A FIT VESSEL

I enjoyed the following stories told to me by friends:

I was six months into my mission in France and having some problems with the language. What gnawed on me even worse were homesickness and the rejection I felt as I struggled to share our message with a people and culture to which I was largely unfamiliar.

On one occasion we knocked on a door of an inactive member and were rudely met by an angry man who spoke to us roughly and then shut the door in our face. This was not unusual, but as we proceeded to the next door, I suddenly felt impressed to go back to that door. My companion disagreed but I recognized the prompting of the Spirit and returned anyway.

The same man met us and began a serious tirade of scolding for our return. It was then that I noticed a woman inside sitting at a chair. I began addressing her and ignoring the rude man. She looked up rather startled but instead of moving away, she approached the door. I began speaking to her in French that I did not understand myself. This went on for several minutes despite the shouts of the man.

The woman listened intently to me and this surprised my companion as well as me. I finally finished and by then the woman was silently weeping and we left. Days later we saw this woman at the small branch meeting on Sunday and I asked her what made her come back to Church.

She said, “You mean you don’t know?”

She then went on to explain seven different questions that had bothered her about her membership and said that I had answered all seven. She felt no more reason to stay away from attending.

It was then that I learned again that the Spirit speaks thru us when we are fit vessels and comes to the aid of members regardless of their situations.

HEAVENLY FATHER’S WAY

The second story goes like this:

I paint murals for a living and was in the middle of a project when I was prompted to buy a dozen yellow roses and deliver them to a certain address. I did not hear a voice or see a vision; it was simply a feeling I had and I followed it. I rang the doorbell and a woman answered whom I did not know. I handed her the roses and left without a word and returned to my mural.

I few days later, I discovered that the woman at the door was a friend of my wife. She had been praying that God would show His love for her by delivering yellow roses. These had a special symbolic significance in her life. We are messengers and agency is the opportunity to choose Heavenly Father’s way.

OUR HAPPY HOME

A friend told me the following:

Many years ago, before I was a bishop, or even a husband or father, I decided, to buy a small home. I had paid rent before and knew that if I gave away money every month for my landlord to spend, I was being financially unwise. It’s hard to believe now, but I had to borrow even my down payment and paid house payments of 68 dollars per month. It may not seem much today, but back then, it was a tidy sum.

Of course, even a small home brings additional expenses and more than once I had nightmares about what would happen if I failed to make my house payment.
After several months, I came across the idea that if I became a landlord and rented out the basement, I could pay my bills more easily.

It seemed reasonable; however, I was not as careful in choosing a renter as I should have been. A divorced woman with a small child and a large, black dog applied and we made a verbal agreement that she was to pay the rent the first of the month and keep her child and dog from ruining the apartment. She had recently been divorced, so I felt sorry for her and decided to forego the first month’s rent deposit and she moved it. It didn’t take long to realize that I had made a horrible mistake.

Her four year old boy wrote on the walls, screamed incessantly and broke everything that wasn’t tied down. Her large, black dog barked around the clock and defecated and urinated anywhere he felt, with no argument from the woman. The lady spent most of her day watching TV and smoking cigarettes and complaining about her child and dog and what a bother they were. When I was home, I offered to give her dog away but she refused, saying that although the dog was a lot of trouble, he was good watchdog.

I heard every excuse in the world as to why she could not pay the rent or about how there was a check she was expecting to be credited to her account soon from some prior work she had done. It was hard for me to imagine her working at anything. She hadn’t paid the rent in six months. I was employed nights, at the time and the dog barked all day when I was trying to sleep.

I begged the woman to get rid of the dog or at least keep it quiet and that it was robbing my sleep, but she flatly refused. The problem became worse with each passing day and it made me a little crazy, although, even now, I admit I was not right in what I did next.

One day, after weeks without a decent night’s rest, I loaded my 22 caliber rifle and shot her dog in the head. I killed him with one shot, as he barked outside my window, while tied to a chain. She immediately called animal control and every policeman in the local area showed up. I had to do a lot of fast talking and pay a huge fine, but they finally let me go. Surprisingly, even after all that, she did not want to leave a place where she could have free rent. Finally, two months later, I was able to get her evicted. Her living area was a total wreck and I had to have it cleaned up and repaired.

I still live in that house, although it has been added onto, and my wife and children have fond memories of our lives there. Friends and relatives have spent nights with us but there have never been renters again.

DO WE REALLY VALUE OUR BIBLE? (This is extracted from a talk by Robert J. Matthews, Stake President, Temple President, former Dean of Religious Education at BYU, now deceased).

Consider for a moment the blessing of having the scriptures so readily available. Today Bibles are plentiful. Most of us have at least one written in our own language that we can read and study with little effort. But Bibles have not always been so readily available…

In about 520 B.C., Ezra the scribe, after bringing the people of Judah back to the land of Judea from their seventy-year captivity in Babylon, gathered them together so he could read the Old Testament to them. He translated as he read because the scriptures were written in Hebrew and the younger Jews spoke only Aramaic, the language of Babylon. Probably for the first time in their lives the Jews heard and understood the scriptures in their own tongue, and they wept and rejoiced. (See Neh. 8.) …

(The story of the brass plates of Laban, the Mulekites, who brought no scriptures with them, the people of Mosiah, who had the words of King Benjamin written for them and many others, witness the value that the scriptures should have in our lives).

During the middle ages, few northern Europeans understood the Latin scriptures, and copies of the Bible were scarce. Sometimes even the local priests knew little of the Bible. The type of church service did not contribute to much reading, anyway, as the emphasis was on celebrating the mass rather than preaching the word of God. Many of the poor people could not read at all; thus, concentrated, sustained, and regular study of the Bible was out of the question for most people.

Still, through the centuries, many wondered why the scriptures could not be translated into different languages so everyone could read and benefit.
The ancient Hebrews had been taught by the prophets in their own language, and the Greeks had been taught by Paul in their native tongue. Why could it not be so with the English, the French, and the Germans?

Although others had translated portions of the Bible into English, Oxford scholar John Wycliffe was the first to make the entire Bible available in an English translation. Since Wycliffe lived before the invention of movable-type printing, his translation was available in handwritten form only. This made copies very expensive. One historian reports that “a copy of the Bible cost from 40–60 pounds for the writing only. It took an expert copyist about 10 months to complete it.”

Early copies of Wycliffe’s Bible were written on large sheets of paper, but when authorities threatened to prosecute and even burn at the stake those who possessed them, Wycliffe made smaller copies so they could be more easily concealed.

It was into this changed world that William Tyndale, destined to become the “father” of our present English Bible, was born. As had Wycliffe, he became a scholar at Oxford. Trained in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, Tyndale saw the need for and was able to make an English translation of the Bible directly from the Hebrew and Greek texts.

He noticed that after he had taught a group and moved on; the priests would come and turn those people away from what he had taught them. The people generally did not have the scriptures in their own tongue and were at the mercy of the priests for their knowledge of religion.
Once, when engaged in earnest debate with a learned clergyman over giving the common people a Bible they could understand, Tyndale said, “If God spare my life, I will take care that ere many years the boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” Joseph Smith fulfilled that prediction. With such bold expression, clergy and state officials continued their persecution against Tyndale.

When British government and church authorities learned that Tyndale’s New Testament was being sold locally, they were furious. The Bishop of London called the translation “a pestiferous and most pernicious poison.” The various bishops subscribed money to buy all available copies and conducted public burnings of Tyndale’s Bible. This exercise was so thorough that only three copies of this first Tyndale New Testament are known to be in existence today.

The persecutions continued, and Tyndale was betrayed by a supposed friend, kidnapped, and put into prison near Brussels. There he uttered a loud prayer: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!” referring to King Henry VIII who had ignored efforts to grant his personal and religious freedom. Tyndale was then strangled to death and burned. About 92 percent of Tyndale has survived in the King James Version of the Bible and Tyndale borrowed much from Wycliffe.

These examples lead us to believe that having the scriptures readily available and in our own language is a blessing that most people in bygone days have not enjoyed. And yet the Bible is not only recorded on paper for reading, but also on audio for hearing, in Braille for feeling, and even on the internet & microfilm. It has been translated into thousands of languages and is available in book form in a multitude of sizes and bindings.

The question seems to be, do we appreciate what it means to be able to have our own personal copy of the Bible?