A Prayer of Faith

Have you ever stopped to think of the wonder of the day in which we live? Perhaps we can appreciate it more if we see how far mankind has come.

In Old Testament times people traveled on foot. Later, the donkey and camel were used either to ride or carry goods. About 3,500 B.C., the wheel was invented. Soon chariots for the rich and carts for the poor were bumping along dirt paths drawn by horse, donkey, or ox. The earliest travel by sea was in canoes. By the time of King Solomon, one-mast sailing ships were hauling goods from port to port. To sail against the wind, however, large oars were needed.

In New Testament times, the Romans had built a network of roads across their empire. The vehicles that traveled those roads were a bit fancier, but the technology was about the same—chariots and carts. The Romans improved sea travel by building large merchant ships that could carry many tons of cargo.

At His ascension, Jesus said, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). The only means of obeying His command at this time in the history of the world was by foot (human or animal) or by ship (rowing or sailing).

In the Middle Ages, land travel remained much the same, but several inventions advanced sea travel. The Chinese invented the compass, and the Europeans invented the rudder, making ships easier to steer, and these more modern ships now had three masts.

As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, land travel remained about the same. Saddlebags had been invented so that a horse could carry supplies as well as a person. Carts became covered wagons, while roads stayed about as in Roman times.

In the 18th century, stagecoaches carried passengers and goods regularly between towns. The first turnpike road was built, taxing for use of roadways. But land travel was still so slow that waterways were thought to be the hope of the future. Canals and rivers became the cheapest and most efficient ways to move people and product.

Enter Joseph Smith onto the stage of history. The night he received the plates from Moroni, he and Emma went to the Hill Cumorah in a borrowed carriage. Then, what was fairly static for over five thousand years, suddenly changed. The gospel of Jesus Christ was restored! The small stone cut out of the mountain without hands started rolling. Ushering in the last dispensation to prepare fr the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Restoration brought with it accelerated transportation and communication technology, enabling the fulfillment of the prophecy “that the time shall come when the knowledge of a Savior shall spread throughout every nation, kindred, tongue, and people” (Mosiah 3:20).

In 1926, Elder Joseph Fielding Smith said, “I do not believe for one moment that these discoveries have come by chance…. They have come and are coming because the time is ripe, because the Lord has willed it, and because he has poured out his Spirit on all flesh” (Conference Report, Oct. 1926, 116-117).

President Spencer W. Kimball said, “I believe that the Lord is anxious to put into our hands inventions of which we laymen have hardly had a glimpse….

“King Benjamin… called together all the people in the land of Zarahemla, and the multitude was so great that King Benjamin ‘caused a tower to be erected, that thereby his people might hear the words which he should speak unto them’ (Mosiah 2:7).

“Our Father in Heaven has now provided us mighty towers—radio and television towers with possibilities beyond comprehension—to help fulfill the words of the Lord that ‘the sound must go forth from this place unto all the world’ (D&C 58:64) (Ensign, Oct 1974, 3-5).

President Gordon B. Hinckley said, “I am so deeply thankful that we have the wonders of television, radio, cable, satellite transmission, and the Internet. We have become a great worldwide church, and it is now possible for the vast majority of our members to participate in these meetings as one great family, speaking many languages, found in many lands.”

From B.C. 3500 to A.D. 1820, (5,320 years), not much changed in the mode of land travel and air travel was only for the birds. “Go ye into all the world” must have seemed all but impossible. Today, a letter that once took many months to reach the sender now can be transmitted in seconds. Travel that used to take months now is accomplished in less than a day. You can lunch in New York, dinner in L.A, and breakfast in Honolulu.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote of her subsistence-level life on the American frontier in the Little House series, believed she’d never see loved ones again because she was moving two hundred miles away. You can feel her anxiety as she awaited her father’s return from his multi-day hunting trips alone in the big woods. If someone had told her that in 150 years her descendants would carry a small device, push a few buttons, and talk to anyone who had a similar device anywhere in the world in seconds, she would call it foolishness or a miracle.

As expected, the enemy of the Lord’s work meddles in, abuses and misuses, new technology, but his perversions are not the topic here. We are simply rejoicing in the opportunity to watch the work of the Lord expand and thanking our Heavenly Father that this same technology that makes world-wide missionary work possible also makes our lives so much easier and nicer.

In the 2007 Church Almanac there is a forty-page article on technology and the Church titled, “A Steady Revolution” by Dr. James B. Allen. He writes:

“Where as in the 1950s missionaries still went to their mission fields by train and ocean-going vessels, sometimes taking weeks to arrive, in the year 2000 they went by jet plane, arriving almost anywhere in the world in a matter of hours after leaving a Missionary Training Center. The air travel of General Authorities [is] scheduled by computer many months ahead of time, correlated with the various stake or regional conferences they [are] scheduled to attend.”

Brother Allen explains that computer programs have changed almost every facet of how the Church does genealogical research, the temple endowment presentation, membership records, financial reports, (and now even temple recommends). He speaks of film and digital technology that puts videos on videotape or DVD for home as well as Church use.

Yes, technology allows us to live more comfortably than ever before in history. In our ease, however, we have to remember these lifestyle conveniences are a by-product of the true purpose for these inventions. “For, verily, the sound must go forth from this place into all the world, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth—the gospel must be preached unto every creature” (D&C 58:64).

You may be wondering if the premise that Joseph Smith’s First Vision in 1820 could possibly pinpoint the beginning of this revolution in technology. Jeffrey D. Sachs, a noted economist, selected by Time magazine as one of the world’s hundred most influential people, gives this exact date, 1820, in his New York Times best-selling book, The End of Poverty, Penguin Books, 2005.(The date 1820 is used ten times, pages 26-30.)

Dr. Sachs writes: “In the period of modern economic growth, however, both population and per capita income came unstuck, soaring at rates never before seen or even imagined. As shown on Figure 1 (page 27), the global population rose more than sixfold in just two centuries, reaching an astounding 6.1 billion people at the start of the third millennium, with plenty of momentum for rapid population growth still ahead. The world’s average per capita income rose even faster, shown in figure 2 (page 28), increasing by around nine times between 1820 and 2000. In today’s rich countries, the economic growth was even more astounding. The U.S. per capita income increased almost twenty-five fold during this period, and Western Europe’s increased fifteen-fold…. If we combine the increases in world population and world output per person, we find an astounding forty-nine fold increase in total economic activity in the world… over the past 180 years (from 1820 to 2000).”

Eighteen twenty is the year when population and productivity of the world began to dramatically advance! Eighteen twenty! There is measurable purpose and design to the Lord’s plan.

Below is an abbreviated list of inventions that have come since that fourteen-year-old boy knelt in a grove of trees in Palmyra, New York on “the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty” (Joseph Smith-History1:1).

1823 electromagnet, 1825 passenger railway, 1827 microphone, 1830 sewing machine, 1834 refrigeration, 1835 propeller, revolver, 1837 Morse code, 1847 antiseptics, 1852 airship, 1856 pasteurization, 1859 internal combustion engine, 1861 bicycle, 1862 plastic, 1863 underground train, 1866 dynamite, torpedo, 1867 typewriter, telephone, 1868 traffic lights, 1877 phonograph, moving pictures, 1879 light bulb, 1884 steam turbine, 1885 automobile, radio, 1892 tractor, 1893 airplane, 1908 assembly line, 1916 sonar, 1923 television, 1926 liquid fuel rocket, 1928 antibiotics, 1930 jet engine, 1936 helicopter, 1938 photocopier, 1941 atomic power, 1946 microwave oven, 1947 mobile phone, 1948 computer, 1950 credit card, 1954 solar cell, robot, 1956 nuclear power, 1958 computer modem, 1959 lunar probes, 1960 laser, weather satellite, heart pacemaker, 1961 human space travel, 1962 communication satellite, 1963 cassette tape, 1964 computer mouse, 1966 fiber optics, 1967 portable calculator, 1969 Internet and manned moon landing, 1971 microprocessor, e-mail, floppy disc, 1973 barcode, space station, 1975 personal computer and laser printer, 1977 MRI scanner, 1981 space shuttle, 2000 molecular transistor, 2001 nano transistor, 2004 metal rubber. (See http://www.krysstal.com.)

The Lord has truly given us the tools to accomplish His work. And work we must! Jesus Christ said, “If ye believe me, ye will labor while it is called today” (D&C 64:26) “for the field is white already to harvest” (D&C 4:4).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 10:18 pm and is filed under United Sisterhood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.