Day 31 Nephi's Ship: Trusting God's Unconventional Path

In Matthew 5.13, Jesus tells his followers that they are the salt of the earth, and in the same sentence offers a warning that savorless salt is good for nothing. Join me in an attempt to be savory salt as I share each day one verse of scripture and one small thought. Perhaps this small daily emphasis can lead to greater savor in your life and ultimately you and I can be savory salt.

Hello, my friends and family, wherever you're listening from. Thank you for joining me and know that I'm cheering for your every success. Welcome to day 31.

We are moving along inside of the story with Nephi and the ship and his incredible faith that's just been developed, kind of reaching a peak of sorts in chapter 17. Today, if you're reading along with me on the 365-day journey of the Book of Mormon, you're going to read 1 Nephi 18 verses 1-11. We are going to dive straight into verse 2 today for our reading.

We're going to continue this Nephi building the ship thing. This is what it says, 1 Now I, Nephi, did not work the timbers after the manner which was learned by men, neither The Bible says I think it interesting that Nephi adds this kind of note inside of here that he building this ship but he seems to be pretty clear that it is not a normal ship At least not that one that at the time would have been considered normal was not after the manner of men. And he's talking about how much time he's spending with the Lord here.

There's a couple other verses that allude to that as well. Well, Nephi is really relying on the Lord. And now that his faith is such that we talked about like yesterday, now that his faith has kind of hit that level, the Lord can really open up what he can see here.

It's creating, you know, incredible things and an incredible outcome. The ship is going to be different than any manner of men would notice there. And I think the cool lesson we can pull out of this is, look, you can do hard things.

And with the Lord, you could do You can do impossible things with the Lord. When you pair up with Him, you don't have to rely on the ways that it's always been done. Or sometimes if you're working with the Lord or you're following the Spirit, it may not look like it's the conventional road to go, but it's going to work.

I don know if this really connects or not but I had a thought come to me a time in my life We used to live in Houston Texas and we had just barely moved there my wife and I We moved to Houston right before Hurricane Katrina came through in New Orleans in Louisiana and whatnot And that was kind of a crazy experience I went over to clean that up and my goodness my eyes were opened to the destruction of natural disasters Names of the And within about six weeks another hurricane called Hurricane Rita was projected to come straight through Houston and we didn know what to do So our family at the time, our cousins, they had two sons that were up at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas. And they said, you guys, you got to get out of town and you got to come up to College Station. You can stay with us in the apartment with the boys.

So my wife and I were gathering things as best we could in the car. There were no gas stations anywhere around. We did have a tank of gas.

We got on the freeway and it was a gridlock. It was bumper to bumper to bumper to bumper. This was an interesting time for us and we didn't know really what to do.

And so my wife and I said a prayer. We asked for help to get to College Station. We turned off our air conditioner to try to save gas.

We had no idea how long our gas would last while we're just sitting there idling and we didn't know whether to turn the car off or if we kept it on because sometimes the car would start to move. The traffic would go and sometimes it would not. What usually would be about a two to two and a half hour drive to College Station ended up being almost eight and a half hours.

I can remember one of the kind of small miracles in our lives It was a big miracle for us at the time but a miracle in our life that made it the Lord just helped us do it better We got to College Station and our gas tank indicator had not moved even though we had had the car running for eight and a half hours straight and had been in traffic and had been driving along the road trying to figure out how to get out of Houston to get away from this hurricane Such an interesting time for us to look back at and consider and yet at the same time we just we did what we felt we were supposed to do. We asked the Lord to help us out and then we just followed the promptings. Turn on the AC here, turn off the AC here.

We had a little spray bottle and we were trying to kind of spray our daughter a little bit to kind of cool her off and stuff when she was sitting in the back. Such an interesting experience. I think Nephi is trying to let us know that, hey, there's going to be times in our lives where we do things unconventionally.

We do things a little bit differently than men are used to, but as long as we're doing it with the Lord's help, it's going to work out. And that's what I love about this verse inside of Nephi's story today. That's all I have for today, my friends.

Remember that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass. Keep it small, keep it simple, and always seek to be savory salt. I'll be here tomorrow. I hope you are too.