Joseph Smith’s Long Night

Two thoughts from reading A Marvelous Work and a Wonder about Joseph Smith –

From his story of Moroni coming to his bedroom three times throughout the night:

Joseph Smith is up all night having visions. In the morning he goes to work the farm and his dad can tell he’s out of sorts and sends him home. On his way home he literally collapses with exhaustion.

It occurred to me – wouldn’t it have been convenient for Joseph Smith to have gotten this instruction at any other time besides in the middle of the night when he had to do hard heavy labor in the morning?  Didn’t God know Joseph Smith was going to collapse on his way back home? Didn’t God care?

God rarely asks us to do easy things. Things aren’t meant to be convenient. Things are meant to make us grow.

Another thing, the collapse led directly to Moroni returning and Joseph being told to return to his father. Do you think when Joseph collapsed with exhaustion he might have wondered, “Why did he have to come in the middle of the night?” Joseph didn’t know the end from the beginning. He was directed to his father who believed Joseph when he said he saw an angel and  his father told him to immediately go follow the commands he was given.

Which leads to another thought I had.

What kind of fascinating teenager was Joseph Smith? Today, a teenager says, “I don’t feel good I can’t go to school” and parents are skeptical. Joseph Smith, in a situation where many teenagers would be trying to avoid intense manual labor, told his father he saw an angel “that commanded me to *cough not farm today, I mean, go get some plates from a hill *cough take a nap, I mean, yeah.”

And that father, instead of thinking, “My lazy teenage son was up too late playing video games (or whatever teenagers did in the 1800s) and now he doesn’t want to work,” thought instead, yes, that was a vision from God, I believe you, go do what the angel told you to do.

Jokes aside, the point I’m trying to make is that Joseph Smith must have been a fascinating young man. His father believed him. I wonder if, when he came back without the plates, his father wondered if he’d been duped into letting his son have an afternoon nap on a hill. This appeared to not be the case. Joseph’s family believed him from the beginning. For four years when he visited the hill annually. For months when he had nothing to show for the plates he had recovered. It was some time before he started to provide real evidence, a translation. Before the translation started, his entire family just had to take his word for it.

Again, what kind of extraordinary person was a 14-year-old Joseph Smith that his father immediately believed he did see an angel, he was commanded to do something, he was not making it up. I believe he must have been a very honest young man. I believe he was young, still a rough stone, but destined to eventually become a prophet of God.