After the saints had settled in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young sent groups to settle all over the land west of the Rockies. The first group that tried to settle in Arizona quickly ran out of water and was in danger of everyone dying of thirst. After much prayer and fasting, they were blessed with enough rain to fill their barrels and beat a hasty retreat back to Utah. As the group related the miraculous rain and also stressed the impossibility of ever settling in Arizona, Brigham Young asked one of the men, Daniel W. Jones, what he thought. He said, “I would have filled up, went on, and prayed again.” (Daniel W. Jones, 40 Years Among the Indians). Sometimes we feel that we've sunk every ounce of trust into our relationship with our Heavenly Father that we possibly can and now it's time for Him to put His cards on the table and prove to us that it's all been worth it. To the group that first attempted to settle Arizona, it seemed to them that nearly dying of thirst was proof that trusting in the call to settle Arizona had been a bad call, but not to Daniel W. Jones. He was willing to go double or nothing with the Lord and keep trusting Him even when it seemed that he and all of his friends had been punished rather than rewarded for their act of trust. The scriptures are full of examples like this. Just think about the men who had been chosen to scout out the land of Canaan for the children of Israel to settle after fleeting Egypt. You would think that after surviving the plagues of Egypt and narrowly escaping the armies of Pharaoh by walking through the Red Sea would have been trust enough for them to have earned the right to walk into the Promised Land without too much of a fight. But no. Ten of the twelve men reported that the land was full of giants and it would be impossible to enter that land and they had made a bad bet following Moses and his God and they should have stayed back in Egypt and never tried trusting in the Lord to begin with. But Joshua and Caleb doubled down on their faith and trust in the Lord. They had seen so many miracles already that they knew that if the Lord could defeat the Pharaoh and all of his armies, then the people of Canaan would hardly even be a challenge for Him. And Joshua and Caleb were the only two of those who originally left Egypt who were finally able to enter the promised land 40 years later. The widow of Zarephath had already been brought to the brink of death by starvation but she was asked to go double or nothing and give her very last crumb to the prophet Elijah. Naaman traveled all the way to some backwater province seeking a holy man to cure him of his leprosy and was told by a mere servant to go bathe in a dirty river. Nephi was first chased out of town and then robbed of all of his family's wealth and then beaten by his brothers and then walked into a pitch dark city with no clue of what he was supposed to do and then told to break one of the ten commandments and kill Laban in order to get the brass plates. Again and again, those who have chosen to double down on their trust and keep betting on the Lord even when they sink deeper and deeper into the hole eventually see, like Job, that the Lord will bless the latter end more than the beginning (Job 42:12). “Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.” (James 5:11). We are all wandering through the desert and we are all given the choice when we have been praying desperately for rain and finally receive it to either retreat back to safety or to fill up, go on, and pray again. I know that it is scary to trust in the Lord and then watch everything seem to fall apart with no possible way of putting it back together and then to go double or nothing and keep trusting in the Lord anyway, but I know even more strongly that if we will keep trusting and hoping against hope that we will see the end of the Lord and discover that it is better than we could have possibly imagined and worth every doubt and second guess that we experienced along the way.
