1 Nephi 16, part 1 (verses 1-5)

Here is a summary of the first recorded conversation in the chapter, found in verses one through four.

Nephi: Righteous peoples gets blessed, and the wickeds burn!
Laman: Awwwww man.
Lemuel: That be harsh, brah.
N: But it's TRUE!
L&L: ..........
Nephi: You guys should really be righteous. Really. Seriously. (Presumably, he goes on...)

And then they humble themselves and Nephi writes that he "had joy and great hopes of them, that they would walk in the paths of righteousness." Really? This is going to sound incredibly cynical, but did he SERIOUSLY think that? That it would be that simple, that all he had to do was EXPLAIN to his wicked brothers why being righteous was in the long run a much better deal than being wicked, and they would listen and completely turn their lives around? Maybe this was the first time that they really seemed to get it. Maybe that was the big difference from Nephi's perspective. I just really wish there were some sort of alternative record that was written from Laman and Lemuel's perspective.

I think a major clue to this whole mystery is found within the summary of that conversation, the line that says "the guilty taketh the truth to be hard, for it cutteth them to the very center." This had never occurred to me until this time around, but THAT is the main reason why you have to convert someone to loving God and wanting him or her to have that desire to please God before you can ask them to make any lifestyle changes, or really any changes at all. If some stranger walked up to me on the street and said, "You may never eat another apple as long as you live, or else you will be punished," I would give him a weird look and move on with my life. However, if someone I loved deeply came up to me and said, "Every time you eat an apple, the voodoo guy down the street stabs this little image of me and it makes my eyeballs bleed." Assuming I believed this person, of course I would stop eating apples, for his or her sake. It's the same thing with righteousness. It's why so many missionaries are so ineffective: you can't convince anyone to obey God using logic, or intellectualism, or anything else but a love for God. Fear of punishment can substitute for the short term, but it never lasts.

It is possible that Nephi saw a glint of what might for a love for him, and a love for God, in their sad little faces when he thought they might be turning their lives around. The notion would be especially tempting if he also thought that perhaps his descendants might be spared all the violence and turmoil that he had just seen in the his vision of the future. Or maybe he was just a really hopeful, positive guy.

There was a missionary I worked with who believed everything everybody told him. If someone promised to quit smoking, he insisted that they were, even if we went to visit and the house was laden with cigarette butts. If someone promised to come to church and was nowhere to be found the next day, he insisted that the tram must have broken down. At the time, I thought he was delusional, and he was at least on some level--he baptized a lot of people who liked him, or were afraid of him (he was an ex-marine or something like that) who had little understanding of the gospel and often fell off the face of the earth weeks after their baptism. However, he met once with an investigator of ours who had been meeting with the missionaries for YEARS, and she said the her short lesson with him was the strongest she had ever felt the Spirit, ever. I remember feeling both jealous and perplexed by that statement, and then oddly gratified when she didn't show up to church the next day even though she had sworn to him she would come.
In an act of legitimate immaturity, I do believe that I went up to poor Elder P. and hissed "I told you so" when she didn't show up. We had been talking about dropping her, and being right somehow felt validating to me. How on earth was being right more satisfying than helping out a nice woman who was thisclose to joining the Church? I am a jerk.

I suppose the really satisfying thing about being cynical is that if you're right, you never got your hopes up to begin with, and if you're wrong, you're pleasantly surprised. But I'm pretty sure that cynicism isn't the way of Jesus. Or Buddha or pretty much any great religious figure, for that matter. Uh oh. I am in so much trouble.