Day 23: Helaman 5-7

I have missed doing my personal scripture study lately. This prayer blog takes enough time that I don’t generally double up. No excuse, I know…. As I started the year another goal of mine was to write my thoughts after reading the scriptures, take my study more meaningful. Yeah, I am just full of goals this year, it seems. Anyways, I went back to my usual spot for tonight’s reading. I have a few random thoughts that I’d like to share.

Have you noticed how many times the word remember shows up in Helaman 5? A lot. The word always makes me think of my graduate studies… I wrote my thesis partly on memory theory. Whenever I see the word remember, I want to stick a hyphen in to make it re-member. Re- create. Re-build. Re-construct. Re as a prefix means to do again. We know the things we must recall, but to remember can imply making those connections new to us, to re form them into a more relevant context. Make it mean something by examining it and re-fleshing it into existence. I could keep going but… It’s pretty philosophical and I’m not quite ready to delve deeper tonight.

Another prayer thought that hit me was Helaman 7. This is when Nephi is praying on a tower and draws a crowd because it so unusual. I was struck by a footnote about the tower…. It links back to Alma when the city is fortified with lookout towers. This seems to be the tower Nephi is on, a tower of safety and protection. Prayer provides us fortification. It also protects others as we pray for them. He didn’t go there to make a scene, but rather to protect his beloved, wandering people.

Prayer is all around us. It reshapes us. It protects us. And it keeps us close to God.