We Thank Thee Oh God For a Prophet

Tonight while studying the scriptures, I started thinking about Joseph Smith.  I was reading his account of the First Vision and it hit me how truly amazing and astounding this experience must have been for him.

Imagine this.

You're fourteen years old.  I don't know about you, but at fourteen years old I was a weird little home schooled sophomore living in a foreign country.  I was most definitely not prepared at that time in my life to meet the Creator of the Universe face to face, I doubt you were either.  Honestly, Joseph probably wasn't!  He'd gone out to the woods to pray, not to speak directly to the Redeemer of Mankind.  You've been to barely enough school to read the Bible verse that inspired your actions and enough church experience to thoroughly confuse you.  My brother was probably more mentally prepared for an experience like this at fourteen.  I really can't judge spiritually, but my brother had at least been born and raised in a stable family that had the truth.  Joseph was raised in a family that moved a lot, lost family members from time to time, and was currently split between religions.

I can only imagine Joseph's horror, when, after deciding to quietly ask the Lord for some help, he was set upon by the terrible power of the adversary.  As a brand new teenager, woefully unprepared, he was hit with the full, destructive force of darkness.  I know people who have had similar experiences, and even a couple times been close enough to witness the physical power that he can have.  These are my most terrifying memories, ones that I do not dare dwell on.  I can only assume that for a fairly innocent boy, experiencing this must have been almost a literal hell on earth.

Until that moment when the Lord manifested Himself.  Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, the Savior, the Creator, the One True God, showing Himself to a fourteen-year-old, uneducated, probably grimy and tear-stained, farm boy from upstate New York.  Can you imagine some of the thought Joseph might have had about that fact?  Precious few men had every actually beheld the true, divine form of God.  Moses, Abraham, Adam, the original twelve apostles.  Suddenly he appears to you, an absolute nobody.  Except, the Lord doesn't physically speak to nobodies, obviously you are someone much more than a nobody.  Imagine that for a moment.  Completely unsuspecting Joseph is floored with the appearance of two beings "whose brightness and glory defy all description" who call him by name and then say he has a great work to do.  Moses had to be transfigured to speak to God, we can only assume that something similar must have happened to Joseph at that time, how else could he have handled that experience?  When Christ appeared to the Nephites, He told them things that no human tongue could even utter, because the human mind cannot comprehend.

We are so blessed that Joseph was preordained to this task.  He sacrificed his entire life to the mission the Lord gave him that day.  He restored the truth to us, who were spiritually starving without it, so we are now so full we can't stand it anymore and have to share with others to keep from bursting.  How blessed we are the the Lord chose the perfect boy for the future job.  To plagiarize Brigham Young a bit, I feel like shouting hallelujah all the time when I think that Joseph Smith the prophet really saw God, and His Son, Jesus Christ, and was willing to give his all to bring light back to this dark world.  I know he was a prophet, do you?