Don't Mean to Get All Churchy on Ya - 2nd ed.

The LDS version of the scriptures contains tons of cross-referencing footnotes. You won't find any cross references to actual events from modern church history, but wouldn't that be a fun project for a future edition?

I was reading in Alma 35 this week - again, I'm not much of a scriptorian, I mainly just read a few verses as the last thing I do each day - and was struck by a particular verse.

At this point, Alma and Amulek have just finished preaching to the Zoramites. There were a few believers, and after consulting together, the more popular part of the Zoramites decided to cast the believers out of the land. These people then came over to the land of Jershon, to dwell with the people of Ammon.

(For some reason, this majorly ticked off the Zoramites, who demanded that the people of Ammon also cast off these people. They refused, and it set off the series of wars that consume most of the remainder of the Book of Alma. I'm not sure exactly where the Zoramites expected them to go - but that's beside the point.)

This is what it says in Alma 35:9 regarding the behavior of the people of Ammon towards the Zoramites and their castoffs:

"And now the people of Ammon did not fear their words; therefore they did not cast them out, but they did receive all the poor of the Zoramites that came over unto them; and they did nourish them, and did clothe them, and did give unto them lands for their inheritance; and they did administer unto them according to their wants."

After reading this passage, I thought of the people of Quincy, Illinois, who in the winter of 1838-1839 received thousands of Mormons into their city. The Mormons had been driven from their homes in Missouri after an extermination order had been issued by the governor of Missouri. The Mormons were heading eastward to find a new place to settle - which of course, was eventually Nauvoo, 40 miles up the Mississippi River from Quincy. The parallels between the two stories are very interesting.

I haven't done a ton of research on this, so I'm not sure exactly sure of the background of the people who inhabited Quincy, Illinois in the mid-nineteenth century - what would cause them to respond with such charity to these Mormons refugees? We know a little more about the people of Ammon - they too had once been cast out of their land, so they were likely "paying it forward", and as is pointed out continously in the Book of Alma, they were something of a remarkable people anyways.

I don't know how much this sort of thing happens in our day - people nowadays seem to tend to respond negatively to dissimilar people showing up in their towns and cities - the tendency is to tell people to go back where they came from. So it's not an easy thing to do, being charitable.

It's also interesting to note that in 2002, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed in Quincy as a way of repaying their good deeds. If that wasn't enough, the church also donated the proceeds from the concert to the city.