Chapter Two

Reaching through Wrestling

Nevertheless Alma labored much in the spirit, wrestling with God in mighty prayer.

—Alma 8:10

 

Enos in the Forest

There is another type of feeling after God spoken of in scripture that clarifies and gives intensity to our face-to-face communications with heaven—wrestling. Now, I do not want to get tied up in semantics, but there is intuitive power in words well used. We sense truth. The narrative of scripture is filled top to bottom with metaphorical language. These metaphors are designed to help us reach deeper levels of mind and soul. If a particular image or poetic expression does not help, we search for others.

For example, the Atonement of our Savior is truly beyond our finite minds to comprehend so it is presented in figurative, representative, or illustrative comparisons—three of the main ones being legal, economic, and healing symbols.

He is our advocate—our lawyer—with the Father. Sin is broken law. There will be a judgment and a punishment or reward. We stand before the bar of God. These are all terms from jurisprudence. We need a defense attorney and Jesus pleads for us. Alma and Paul used these terms, but then Alma was a chief judge and Paul lived in the legal world of the Roman Empire.

Sin is also debt, and we are in danger of the creditors. We are unable to balance the account. Mercy is applied if we forgive our debtors also, as in the parable of the unmerciful servant. Jesus has the means to pay the debt and we go free. We need a redeemer—that word is an economic word though it is so attached to Christ we may not realize it.

Sin is a sickness, a disease which mars the image of God we carry. We need a physician, as Jesus, himself, indicated when he said: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mark 2:17). He is the “balm in Gilead” (Jeremiah 8:22). Jesus is the great healer who cures our spiritual leprosy and makes us whole. “If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean,” the leper cried. Jesus responded, “I will; be thou clean” (Mark 1:40–41). And so it is with us all!

Personally, I prefer to think of Jesus as a healer. It is less stressful—or painful, I suppose—to see sin as a disease than as a crime or violated law, or as irresponsible or foolish spending. I’d much rather approach the clinic than the court, but any of these three portrayals of Christ’s saving grace can be effective. We use what makes sense within our own souls. The same is true of feeling after and finding God, of reaching for face-to-face dialogue. Pouring out, wrestling, knocking at the door, and others are offered as analogy, as comparative visual aids, or linguistic clarifications, or descriptive symbols because things of the Spirit are sometimes beyond ordinary language and understanding. The prophets in the scriptures attempt to put them, like tools, into our hands. They are levers for the soul to lift thoughts to higher awareness and discernment.

We are dealing with the mind-set and soul-preparation that draws us nearer to God, or as Enos said, “I did still raise my voice high that it reached the heavens” (Enos 1:4). That is what we want to do—reach the heavens, learn how to raise our voices high. Pouring out is one way we can raise our voices or feel after God, but wrestling is another. As Hannah helped me learn to pour out, Enos has taught me to wrestle. I have often been impressed with the words Enos chose in his small section of scripture, which has become such a favorite to so many. His description of his efforts imparts such intensity—something that is often required of the soul. He is doing more than mere praying (though I hesitate to use the word mere in referring to any conversation with God). Though Enos sometimes uses the word prayer, his other expressions dominate and give a better understanding of the state of his mind and heart. Sometimes when I need to raise my voice high I ask myself if Enos’s words describe what I am doing as I talk with our Father in Heaven. The building accumulation of Enos’s narrative is as instructive as any single expression. Here are the words he applies. All emphasis in the verses is mine.

 

• “I will tell you of the wrestle which I had before God” (Enos 1:2).

• “The words ... sunk deep into my heart” (v. 3).

• “My soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker” (v. 4).

• “I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul” (v. 4).

• “I began to feel a desire” (v. 9).

• “I did pour out my whole soul unto God” (v. 9)—Hannah’s expression.

• “While I was thus struggling in the spirit” (v. 10).

• “I prayed unto him with many long strugglings” (v. 11).

• “After I had prayed and labored with all diligence” (v.12).

• “I cried unto him continually” (v. 15).

 

Intensity, concentration, passion, will, and effort are at work in the three prayer-filled areas that Enos focuses on—his own needs, his desires for the Nephites, and his hopes for the Lamanites. The answers simply must come! He won’t stop until they do! He wrestles them into being by hungering, struggling, and laboring in the Spirit. I have sometimes asked students if they think prayer is easy or hard. The answers we give to that question are revealing. Sometimes we too must wrestle with the Lord. I think about how different a response we would have to a friend or family member saying, “I must go and pray” than we would if they said, “I must go and wrestle before the Lord.”

Reaching through pouring out suggests, “I’m full anvd must get it out.” Our hands lift upward, offering to God what we hold. Reaching through wrestling says, “I’m empty and desire filling.” The stretching hand searches for something to grasp. That infusion may be a need for wisdom, forgiveness, strength, more intense faith, patience, love, answers, or hope. It may be a need to calm fears, or, as in Enos’s case, to draw forth blessings for others as well as oneself. We may wrestle with the best way to help a child or spouse or friend. Whatever the concern, the emphasis will usually rest in the need to be filled, or for God to intervene in our behalf, or to give direction, guidance, and wisdom. We may simply plead with him to solve our problem or to change the mixture of our lives.

We are given a secondary witness of wrestling a little later in the Book of Mormon. “Alma,” we are told, “labored much in the spirit, wrestling with God in mighty prayer” (Alma 8:10; emphasis added). There are some of those words again. Alma’s efforts were in behalf of the people in Ammonihah and, unfortunately, produced no immediate results. Alma finally left, rejected by the people. But he was instructed to return; upon his second visit he found and converted Amulek and, in time, even his rival Zeezrom. Our wrestlings, like Alma’s, may not always bring immediate answers as they seemed to with Enos, though they took him all day and into the night. Yet eventually the desired reply will come. This is especially true when we labor for another we love.

Is It True?—First Wrestle

When I wrestle, to use Paul’s words, I’m “feeling after” something to hold tightly to, to lock firmly into my heart. I was raised by a mother who had a powerful testimony of the Book of Mormon. I can’t remember going into her bedroom to say good night and not seeing the Book of Mormon on her nightstand. I recall her reading it intensely, which she does to this day at ninety-one. She read its stories to my sisters and me as young children. It had been the key to her own conversion as she struggled out of inactivity and rebellion. Because of this, I never doubted its truthfulness and I fully anticipated that the outcome would be positive when at the age of fourteen I decided to read it independently and gain my own witness.

However, for whatever inexplicable reason, as I started to read it I was filled with darkness. Doubts seemed to consume me. I was troubled by just about everything—the long chapters quoted from Isaiah, the emphasis on war strategy, phrases from the New Testament, horses, words that appeared to me to be made up like ziff, cureloms, and cumoms. So I wrestled. I wanted to believe. I wanted it to be true. I could not understand why I wasn’t feeling the warm, swelling, burning promises. All was confusion. All was doubt. I sometimes physically trembled with a gripping fear that at certain moments was terrifying. How could my mother be wrong? How could the wonderful people and organization I loved have arisen out of fraud and deception? When I read the Joseph Smith story, I could not help but think This boy is telling the truth. But a testimony of the Book of Mormon wouldn’t come. It was the black hole in my spiritual universe that was drawing all the light out of me. But I couldn’t give up the search. I couldn’t just walk away. That book wouldn’t leave me alone. The name Anti-Nephi-Lehies caused a crisis for me one summer. I was working at my uncle’s ranch. We always took Sunday off and I was reading the Book of Mormon in the front room alone—trying once more to get my answer. I never felt that God was saying to me, “It is not true.” I just could not shake the night around me when I read it. Sunrise would not come. Maybe it would today. As I read the name Anti-Nephi-Lehies, my heart froze. The voices inside me kept saying, Joseph Smith made that up. I shut the book and went down into the willows by the river and wrestled with my doubts all day. I pleaded with God, but after hours of pleading, I had to admit to myself that nothing had come. I thought, Well, maybe in seminary my faith will rise.

I studied the Book of Mormon in seminary during my senior year. It was not a good experience. I suppose it was partly my own fault, perhaps I was a bit rebellious, but the teacher could not connect with me or hold my attention. It was an early-morning class, and I finally asked my mother if I could drop it. She always gave us children a wide latitude of freedom, and though she was saddened by my choice, she gave me permission. However, the bishop was not so acquiescing. He came to our house and pointed out I was older and needed to set a proper example. I returned, but felt nothing. I did, however, begin to study Maya archeology, thinking maybe there would be something there.

After graduation, I went to Brigham Young University and took a Book of Mormon class. I thought I had the worst teacher in seminary, but my experience at BYU eclipsed even that. I was seventeen and, though it may sound strange considering my lack of Book of Mormon conviction, I never considered not going on a mission. I had planned on one since I was a small boy. I left off studying the Book of Mormon and switched to the Old and New Testaments. As my nineteenth birthday approached and I submitted my papers, I began to talk with returned missionaries, asking them how to be successful. I took a little spiral notebook and wrote down all their suggestions. I had many wonderful ideas, but something seemed lacking. In spite of my failing wrestle with the Book of Mormon, I had faith in a loving God.

One night I knelt beside my bed with the spiral notebook and laid it out before my Father in Heaven. I have collected all these ideas, I told him, but I feel something is missing. If you were to add anything to my list what would it be? It was such a simple request, but for reasons that were never fully revealed to me, the God we worship chose this moment to end my years of wrestling. With a voice as audible as the Spirit can offer without literally penetrating the ears, I heard these words: “Bear testimony that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God—and that the Book of Mormon is true.” Why did I not receive those words when I was fourteen, or in seminary, or at BYU? Why then? Why at a time when I was not even asking for faith to end my long fight with the darkness of doubt? I cannot answer that. God has his ways. Maybe I needed to show the Lord how much I wanted his affirming voice. I do not know, but I went to France and could sit before those we taught and tell them while looking fully in their eyes that I knew Joseph Smith was a prophet and the Book of Mormon was true. Sometimes they would ask me how I knew this and I would answer, “Because the voice of God declared it unto me.”

Yet my wrestle was not over, even though I believed it was. How could I have a stronger testimony? What could possibly shake it out of me? As I read the Book of Mormon during my mission, I came to love its stories and truths at a deeper level than when I heard them as a child from my mother. It was the first thing I wanted to get into the hands of those we met. I remember being impressed to put a copy of the Book of Mormon in the mailbox of a woman who told us her husband was not interested. She was converted by reading it alone without missionaries to teach her. My confidence in this wonderful book increased, yet there would be a final struggle.

As my mission neared its end, we were teaching a number of wonderful investigators. They all seemed to be progressing well. But over a period of about a week we lost all of them, and each time the reason was identical: They could not accept the Book of Mormon. We had one final family we were teaching, a single mother, about my own mother’s age, raising her children alone. She was such a beautiful person in spirit. I wanted to see her conversion as deeply as any I had taught in France. We approached her door one day and saw a letter taped to it. She told us she loved our church and its people, but she could not see us again. She had decided she could not join because of the Book of Mormon. Many of her concerns resounded in my soul; I knew them well. As we rode our bikes home in the darkness, through my tears I could feel the old fears resurface. I could not contain the thought that if we did not have the Book of Mormon, this woman would be a member of the Church. I found myself wishing it did not exist. You cannot be a good missionary and think that. You cannot be a good member and think it. When my companion was asleep, I knelt and wrestled. I was losing something extremely valuable to me and I did not know how to retrieve it. Finally, exhausted emotionally, I tried to sleep. In the early hours I was granted a dream.

An Old Woman at the Gate

I was in a foreign country with three friends. We were in a small medieval European village, such as you might find a few centuries ago. We loved the people and they loved us. It was a tangible, abiding, enduring, heart-filling love. During the day we labored side by side with them. At night a curious thing happened. They would lock us in a cage for fear we would leave them. We did not mind this nightly ritual because we knew why they were doing it. I have often pondered on this image and thought how powerful it is. If the nations of the world truly understood who the missionaries were that labored among them and what the truths they carry could do for them, would they not do all they could to keep them?

One evening as the door was being locked and we were alone, one of my companions said: “Tomorrow we must go home.” He then laid out the escape plan, and as I listened I knew it would work. We were all sad, but I knew also that he was right. We had to go home. It was time. The scene then changed. It was the next morning and the four of us were running down the main street of the town. We had small backpacks on and a crowd of villagers was running after us. Others were leaning from their windows, watching our running figures in desperation. All were crying, as was I. “Why are you leaving? We love you! We have been kind and good to you! We need you! Please don’t go!” We were running to the city’s entrance gate, a medieval-looking doorway with towers on both sides. The gate was open and once we were through, the people could not follow. I watched my three friends run through the opening, but when my turn came I could not go.

I saw an old woman sitting by the side tower. She had been an especially kind and dear friend. She was weeping; I could not run past that beloved face without stopping. I had only a few seconds before the crowd would overtake me. I knelt on the cobblestones in front of her and removed my backpack. I reached in, removed a French copy of the Book of Mormon, and placed it in her hands. “I can’t tell you why I have to go,” I said, “yet you must believe that I need to depart. But I want to give you something. It is the most precious thing I have and I love it with all my heart. If you will read it and teach it to your people, it will bring you more happiness than you believe can exist in this world and you won’t need us anymore.” I rose from her side and ran out the door.

I woke up at this point, all the images bright in my memory. And even more important, the feeling, the love, the conviction, the deep-seated belief was still there. It has never left me since that night. I cannot hold a French copy of the Book of Mormon without being overcome with emotion. I have now taught the Book of Mormon almost every year for the last thirty-five years. I have taught many bright, intelligent, and talented college students over those years, and I can say I have yet to meet the twenty-three- or twenty-four-year-old who could produce it. Its truths have lifted my life. It is one of the central pillars that hold up the ceiling of my soul. I believe that my many wrestling, laboring, long-struggling, hungering cries over the years have anchored it into place.

Pillars of the Soul

I have related these experiences at length because they represent my greatest wrestle with God, one of my most intense “feel after him” challenges. I have fought my way through two more almost equal in intensity. I have shared them in other publications so I will only briefly refer to them. My first experience with the temple endowment filled me with the same fearful nighttime tossing and darkness. I wished at the time we had no temple ceremony. I had to learn how to understand the symbols that the Lord uses in his house to teach us. This took a number of years and a good deal of thought. When I had wrestled my way through doubts and bewilderment, the temple became beautiful and filled with love and wonder. The highest summit of my life took place in the temple when I was sealed to Laurie. I anticipate no greater blessing will be bestowed on me in mortality.

I think often of the interior of the soul as a beautiful building held up by masterfully carved pillars that represent those irreplaceable truths we all fervently wish to know with unshakable firmness. There is a loving Father who watches us and cares; his divine Son showed us through his life and teachings and mercy how to live and find a place in our eternal home; that Father and Son spoke to the boy Joseph Smith in a grove of trees and initiated the restoration and revealing of divine truth whose crowning splendor is the temple; the scriptures contain the light and guidance sufficient to bring us home; we are still blessed with prophets and apostles, seers whose vision will be a constant stabilizing comfort as we walk the path that lies before us.

My love for Jesus and his teachings—no lovelier, more beautiful man ever walked the earth—is as solid as I believe it can be in this life, and my faith in my Father in Heaven was born in my earliest childhood and has never been questioned. These pillars have always stood firm, but I would say that two of the strongest supports of my testimony are the Book of Mormon and the temple ordinances. Perhaps in his divine wisdom, God knew that only by wrestling could I shape and raise those pillars into place.

Now I wrestle once again with the passing of my wife. All my happiness depends on the strength of my earlier raised and positioned pillars. If all I believe in is not true, I will never see her again. That is a black hole as great as I have ever faced. I believe my earlier wrestlings have prepared me for this last—and perhaps greatest—struggle my faith has had to sustain. As the Lord brought me through my earlier wrestlings, I trust he will bring me through this final hungering. I wrestle to continue moving along the path of conviction and faith I learned from Dante: “Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is” (see Browning, “La Saisiaz,” 61). We all want to advance from belief to affirmation to certainty, and we will as we feel after, reach for, and in time meet God face to face. We all will wrestle. If you never do, you may thank God with fullest praise that you were given the priceless gift of faith, for it is a gift of the Spirit. For those who wrestle—from the deepest doubts to how to best raise a child or build an eternal marriage; from rising through hope and forgiveness to the approach of an uncertain, perhaps even fearful, future—the Spirit seems to testify, “Don’t give up. At the end of your labors the answers come and the pillars erected are stronger for having wrestled them into position.” Did not the Lord tell Joseph Smith when he was struggling in Liberty Jail, “Hold on thy way”? (D&C 122:9). May our feet stay on the path—all good things in life lie on the path—and never leave it, though it requires us from time to time to wrestle, to hunger, to labor in order to move forward.

Wrestling’s Sometime Irony

Perhaps the most well-known use of the verb to wrestle in connection with prayer is in the Old Testament, in the story of Jacob’s relationship with his brother Esau. The story is instructive because of the irony of Jacob’s awareness—or lack of it. Jacob, returning with his wives and children from two decades of laboring for Laban, hears that his brother Esau is coming to meet him. Believing that Esau is still estranged from him because of their father Isaac’s blessing, he throws himself on the Lord’s mercy. “Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the mother with the children” (Genesis 32:11).

Later that evening, after having sent his wives over the Jabbok ford, “Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day” (Genesis 32:24). Though the story in Genesis is layered over with other details which can confuse the experience, Hosea’s retelling of Jacob’s famous wrestle gives clarification. He simply records, “He had power over the angel, and prevailed: he wept, and made supplication unto him” (Hosea 12:4). This is a spiritual wrestling. Jacob prevails as it lasts through the night. It is here that his name is changed to Israel, which means “to persevere with God.”

Wrestling, in a scriptural context, is by its very nature an upward path whose summit ends with face-to-face meetings, and it can and usually does take perseverance. It is also in this story that we find the first use of the phrase face to face in the Bible as it refers to an intimate contact with Deity. As the morning broke, Jacob named the place Peniel, which means “the face of God,” concluding, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” (Genesis 32:30).

However powerful the story may be as an illustration of wrestling for God’s intervening mercy, there is an even greater truth found in the irony of the story. That irony is one I think about every time I am driven by my needs into the world of feeling after and reaching as did Enos and Jacob. Jacob never needed to anguish so deeply and plead so earnestly for God’s protection against Esau. Esau is not estranged! He is not coming to slay Jacob’s family. In Jacob’s fear, he projected the worse outcome of his impending meeting with his brother—but Esau had only forgiveness, love, and welcome to give. Though Jacob did not know this, the Lord did.

What follows is, next to the forgiveness of the prodigal son, the most soul-lifting and beautiful example of reconciliation and mercy in the standard works. It is on par with another beautiful story of forgiveness in Genesis, that of Joseph and his brothers. “Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, Esau came, and with him four hundred men. ... And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept” (Genesis 33:1, 4). I have wondered at times when I wrestle, struggle, labor, or hunger for God’s help, if there is really no need to if I could only see right. So I have learned to question my questions, fear my fears, and doubt my doubts. That is good for the health of one’s spirit.

We will all wrestle throughout our lives. It seems to be a common portion of the cup of mortality. Peter, who walked on the water and then fell with the wind and waves, has comforted me often enough. That story is a perfect portrait of the wrestle between belief and faith and doubt and fear. Sometimes we can walk and sometimes we fall through that thin filament of faith’s firmness lying on the surface of the water. Thomas needed to see and feel and even the other apostles, with the Savior standing right in front of them, “yet believed not for joy, and wondered” (Luke 24:41). They needed the added assurance of watching the Master eat a broiled fish and honeycomb. We could talk of Zacharias’s hesitant questioning of Gabriel in the temple when John the Baptist’s pending birth was announced, a hesitation which brought on his loss of speech and hearing until Elizabeth delivered the promised child. And I think all of us understand a father’s plaintive cry to Jesus in behalf of his diseased son, “And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24).

We must be careful that we do not take counsel from our fears, though we are allowed the comfort of knowing that fear is a common part of humanity’s struggles. We may believe we are wrestling with the Lord when we are wrestling with our own anxieties. When I am confronted by this possibility, I am always reminded of a scriptural principle I call “ten-piece promises.” Herein we will discover another type of reaching.