Of Wars and Rumors of Wars

The Lord Jesus Christ declared the hearing of wars and rumors of wars to be significant among the signs of the latter days preceding His personal return to the earth in glory, to rule and reign.  This from Matthew, in the New Testament:

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars . . . For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:  and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.  (Matthew 24:6, 7)

This from Mark:

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled . . . For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:  and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles . . .  (Mark 13:7, 8)

And this from the Lord through a modern prophet:

And in that day shall be heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the whole earth shall be in commotion . . .  (Doctrine and Covenants 45:26)

As well as I can recall, I have always thought—from my young childhood—that I was living in the latter days, shortly before the return of the Savior to the earth.  I cannot remember a time when I did not suspect that to be true.  Perhaps many in many ages have had similar thoughts. 

My study of the scriptures, ancient and modern, and the words of the prophets, dead and living, matched against what I have witnessed in my life have confirmed my belief that the day of the return of Jesus Christ, to live and dwell among men as the resurrected Lord, is near.  I do not predict precisely how near.  It may not happen in my lifetime.  The Lord said that the Father has not confided the precise day even to the angels of heaven (Matthew 24:36).  But if I do not live to see that day, I do not expect that the Savior’s return will occur long after I die, in which case I hope to come with Him together with many who lived and died faithful to the testimony of Christ.

Until recently I had considered these prophecies of wars and disasters to be a sign of something new.  Yet wars of men and convulsions of the earth are found throughout the annals of history.  Perhaps the prophecies refer to an increase in frequency and intensity.  Maybe that is so.  Looking back on the recent twentieth century it is hard to find a year without war raging one place or another, and I cannot identify another century in which so many tens of millions were destroyed at the hands of their brothers and sisters.  The Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance, if not many other ages, were also racked with constant conflict and mayhem.  Their numerous wars seemed interminable, including a Thirty Years War and even a Hundred Years War.

I have come to suspect that in reading these prophecies I misdirected my focus.  For something to be a sign, it must be new or different.  What was the Lord saying here that would be different, different enough so that we might notice?  Perhaps it was not the wars and physical upheavals themselves, as those have been with us since man and woman left Eden.  What is very much new and different about today is our ability to hear of the wars, rumors of wars, and the natural disasters. The evils of men and the destruction of nature may be increasing in frequency—and the case for intensity of human mayhem is not tough to make—but what really is new is our ability to hear of them. 

Nothing in the entire history of the world can compare with the very recent ability of mankind, anywhere and everywhere, to hear of what is happening anywhere at any time on the planet.  That is especially true of “rumors.”  Internet communications, and the many evolving formats of social media, make the spreading of rumor—always known to travel on wings—electrifyingly quick and amazingly ubiquitous.  Every day we do hear of wars and rumors of wars and the whole world in commotion.  It is hard to avoid.

As the dashed expectations held by many at the time of the Savior’s mortal ministry blinded them to the reality of the fulfillment of prophecy, holding too tightly to one’s opinion of how prophecy might be fulfilled is a risky business.  The Lord expects us, however, to think about it, else why would He make the prophecies and repeat them?  I offer these thoughts for pondering, even while we observe the mighty work of God unfold in our own lifetime, as He told the prophets it would.  

What have you heard today?

Of American Prosperity and Failing Villages

The Internet has been a boon for small businesses.  No longer is the market of the small business limited to the local community.  The Internet—together with an efficient system for making payments— allows customers to find the business and do business from near and far.
 
I am thinking at the moment of the used and rare book trade, although I have frequented other lines of small businesses via the Internet, including finding hard-to-get plumbing parts.  I love to walk into a book store, especially a used book store, and more often than not I leave with a new acquisition or two in hand.  I recall not very long ago buying a set of the debates surrounding the ratification of the Constitution.  As the bookseller rang up my purchase he asked whether I had found what I was looking for.  I told him no, that I had found what I was not looking for.  That is the way it usually is for me and a book store, the surprise and wonder of it, the discovery of things of which I had not before been aware or did not know were available to me.

It is a problem that there are not that many small bookshops around, maybe at most one in a town, two or three in a city.  I understand that it is a tough business.  You have to be willing to let musty old volumes sit around on your shelves for a long time, and those books are costing money while they sit there.

The Internet helps solve that.  You can search for a title or an author and find perhaps several sources of the book, long out of print, in bookshops scattered around the country, in towns and villages where you may have never been and would be unlikely to visit.

I have remarked how much I loved a couple of readers we used in grade school.  I could not even remember the names of the books or their authors, but I cherished them for the enthusiasm that they taught me for economic growth and development in America.  I learned a lot more than reading from those books.  I learned that America was a growing and developing country, always becoming more, richer, grander, harnessing the optimism of its people who came from many places but found in America a place where there was joy in the hard work of the present because you owned the results of what you did and what you did was build a more prosperous future that you passed on to your children and their children, who built on it in their turn.

Through the Internet I discovered that the books were written by Mabel O’Donnell, entitled Singing Wheels and Engine Whistles.  They told of the fictitious town of Hastings Mills built in the early nineteenth century on an Illinois prairie, a town that grew to become the prosperous city of Hastings by the early twentieth century.

The town and characters were a literary fiction, but they captured the real spirit and efforts of what happened all over America at that time.  Elsewhere I have quoted a passage from the first book, Singing Wheels, in which the founder of the town, then numbering but a few dozen cabins occupied by hardworking people with dreams, shared with his son the dream of how the town would grow, transforming the surrounding prairie into prosperous farms and the town into the prosperous center that would serve them all.

In the second book, Engine Whistles, the grandson of that founder is chatting with a train engineer about what made the town into a thriving city of 12,000 inhabitants, and growing.  The engineer proudly tells the boy, Tom, that it was the railroad that put Hastings on the map, and the vision of the men—including his grandfather— who brought the railroad to Hastings.  At first Tom agrees, but on second thought Tom argues that there was more to it than that.

“A railroad doesn’t make a town,” he said with a thoughtful look in his blue eyes.  “The railroad didn’t make Hastings.  My grandfather did.”

“Come, now, lad,” boomed engineer Bill, a note of amused disagreement in his voice.

“Yes, he did, too!” insisted Tom, hurrying on and allowing no time for argument.  “He came west in a covered wagon when there wasn’t even one cabin in the valley of the Big Turtle.  He knew it was a good place for a town, and so he built a lumber mill.  Then he cut down trees and sawed lumber so that other people could build homes, too.  He’s the one who made the town!” (Mabel O’Donnell, Engine Whistles, p.37, 38)

As a child growing up in south Florida, I saw that story playing out around me, as each year new homes, businesses, churches, highways and much else were built.  Economic development was the way of life.  When I was a teenager my family moved to western New York, to a much older village, much like Hastings, built in the early nineteenth century by men of vision, a village that thrived into a bustling business, industrial and even cultural center of some 10,000 people. 

But I arrived in the village’s twilight.  It still numbered 10,000 people and still retained something of its old spirit, with several manufacturing and business establishments and even a college.  By the time I and my schoolmates left—and it seemed that most of us did leave—the college had folded up, as had all but one of the manufacturing firms and many of the businesses.  I understand that the biggest employer now is the local hospital system, a close second being the ugly sum of the various state and local government agencies.  People were very happy to get a new state prison built nearby.  The heavy taxation and regulations emanating from Albany made business too expensive and leached away the village’s future.  Just recently, driven by tax burden, the remaining inhabitants of the village voted to give up their village charter.

A different story, that one, but one that has its echoes in too many places.  I wonder whether that was the America that the Dutch, Germans, Italians, Irish and others who built the village had in mind for their descendants. 

I am very glad that I found Mabel O’Donnell’s books through the Internet and was able to buy them and read them again.  You will have to get your own copies, though, as I am passing mine on down to my grandchildren.