Solving Problems at the Source

Another problem I've been having with blogging about these first battles of the war chapters is that while the Lamanites were being fairly ridiculous, I can also see some wisdom behind their actions. Attacking the Anti-Nephi-Lehies wasn't entirely necessary, but historically, violence has been pretty much the only tool that has proven effective at removing unwanted monarchs. Basically, the only way to get a new king is to kill the old one. I'm not sure why the Lamanites didn't finish the job when they discovered that the Anti-Nephi-Lehies weren't defending themselves or their king, but that's a discussion for another time. My point is that, if they really believed that having a Christian king was bad for their country, attacking the Anti-Nephi-Lehies was probably their only logical option.

But more to the point that I wanted to make today, when a person has a problem, they would do well to go to solve the problem at its source. If a swarm of hornets was biting my arm, I wouldn't rush to get bandages right away; I would get rid of the hornets first. If the Nephites were converting the Lamanites to Christianity, and if the unconverted Lamanites felt like that was a problem, it would make sense for them to go directly to the Nephites and convince them to stop.

The war chapters teach us both good and bad examples of how to deal with Satan's influence in our lives. Here, strangely, we see both good and bad examples being demonstrated at once. While it would have made more sense to specifically target the Nephite missionaries who had done the actual converting rather than attacking the Nephites as a group, it certainly makes more sense for the Lamanites to attack the Nephites than for them to kill their fellow Lamanites, the Anti-Nephi-Lehies. When they decided to go after the Nephites instead of the Anti-Nephi-Lehies, it was like targeting the hornets rather than attacking their own arm. Sure, they were attacking the wrong Nephites, but they probably didn't know that. They thought they were going to the source of their problem, which is usually a good idea.

Another lesson we can learn here is that there's more than one way to look at each story. It's easy to find a lot of things wrong with what the Lamanites did over the course of their history, but we might want to bear in mind that the stories we have about them were written by their enemies, the Nephites. Perhaps we would do well to also consider the Lamanites' point of view, and to look at the things that they may have done right. We can learn more from them that way, and the more we learn, the better we can handle life's various problems. For example, it makes more sense to go to the source of our problems than it is to lash out at others, and we can learn both of those lessons from the Lamanites.