart of World History. It was so fun to show here's the time of Christ. Here's the Meridian of Time. Here's a time where apostasy begins. And here's this long period of apostasy.

And why didn't the Lord restore the church in 1500s during the time of Martin Luther? and then show how all of the United States of America set up and oh here's the Declaration of Independence. Here's the Constitution finally ratified 1791 and there is these long stretches of time and then it's like 14 years later Joseph Smith born Sharon Vermont and it's show how quickly once religious freedom was born Sharon Vermont. And it's show how quickly once religious freedom was sort of guaranteed that how quickly the Lord had

things in place. The beginning of the American revolution is between the birth place and the birth date of Joseph Smith, senior and Lucy Max Smith. So George Washington is is a mere couple hundred miles away. How do they move? Like how do you move in 18? What year do they move?

18, 16 and 17. I say it that way because it takes so while. The dad goes first and he's got to go find the place and try to make the contract. If it's not a good idea, he'll send word back and say never mind. If it is, he'll send word back and say, come on. When we talk like, oh, they're going to go from Vermont to New York. This is not a two hour jump in the Hyundai Sonata. I'm going to zip over there and call you. Yeah, weeks of travel.

You can walk it. You can ride a horse. You can take a cart or as Joseph's family will do. They'll load a wagon with most of their stuff and then most of them will walk all apart of the way. The wagon is for taking this stuff in. There's not a whole lot of passenger space in it. Joseph is still hobbled at this time from the leg surgery. It's still tough for him to walk and he walks a good chunk of the way. It's a hard trip. Mom leads the group. The family is contracted with a teamster.

What we would today think of as like somebody to drive the truck that our stuff is in and get it to the place where we're supposed to go, load it up and unload it. And the guy's a jerk. He's a bully and she finally fires him part way into it. And she's little, isn't she little? Yeah. Yeah, she's not a great big woman. She's five foot probably, right? Yeah, and Joseph gets pushed down By the guy and the family that are with him he gets picked on and

And they finally get to where they're going meet dad and it's a happy reunion and they decide this we're gonna make it We're gonna we're gonna get ourselves a hundred acres in the woods They're gonna move south out of Palmyra within a couple of years and it's south, a few miles south, and Manchester were the sacred groves. This is an important thing for students of the first vision. For some reason, we have Palmyra fixated on our brains as Latter-day Saints. They move there, they're clear in their own land, right? They've got to build your own house. This is a build your own house time period. There's not a guy there saying, okay, what kind of floors do you want, what kind of sinks do you want?

Do you like the Travertine and so forth? Right. Yeah. They are going to hire a guy later to build a middle class house, right? They're aspiring to middle class respectability. But for right now, you better some shelter and it better be not very time consuming and it better be made out of the same stuff that you're cutting down to make

yourself room for a cash crop. In other words, they got to get a cash crop in the ground as fast as they can. And Lucy says, in about a year, we cut 30 acres of hardwood trees down. I don't know if any of the listeners have ever done that. I think I may have cut one hardwood tree down over the course of my life. And it is hard. That chainsaw. Yeah. It's hard, hard work. And they're pulling stumps out too, right?

Some of these trees are. Yeah. Sometimes they'll just leave them, but sometimes they'll pull them out or burn them or whatever it takes. They'll split the trunks into rails. They'll haul, they'll burn as much as they can. They'll haul the ash to an ash tree. They're incredibly industrious people.

I'm gonna use this on my boys, right? And they're like, dad, I wanna play the switch. I cleaned my room. I wanna play, but I'll be like, no, we're gonna be like this, miss. We're putting in 18 hour days, right? We're going to go outside and cut down trees. Sounds good. Now he starts attending church meetings. I assume that's with his mother. It's hard to know for absolute certainty. The chronology here is difficult to pin down.

Part of the reason for that is we don't know when, Lucy and some of the family joins the Western Presbyterian Church, those records are not available. We know when they get out of it later in the 1820s, well after the first vision, but we don't know when they get in. So what we have are just a few scraps of people remembering that Joseph, for example, caught a spark of methodism on the road to Vienna, which seems to be a reference to him attending the Methodist camp ground, Methodist meetings that were held along the roadside. The Methodists are gaining ground on the

Presbyterians rapidly here. Okay, so Methodist is a kind of a new idea, Methodism, with Presbyterian being kind of the solid. Presbyterian is the old church, the respectable church. And actually I have two churches in town, brick buildings. This is what Lucy's family, this is her tradition that she comes from. This is what she sort of aspires to in a social sense. And the Methodists in some ways are new kids on the block and they're aggressive and they're plain. And they emphasize a lot more sort of personal responsibility and ability.

The difference between Presbyterianism and Methodism, at least in this time was Presbyterianism is God choosing you. But have you been saved because God wants you and so you can't really do anything, you just kind of wait until you feel God choosing you versus Methodism, which is you can choose God, you can go out and be saved by, you know, not by your own works, but because you're seeking Him. It's definitely an idea whose time has come. The Americans are saying, we should represent ourselves and we should have our own

representatives and we should have a say in our government. Methodism comes on the scene and says, that's true for your religion too. Brigham Young seems to lean towards Methodism. John Taylor seems to lean toward it. I think Wilford Woodruff as well seems to lean toward it. So some are going to church and some aren't. This is an interesting thing because there's a lot of day-state families just like this.

Some are going to church and some aren't. Mom is going to church with Hiram, Samuels, Sofronia, and everybody else is staying home, right? Yeah, Elvin stays home, dad stays home, Joseph stays home. They're the more free thinking ones. I don't want any kid hearing this going, see mom, I don't have to go to church, right?

Joseph didn't go to church with his mom, but that's interesting that half the family is headed into town. And it's a long walk, right? That's a long ways to go to church. You gotta work hard to get to church. And it would be superficial to say, well, Joseph Sr., and the boys are lazy

or not as devoted or something. That's really a misreading. They are just as much concerned about the salvation of their souls as the rest of the family, but they are super frustrated at the narrowness of the Presbyterian God especially, and of the hypocrisy that they see in the clergy. Yeah, he says this here. He says their feelings were more pretended than real. Right. Was Joseph Smith, was he a big time Bible reader? Because he says I was one day reading the epistle of James.

And I've always thought that means that's not the first time he picks up this book. Mom says in her memoir, he never read the Bible through. And I think the first time he ever read the Bible through was in the mid 1830s when it was the new translation. Yeah, Tony Tedson said that to us. He said, he heard our start in this church and he's thinking, I better read this thing all the way through. He lives in a biblically saturated culture. There's no way around it, but he's not himself

a systematic reader. Joseph is a deep reader. He is a thoughtful reader and he'll dwell on it, right? You can tell that from the way he talks about James 1 and 5. Never did any passage of a scripture come with more power to the heart of a man than this is at this time to mind. I reflected on it again and again. That's characteristic of Joseph's Bible reading. He's one of these students and I've had these that grab onto a phrase and it stays with them. Stays with them forever versus some students who are going line by line because they want to finish the book That's not Joseph

He doesn't care so much about finishing the book because he does about finding the answer to his problem Right, and it's important to know that there's an assumption in his cultures This is a thoroughly Protestant culture and And just real quick, for everybody who's listening, Protestant is like a protester the opposition to Catholicism. What that means is the Bible is it. There's not nearly so much emphasis on sacraments or ceremonies. That's Catholicism, yeah. It's Christ and His Word.

Your answer will be in the Bible. Notice that that's what Joseph is assuming. Where can I find the scripture that tells me whether the Methodist Church or the Presbyterian Church is right? Where can I find the scripture that tells me where to gain forgiveness of my sins? The big epiphany for Joseph is to come to realize those scriptures are not there. The book is not closed. It's not the archive of all God said. Instead, it says, if you lack wisdom, in 1820, if you lack wisdom, you can still ask God. The Bible is an open book. It's a book of experiences of people who received revelations. It's a book of testimonies of God's work in the lives of his people.

And Joseph has to come to realize that can be ongoing. It doesn't just have to be included in the covers of the book. That's a major departure for him. And frankly, that's the genesis of the restored gospel. The kids come to me with their problems, Dad. I don't know what to do about this. This class is killing me. This friend is really driving me crazy.

What do I do to say, let's, let's look at the scriptures. We do it so much in our family that becomes kind of natural. Right. That's what it was to Joseph. I've got a, I've got a problem. Naturally, I'm going to go to the scriptures and drive a soul mate. Yeah. I love that, Hank. The thing that bugs me is when I hear Latter-day Saints cheapen the whole process to boil it down to four words, just pray about it. That's not what it says, and that's not what he did. He worked intellectually hard. He worked spiritually hard. And that's the inheritance of Latter-day Saints

is to work really, really hard to sort out your problems. And to not just think that the work is with my brain is to work really, really hard to sort out your problems. And to not just think that the work is with my brain or with my heart, it's both, to seek learning by study and also by faith, where God will tell you in your mind and in your heart by the power of the Holy Ghost. That's the legacy of the first vision. Yeah, I think we've done that.

Sometimes with Moroni chapter 10, we've said, read it and pray about it. And God will give you the answer. No, well, there's a little bit more to it to that when he comes to Joseph Smith history. He didn't just read it and pray about it. There was a lot of anxiety, there was a lot of pondering. Joseph's time, there's a lot of time to ponder.

You're gonna walk to town, you're gonna walk back. You don't have your headphones in, you're thinking. The whole time. You're out planting seeds, cutting down hardwood trees, you're probably thinking. His 1832 autobiography says, between the age of 12 and 15, I become seriously impressed. My mind becomes seriously impressed with regard to the all important concerns for the welfare of my immortal soul. He spent years worrying and thinking and studying and working on this problem.

You go back to Moroni's promise and Moroni 10.4, the ask, but Moroni 10.3 is ponder how merciful God has been since the time of Adam until the time you receive these things. That's a, that's a long process. That's enus wrestling. That's a, it's going to take a while to learn everything that God has done since Adam and ponder it in your heart. People have said, I've done what Merronized Promise and I didn't get an answer why didn't I get one. And I think part of it is God's not going to give you an answer. You're not prepared to actually act on. So maybe all this pondering prepares you to act. This concludes part one of Joseph Smith History.

Please join us in Part 2, the first vision.