My First Vision Assignment

I have come to decide that I'm not really a good blogger, which is fine, no one (including myself) really cares. However today I had the chance to do an assignment for my religion class here at BYU and I felt I should share it. It has been a great learning experience for me, and while I'm not the best writer in the world, I hope you can get the feeling out of it that I felt as I wrote it.
A little background to this assignment, we were asked to read several different versions of Joseph Smith writing about his First Vision experience when he saw God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ after praying in a grove of trees. Then we were to pick one out of three questions:

(1) In your own words explain why you think Joseph Smith provided different accounts at different times to a different audience (include at least three or four examples).

(2) What difference to your understanding of and appreciation for Joseph Smith's prophetic ministry did you gain by reading all the First Vision accounts?

(3) Pretend someone you know is investigaging the Church and approached you at a ward function and asked if he or she could send you some questions. In a follow up email, your friend asks "Why are there different accounts of the First Vision?" Now repsond to the question in order to build understanding and faith in this investigator. 

I picked number two. It was so great for me to ponder and I learned so much. Again, forgive my lack of writing skills.

McKall Ruell

Sept. 8, 2015

Rel C 225

First Vision

For most of my life, I grew up believing that Joseph Smith was perfect. He had perfect faith, perfect humility and perfect obedience. In short, I felt that he was a perfect example of being like the Savior. I suppose in many ways he was like a superhero in my eyes. With that image of the prophet in my mind I had a desire to be like him. I thought that someday I would accomplish miracles on a daily basis, have such a close relationship with Heavenly Father that every desire to do wrong would completely and magically vanish away and that I would never be scared to do what Heavenly Father asked me to do, no matter how hard it was. However as I got older I became discouraged and I felt that I could never live up to those standards because I was just a normal person. No matter how much I wanted to have strong faith, perfect humility and obedience, I couldn’t seem to quite get myself to follow through all the time.

            Over the past few years as I’ve had the chance to study the Doctrine and Covenants, Church History and attend many institute classes about our Latter-day Prophets I’ve come to see that Joseph Smith, as well as all of the prophets in this dispensation were normal, imperfect human beings. At first this was hard for me to understand, not that I ever doubted that the gospel was true, or doubted that they were prophets called of God (the feelings in my heart have always been too strong to allow me to do that) it was just that my super hero image had been shattered and I wanted to put the pieces back together, in the correct order this time. This assignment of studying the different accounts of the First Vision has in many ways been a final step in putting those pieces back together.

            It was been a great relief for me to understand the Joseph Smith, as wonderful as I still believe him to be, was not perfect. He didn’t have the best education and struggled with writing (which as I am struggling to write this is a great comfort to me). He was a normal person who at the end of the day could hardly remember what had happened the morning before, and if you’re like me you can hardly remember the hour before. For me, this realization has been comforting and empowering. If Heavenly Father can take a normal and imperfect person like Joseph Smith and do so many marvelous things to further his work, surely he can do that for me. I am no Joseph Smith by any means, and I still feel that he is one of the best examples of following the Savior, but whatever the Lord has planned for me I want to be able to accomplish it.

            All of the details in the first vision accounts don’t completely match up, but that is not what matters to me. Whenever I read about the first vision, no matter what version it is, the feeling in my heart is the same. I know God the Father and his Son appeared to the Prophet Joseph Smith and I am so grateful that a normal, imperfect 14 year old boy had the courage to go into the woods to pray, that he was humble enough to answer the Lord’s call and then to tell us about it.