Mothers In The Book Of Mormon

I believe that studying the Book of Mormon from the angle of women’s experience, women’s challenges, women’s testimony, has affected my testimony tremendously.

For example, with Sariah, I recognize far more and appreciate far more opportunities for my testimony to grow through trials. After studying Sariah and seeing her challenges there at the beginning of the Book of Mormon, I’ve come to the conclusion, that “if we will let Him,” God will take us to that place where no one can help us but Him. And it’s in that place that we find the greatest miracles of our life and recognize the fullness of all that He has to give to us, that He wants to bless us with. Sariah teaches me that.

When I think of Abish, desirous to be a good missionary but not knowing how to do it, she gives me great confidence, to just step out and not try to get everything right the first time. To open my mouth, to bear witness, to do something that I believe is what God wants me to do. And it may not be always understood or recognized and appreciated, but she tells me, “don’t wait for that, just do it!” God knows how to give compensatory blessings and bring about miracles out of our feeble best efforts.

I think of the mothers of the Stripling Warriors, who may have had some difficulties as they raised children as single mothers, at least in many of the cases that would have been true. And how often they would have gone to sleep at night and wondered, “Am I doing enough, have I done what God wants me to do? How can I do this without a father figure in the home?” And how many days they would go in, day in and day out, feeling frustrated and ineffective.

But years down the road, I think of how they would have felt as they received those reports back from the front lines of the war. And then when those sons come home, and the testimony they bore, and the witness they could give, that “God is aware of them,” and that they learned their faith from their mothers. I think that that would have been a remarkable thing. And a lot of times mothers don’t know what difference they make in the world.

I hear it often times at BYU among students. I remember teaching about those chapters about the Stripling Warriors and afterwards, I guess it was the end of the semester, asking students to do an application paper on something that they applied and I will never forget what one of the young men in the class said, “after studying the mothers of the Stripling Warriors, I called my mother and told her that I had now recognized that my faith here, away from home and at school, for the first time has come because of the example that she has set and the fact that she's always been there for me.”

I think that that was a remarkable experience for the mother to receive that. But I saw what a joy it had brought to the son, to be able to come to that conclusion. That happens all the time with mothers everywhere and I love that example and I think it’s one of the reasons why most women in the church know and love the story of the “Mothers of the Stripling Warriors.” Because they brought about good, by just doing what they could day in and day out, when they received no credit for it along the way.