36 And thus they did murmur against my father, and also against me; and they were desirous to return again to Jerusalem.
It seems like it’s human nature to prefer the known to the
unknown, at least when times get tough. Here is an example of that. As already
noted, Ishmael’s children were justifiably sad when he died. And in their
mourning, they started focusing on the hardship instead of the Promised Land.
I’m sure that’s why they wanted to go back to Jerusalem. Another thing we as
humans tend to do is romanticize the past. The children of Israel, wandering in
the desert, came to a point where they would rather return to Egypt, to
slavery, than face any more hardship (Exodus 16:2–3; Numbers 14:4 (1–5)).
I,
myself, have fallen victim to that thought process. I felt that going back to
school to finish my Master’s Degree was an answer to prayer. My Patriarchal
Blessing mentions a gift of teaching, and Sheri and I both had a strong answer
to prayer that I should go back to school. So we left on a shoestring and a lot
of faith on our journey to the “Promised Land” of a career change. It’s been
very difficult. My marriage was tested during graduate school like never
before. We obviously survived. My student loans have been an enormous burden,
and the salary of a teacher, at least the jobs that I have had, has not been
nearly enough to justify the debt load. There were many times over the past
nine years (as of the time of this entry, May 2008) when I have wanted to turn
back, to get out of education, to go back to working in a print shop. I forgot
how hard that was at times, and how unfulfilling. Now that I am in my “Promised
Land,” I see that it was all worth it, changing careers. I still have the debt
load, but with my current job I see a way to reduce that debt, or even
eliminate it altogether. So I can empathize with going back to Jerusalem.
The
problem is that as much as I wished at times I had never gone to school and
started the journey, the fact is that I couldn’t go back. And neither could
Lehi’s group. They had people in Jerusalem who wanted to kill them, not to
mention the imminent destruction of Jerusalem. They didn’t know what a good
deal they had, and wouldn’t really know until they actually reached their
Promised Land.
