Another Cool Story

I have to share another story from the history of Joseph Smith book I'm reading.  There are many amazing stories in there and it really helps me understand a lot of the back story behind the tales I've been hearing since childhood.  One story I'd never heard before was about Joseph's brother Samuel.  Right after the Book of Mormon got published, the older boys from the Smith family went out proselyting to try and sell the books and spread the message of the new church. 

Samuel was trying to be a good missionary and knock on a lot of doors, but was often turned away because many people had heard about Joseph Smith and thought he was either crazy or trying to take people away from other religions (leaving their pastors without a job) and other things like that.  One night, Samuel went to an inn where he tried to talk to the owner.  He presented the book as a history of where the Native American people came from and when the owner asked him how he got such a book, Samuel told him that his brother had translated it from a manuscript given from God.  The owner called him a liar and said many other bad things and kicked him out of the inn.  Samuel walked a little further down the road and spent a cold, uncomfortable night sleeping under an apple tree.  The next day he met an old widow who gave him food and he shared his message with her, which she was very receptive to.

A couple of weeks later, Samuel and his parents came to that same town.  His parents wanted to see this inn where the man was so rude to their son.  However, when they got close to the inn, they saw it was closed up because of a smallpox outbreak.  They found out that the innkeeper, his wife, and their 2 children had died because of it and it was brought there by a man who had stayed there a few weeks earlier.

Now I'm not saying that people who are mean to you are going to get a horrible disease and die, but Samuel was saved from that fate.  I'm sure while he was sleeping under that apple tree that he wasn't too happy with God and thought that he was forgotten.  But he was saved and was able to spread the gospel to those who might not have had the chance to hear it otherwise.  It's a good lesson to remember: even when we are going through hard times and think that we're being punished for a sin or that God has forgotten us, it will be for our good in the end.  We will have learned something, or our lives might even have been saved because of it.