3 Nephi 17

[Jesus turned back to the crowd and shouted in their direction:]

Look, it’s my time now. And I know you don’t get everything I’m saying, which Father-God basically dictated to me as a script. So go home and ponder what I’ve said. Stewing about ideas is the only way to really taste them. I’ll be back tomorrow. I hope you’ll be ready. Because I’m not letting up either in difficulty or length of sacred prose. In the meantime, I’m off to visit “the lost tribes of Israel,” a phrase I dislike, since Father-God knows where they are and he’s “told” me, as if we actually had independent thoughts in the first place.

[People started crying. It seemed like he’d just gotten here. After a few hundred years of speculative waiting, couldn’t he hang around a little longer? He said:]

I do feel sorry for you. From my gut, honestly. I want to heal some people. It’s this unstoppable impulsion in me. Bring me any of your blind, deaf, palsied, scabbed, or deformed friends. I’ll cure them, partly to show you what I’ve been doing so much in Palestine for the last three years.

And with that he began a cavalcade of astounding healings. He was in a hurry so he had to move fast—though not so fast he didn’t pause while the cured kissed his feet.

After hours of this, he asked parents to bring their children to meet him. The parents did, and instinctively set the kids in a circle around Jesus, partly to keep him from leaving, forgetting he could just float up or dematerialize. After all the children had arrived, Jesus told the multitude to kneel down. Jesus had a pang of grief, aftermath of having been murdered in cold blood perhaps. He said, “Father, I am puzzled about what’s wrong with Israel, both as a nation and an attitude.”

Then he knelt down and prayed, though louder than you or I pray, because, despite all his earlier talk about praying privately, he wanted this prayer as public as a mouth could make it. Ironically, everyone heard him and decided that the words were too glorious to be written down. Be careful what you wish for, they say. But it must have been some prayer, considering all the amazingly wonderful things that have been written down in recorded history and these things couldn’t be.

Jesus finished, people felt shaken,

and he told them to get up. “Your faith makes me so happy. I had a moment before I started praying. But between the prayer and your reaction, I’ve cheered up a lot.” Then he started crying.

He walked around, picked up children one by one, blessed him or her, prayed a quick prayer for each. And then he cried again. The post-traumatic stress of the last three years is hard to imagine. But people saw it and felt it.

“Look at your children now,” He said. And people saw fire-angels floating from the sky and surrounding their kids. Protection and comfort, though mixed with chest-splitting terror, especially among the pyrophobics, whose number had skyrocketed in the past week.

Now this portion of the proceedings was seen by 2,500 people (men, women, and children, that is, though we usually number by adult males only).