"I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them (1 Nephi 3:7)."So Nephi and his brothers went back to Jerusalem. They first drew lots to see who would go talk to Laban. That didn't work well; Laman was thrown out. The next idea was to go back to their home and get all their gold and precious things and buy the plates. There may have been things that they needed to learn while on the trip to and from their house. Maybe patience. Maybe being willing to give away all they had to get the plates. Maybe learning to submit to the will of the Lord. I don't know.
Anyway, they bring all their things back and show them to Laban. Not only does their plan fail, it gets worse. This time Laban sets his servants to kill them. They escape, but then Laman and Lemuel turn on Nephi and make things pretty miserable, too. And all of this occurred while Nephi was on the Lord's errand. He was following the Spirit, living his life the way he ought, and trusting in the Lord. And it still happened.
At this point, if I were Nephi, I would wonder what the Lord was up to. Why had this happened when I was doing everything I should? But the Lord had a plan, and this preparatory experience was just that: preparatory. Even though everything had failed so far in Nephi's attempts to get the plates, it was still a commandment, so he still kept looking for ways that the Lord had prepared to help him accomplish the thing that the Lord had commanded.
I recently read this in a devotional by Rob Eaton, given at BYU-Idaho on January 19, 2010. He says,
"We sometimes simplify 1 Nephi 3:8 to this basic principle: the Lord won't command us to do anything we can't accomplish. But what Nephi actually said is 'that the Lord giveth no commandment unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.' If we buy into the oversimplified version of Nephi's statement and we have been commanded to climb the wall of Jerusalem, we might stand in front of the wall, jumping repeatedly in desperation, telling ourselves, 'I know I can jump over this wall because the Lord commanded me to.' On the other hand, I can imagine Nephi jumping a time or two and then stopping and thinking to himself, 'The Lord would not have commanded me to do this unless He had prepared a way for me to do it. I bet there's a ladder lying around here somewhere.'"
When everything unravels, and I am left without those plates that I was sure I almost had, I need to remember that it was a preparatory experience and that the Lord designs to rule the future as He has the past. And I need to look for other ways that the Lord has prepared for me to accomplish the thing that He has commanded.
