Another Way God Speaks

I guess it is true that signs follow those that believe.

A story from a friend:


"In the fall of 2013 I had just gotten home from my mission and was given one of the greatest callings I had ever had: locking up the church at night. I often had the entire church building to myself and would sit in the chapel to think, read, and pray.

One of those nights, I felt pretty useless and asked the Lord what He wanted me to be doing with my life. As I pondered this question the Lord spoke to me (although I wouldn't have called it that at the time) saying that I needed to read through the replica of the 1830 book of Mormon that I had from beginning to end. I thought that it was too simple of an answer to the question of "what should I do with my life", but I began anyway.

As I read, I noticed a huge increase in my understanding because of the way the 1830 was formatted. There were no verses, fewer chapters, no footnotes to distract me, and a lot of space in the margins for note taking and referencing. I liked the fact that the notes I took were not someone else's idea of what the scriptures were saying, they were mine and what the Lord had taught to me. And my references were connections that I had made, not connections that someone else had made and printed into the scriptures for me. My scriptures were very alive.

For the next two years some friends of mine and I would talk every once in awhile about how nice it would be to have scriptures that were all formatted similarly to the 1830 book of Mormon. In the summer of 2015 one of my friends said that they had a plan to re-do the scriptures. I shared all of the ideas I had from my experience reading the 1830 and which turned out to be pretty much what my friend had in mind. We fiddled with some ideas for a while, like including the JST, making sure that all the scriptures we included were from the earliest extant source, and perhaps even throwing in some revelations that Denver had shared. In November of 2015 we began the project and acquired help from other trusted friends.

The entire process was a great learning experience. We would often run into roadblocks and ask in prayer what should be done about them. Our questions were often answered with clarity on how we were to proceed. A year later, in November of 2016, we had finished the project aside from some formatting that needed to be done. Since we had decided to include some of Denver's material we had to reach out to him in order to obtain permission to use it. He agreed to let us use some of his material and even offered to reach out to his publisher to get these new scriptures printed. At that point we essentially handed the project off to him and were just waiting for a new, functional set of scriptures.

About three weeks later I dropped in to Adrian Larsen's blog. He had posted earlier that day that a new, earliest extant version of the scriptures were made available. At first I thought that Denver had told Adrian about the project, but as I read through the post I realized that this was not talking about the project we had finished three weeks earlier. My heart sunk and I was really confused at why the Lord would inspire two different groups to do the same thing, or if one was inspired and the other wasn't. I contacted Denver to see what he thought we should do and he suggested that we meet with the other group to see what the differences were and if we could possibly merge the two projects to make one superior project. I agreed and the other group was contacted and a date was set to meet.

It took me a couple of days of prayer and looking at the other group's project before I realized that the left hand had no idea what the right hand was up to, and that this fulfilled the required testimony of two or three that this was a work inspired of God. I was glad that no one group could take credit, but because of the circumstances, God HAD to be given credit.

We are no longer two separate groups, but one bigger group. The process of merging the two projects has been almost effortless and certainly very inspiring.

While there is much more that could be added, this is basically what led me and others to where we are now."

So that is another way God speaks.