3 Nephi 10

There will be time enough to explain that later.

I was tortured brutally for all this. Killed by oh-so-self-righteous zealots. But I’m back. So let’s get on with it.

This voice stunned everyone. It crippled the soundscape for hours. It was to hearing what the darkness had been to seeing. Even the pathetic laments died out. And then it came again:

Let me give you a metaphor. Because if I live anywhere, it’s in the house of metaphor:

A hen gathers her chicks under her wings. That’s how I wanted to gather you. I wanted to protect you and feed you. [This was repeated, more or less, three times.]

I still will. Because, even though I’ve treated you like the fox who’s broken into the chicken coop, I’m still a hen at heart. Try to remember that. Forgive me as I will forgive you. Let’s make a new covenant, you and I.

But if you back off, nothing will get rebuilt.

The voice ended and the wailing of mourners resumed. The three dark days ended but the gloom did not. Cataclysm tapered off but the psychological toll remained.

Miraculously, some of the splits in the ground started to close like sutured wounds. With all that had happened, this was enough to trigger some spotty rejoicing. The predictions had come true. Praise God, some said, though we’ve always had a few sarcastic types to muck up the emotional consensus. For some the sentiment stood; for others it stood on its head.

Many believed only the righteous were spared.

God kept them safe and killed only bad people, reinforcing an explanation God had worked so hard to dispel in his book about Job. Anyone who had not killed or wounded prophets, they said, was not drowned or suffocated by landslides or incinerated or crushed by falling rock or choked by smoke inhalation.

It’s a tough call. I will say that, obviously, those who were spared would make the case that they were better than those who died. Who would think the reporting would be otherwise?

But since the prophets predicted the destruction of those who resisted them, the logic of the day was that any who got destroyed therefore must have been resisting the prophets. It’s a bit of a logic problem. Philosophers have explained it. Those Greeks again.

Still, my job is to reaffirm that prophets said the wicked would die and many people died so they therefore were wicked, because that validates the prophet’s predictions and that’s my assignment, to validate, not confront. Because if I confront, who knows if I won’t be the next to die in a horrible “natural” (i.e., supernatural) disaster?

I do remember, though, that the prophets who foretold the bad Nephites’ doom were killed for their doomsaying. So I guess good people get killed too. They got stoned; so did the wicked in my story. It just depends on who was throwing the stones, I guess—nature or human nature.

My head swims with the possibilities. I calm it by noting the one good thing we all know: not everyone got killed. And the few survivors formed the seed of a new era. The gardener? Jesus himself. He was about to come and bulldoze away the backwash and debris of the last era.