My whole life has been musical, in one way or another. My whole life has revolved largely around musical instruments. Therefore, ever since my cognitive skills were developed enough to read and comprehend for myself the holy scriptures, the phrase "instrument in the hands of God" had always reminded me of musical instruments doing amazing things while in the hands of people.
I've read the Book of Mormon numerous times. I keep re-reading it. This time around, I knew I wanted to read it a little bit differently from how I ever previously had done. This current time, I am listening to the lds.org narrator read it to me as my nightly bedtime story. I've been loving it bigtime. As the chapter gets read, I listen carefully for a specific word or part that jumps out at me. And when the chapter gets done, I use my phone to log whatever thoughts occurred to me as I was listening. I report which verse got my brain and heart really whirring. (I periodically email my phone log to myself, as a form of backup, lest my phone decides to meet its doom or inferno someday. I soon plan to convert my phone notes into a nicer, cleaner, easier-to-navigate format in a fancier word processor.)
Every once in a while I'll come across a chapter, listen to my digital storyteller read it to me, and as soon as he finishes, I'm all "Hold up... I'm pretty sure I didn't pick up anything from that one......" But since I'm passionate about determinedly finding something I identify to be pertinent to my life in every single chapter, the "stubborn" side of me goes, "Alrighty then. Looks like we're gonna just have to start this chapter over again and try this again!"
Alma 35 was one of those "redo" chapters. First time I listened to it, I didn't detect a favorite word, phrase, or verse. And so I listened to it again. And ironically, Alma 35 is the chapter that contains the verse that I wish to highlight right now for you. Particularly, the 14th verse is what really grabbed my attention.
And so... INSTRUMENTS. Here comes the verse (well, half of it):
And Alma, and Ammon, and their brethren, and also the two sons of Alma returned to the land of Zarahemla, after having been *instruments in the hands of God* of bringing many of the Zoramites to repentance......
Like I said in the first paragraph of this blog post, I used to always associate the scriptural phrase "instrument in the hands of God" with musical instruments, since my life -- almost ever since my birth -- has been heavily music-oriented. I play piano. A lot. I'm no Liszt, but I'm good.
But lately, my Alisonian world has been encountering close loved ones who've recently undergone some sort of medical surgery. Even I had a recent tooth extraction and minor bone graft -- no biggie, but surgical still the same. And so... SURGICAL instruments! No longer just musical instruments occupying my waking moments.
And so what I'm getting at is that there may be at least a couple of different ways we can paint "instrument in the hands of God" on the canvas in our heads. We can pretend it can be like we are a musical instrument in the hands of God, the great master Musician -- that way we can create and spread true righteous beauty among our family, friends, and neighbors, anywhere we go. AND we can also pretend it can be like we are a surgical instrument in the hands of God, the master Surgeon and Healer -- that way we can help mend broken hearts when and where needed, and we can help others discover or remember that there is a God who is that master Healer, who hears and answers their prayers every single time, who loves them incredibly and infinitely so much, and whose Only Begotten Son is Jesus Christ: the Way, the Life, the Light, the Redeemer, and the Savior of the world.
