Building Our Boat

Tonight for our family night lesson we talked about a couple of stories in Nephi from the Book of Mormon. The first was the story of when the Lord asks Nephi and his brothers to return to the danger in Jerusalem, after they have fled it's destruction, to get the record of their family and of the Jews which are now parts of today's Old Testament and the Book of Mormon. And the second story was when Nephi and his family have been traveling through the wilderness after Jerusalem is destroyed by the Babylonians. When they come to the ocean, the Lord tells them they must build a boat to travel to the land He has promised them. We discussed the importance of the scriptures in guiding our lives and how Nephi's family had to work together to build the boat. It would have been too hard for just one to do it alone, and work was stalled when some of the family members wouldn't pull their weight. Big tasks must be done together; we need to support one another and to work as a team.

The focus of the lesson was getting our family ready for our scripture summer reading program, a challenge we are all taking on together and must provide support for one another in order to accomplish our goals. So most of the questions we were asking the boys had to do with the scriptures, their significance, the way they teach us, direct us, answer questions for us, uplift us, etc. But when we asked them "What does God ask us to do when things get hard? What can we do to help us through the challenging times in our lives?" The answer we were expecting was something like, "Turn to the scriptures" or "Keep in mind the things we read so we can know what to do when things are hard." Something like that. But instead Josh answered, "Build a boat!!"

I loved that. Build a boat. So tonight, after our lesson we spent some time together in the twilight of a hot summer day, building our family's boat that will carry us all through the sometimes calm, sometimes rough waters of this life.