Nephi gets the good stuff.

I’m not talking about when he and his brothers went back to get the brass plates from Laban. Nor when he and his brothers went back to get Ishmael’s family and, not coincidentally, wives for themselves. Although it did occur to me that there was another perfect example of how blessings come after the trial of our faith [and, frequently, our patience]: they seek first the kingdom of God, i.e., the scriptures which would become our Book of Mormon, and then they are given a necessary component for their exaltation, i.e., eternal companions.

No, that is not the primary reason why I am diving headfirst, and heartfirst, into the Book of Mormon. Although, yes, it is something which I desire when the Lord sees fit.

But I digress. Nephi hears his father relate a dream or vision, and desires to know the translation. An angel comes to ’splain, Lucy. In the Book of Mormon, when an angel appears to you, it’s generally because you are being a knucklehead, and you are being called to repentance. And when angels are sent to the righteous, typically their first words are “Fear not.” If there was any of that with Nephi, he left it out of his record.

Here, the angel asks, “What would you like to know?”

And Nephi says, “I want to see what Dad saw.”

The angel shows him the vision and asks if he knows what the tree means, and Nephi does. He tells the angel that it is a representation of the love of God, as are many of the symbols in Lehi’s dream. [I only noticed this morning that instead of the angel explaining it all to Nephi, which is what you would expect, Nephi gets to tell the angel, who confirms it.] And then he and the angel have an extended, ecstatic conversation about the good stuff.

You don’t get that sense of excitement in our translation of the Bible (we use the KJV, which I love, but it’s not immediately comprehensible); here you get a glimpse of that angel as an individual, with opinions and personality. I think he was just thrilled to be speaking with somebody who loved godly things and who “got it.” A higher-order version of the kind of conversations you get between people who love fishing, or knitting, or Jane Austen.

I wonder, parenthetically, if this was the angel who kept getting sent to Nephi’s family to tell Laman and Lemuel to stop whaling on their younger brothers?

“Hey, you two idjits! Knock it off! Oh hi, Nephi! Hey, Sam! You’re going to love the mansions [yurts] that are being prepared for you in the eternities. 100% yak felt. The moths are allergic it. Your wives will love that!”

I have worked the first row of nupps on Willow’s shawlette. The purling-back-together of seven loops into one stitch is exceedingly slow going, but childbirth words have thus far not been necessary. And the nupps themselves [five, I think, finished out of the 29 on this row] are lovely. Five nupps per pattern repeat times 29 pattern repeats. One hundred forty-five nupps. This may turn out to be my only venture into Estonian knitting, or I may discover that I love it every bit as much as cabling or garden-variety lace.

And on that nupp note, I will hop into the shower that I should have hopped into half an hour ago, because I should have left four eight minutes ago.