Jennifer Stultz

When I was young, our family tradition was for my father’s family to gather at the farm. My father had inherited the home where he and his siblings had been raised. His brother’s family lived only a few miles away, and one of his sisters lived about an hour’s drive away. However, the other two sisters lived in California and Texas. The sister in California did not visit regularly, but the family from Texas came nearly every year.

Hundreds of good and blessed years had passed from the time Jesus had visited his sheep of another fold(1) when things began to disintegrate and the people divided into factions and slid into darkness, finally uniting into two opposing nations, and war prevailed. Mormon however remained faithful to God, and although young was appointed to lead the armies of the Nephites. As the record reveals, their lands had become full of thieves and robbers and murderers and magic arts and witchcraft - nevertheless Mormon led them to a series of costly military victories. Yet they did not repent, and he saw that although his people began to mourn and sorrow and lament, “their sorrowing was not unto repentance, because of the goodness of God, but it was rather the sorrowing of the damned…”(2).