Remember

I had an interesting and random thought this morning as I started reading 3 Nephi 15.   Where is it in the history of man?  33 A.D.  Who were some of the prophets before this time?  Isaiah and Moses from the Bible, but Lehi, Nephi are two in the new world.  We have writings from these prophets, and they were shown marvelous things by the Lord.  They saw worlds without end (Moses).  So they knew many truths, not the least of which is the fact that the world as well as other worlds had to be round.  So at what point in time did the world not know the world was round? 

I just did a quick check on the Internet to verify what I thought I was taught in elementary school.   "Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus popularized the idea that Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because many Catholic theologians insisted that the Earth was flat."

Another quick look on the Internet to remind myself what the Dark Ages was all about.  It was the concept of a period of intellectual darkness and economic regression that supposedly occurred in Europe following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.  Time ran out before I could really wrap my brain around it, but my original thought was this:  “How in the world did Satan erase the memories of the people that they would believe the world would be flat  - not to mention a host of other questions?” Some day I want to study this.  For sure, it is evident to me Satan has the power to erase memories. 

Now where do you think I’m going with this?  Frequently you see the life of a good person fall apart.  They’ve received their covenants and they had knowledge of a lot of things pertaining to gospel principles.  Yet for some reason, they seem to forget.  Put this into a larger setting and you can see entire families not being raised with knowledge that was once taught to a nation.  It becomes a movement of darkness. 

I’m not certain why these questions came to mind except I’m seeing entire families who once had the gospel, and are now being raised without it.  These children will then raise families of their own and the beat goes on.  Because we have scripture that gives us a pretty good understanding of what the end of this world is going to look like, it is not difficult to see how it will happen and why we work so hard to keep it from happening. 

The gospel is full of light and understanding.  I am so grateful to have it in my life and grateful my children are teaching it to their children.  I pray fervently this will always be the case.  It doesn’t take long for a family to be in utter darkness, and it's not hard to see why our prophet has repeatedly told us that REMEMBER is the most important word in the English language.