Journeying through the Wilderness to the Promised Land

    If you are intentional and consistent in seeking out, recognizing, and following the commandments of God and personal direction you receive from Him, you will eventually get to where you need to be, say what you need to say, and end up becoming the person you need to become.

    There are many parallels between our paths to various opportunities, careers, experiences, and blessings and the journey of Lehi and his family to the promised land. The Lord's guiding them to the promised land begins simply with the instruction to depart. Lehi and His family have no idea that they are going to have to go back to Jerusalem twice; they just go. They don't know that they are going to end up journeying for eight years, that they are going to break their bows, that they will almost perish several times, and so forth. And they have no idea when they get to Bountiful that the Lord is going to ask them to go farther. They think they have arrived.

    Perhaps it is a blessing that we don't know exactly how our paths through life will wind; such knowledge might cause us to hesitate to start or to halter along the way. It is difficult to know if Lehi and his family would have had the strength and fortitude to leave and to endure if they knew exactly how hard and how long the journey was still going to be at each point along the way. And yet that's just the way it should be--rather than focusing on how far we still have to go, we find greater joy and success in focusing on our very next steps. As Jesus put it so well, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient is the day unto the evil thereof" (3 Nephi 13:34).
    The way the journey was unfolded line by line, step by step, and phase by phase for Lehi and his family is also the way the Lord often leads us to where and who we need to be in our lives. Just like with Lehi, the Lord always lets us know the ultimate destination--our individual "promised lands," but each twist and turn may surprise us in the moment.

    Sometimes we might wonder if we will ever get there. Sometimes  we may find a place where we think we are going to rest only to learn that the Lord wants us to go farther. There may even be times we wonder if God has abandoned us and left us to perish along the way. But the overarching lesson that comes out of this narrative is what Nephi came to know so clearly through his experiences--that if we commit to keeping the commandments of God and never give up until we have accomplished what he directs us to do (1 Nephi 3:7), we will arrive, and until we do, we will be highly favored of the Lord in the midst of our afflictions along the way (1 Nephi 1:1). He always direct us, strengthen us, and provide means for us to in the moment we need it as long as we trust that we really are being led by the Spirit, even if we do not know beforehand the things that we are going to do (1 Nephi 4:6).

    As long as we keep trusting in the Lord, someday, we will look back at all of our present afflictions, questions, uncertainty, and whatever else is crazy in our lives right now and have the experience the knowing as Nephi did that these words of the Lord were true for us as well: "I will also be your light in the wilderness; and I will prepare the way before you, if it so be that ye shall keep my commandments; wherefore, inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall be led towards the promised land; and ye shall know that it is by me that ye are led (1 Nephi 17:13).