Last June Marjorie and I were expecting some important mail.  We were checking the mailbox at the bottom of our hill on a daily basis.  One afternoon as we were on our way to our friends’ graduation celebration, we stopped at the mailbox once again.  I opened the box, saw the long-awaited envelope, and handed the mail to Marjorie.  As I drove on down the road I asked if she was going to wait to open the envelope when our children could be there.

“No!” she stated emphatically.  “I want to know where we’re going!”  She opened the envelope and began reading aloud:  “You are called to serve in the Van-u…, Van-u…, Port Vila…where in the world IS this?” she asked.

Thereafter, whenever anyone asked where we were to serve our mission, we would answer, “Port Vila, Vanuatu,” and they would say, “Is that in Africa?”

I only found two people who had a clue where Vanuatu was.  Both hesitantly, but accurately, said, “That’s in the South Seas, isn’t it?

We’ve been in Vanuatu for six months now.  Our youngest son is serving concurrently in Chile.  I go to the post office here with letters to mail to our missionary.  I lay the envelope on the scales at the counter so that the clerk of the day can weigh it and calculate the correct postage.  Every girl who has waited on me glances at the address, wrinkles her brow, and asks, “Is that in Africa?”

Everyone back home who knows us can now, at least in a general way, tell you where Vanuatu is.  They can tell you that it’s an island nation in the South Seas.  When Marjorie opened our mission call and asked where in the world Vanuatu is, I was able to tell her.  That’s because I have an odd hobby.  I read encyclopedias.  I especially like to study geography and history.  Just a few weeks earlier I’d read all about Vanuatu in the set of World Book Encyclopedias that I bought from a salesman when our children were young.  It’s one of the better purchases that I’ve made.  I was able to tell her that Vanuatu was one of the newer nations of the world, and that it was in Melanesia.  Because I’ve studied about it, I can now tell you the difference between Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia—three terms that used to confuse me.

I own another set of books that I’m fond of studying.  Like the encyclopedias, these books also teach me a great deal about geography and history.  In fact, this set of books contains secrets about geography and history that can be found in no other place.  I was shocked several years ago when The National Geographic questioned the existence of King David and father Abraham.  The “scholars” who put the article together discounted the Bible as fiction.  Other “scholars” wrote a subsequent article in a later issue making king Herod into a great leader, and concluded that the Biblical story of his slaughter of the innocents never happened.  That revered magazine, and many others like it, twist Jesus Christ and the Christian religion into unrecognizable forms, and promote a general disbelief in Jesus Christ, the Bible, and Christianity.

What the so-called scholars don’t know is that there is now a second witness of Christ that substantiates everything the Bible has been teaching for hundreds of years.  Like the Bible, The Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ was also written anciently by prophets who knew whereof they spoke.  The authors of the Book of Mormon speak of David, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Adam,  Eve, Moses, the parting of the Red Sea, the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the Creation, and most of all, Jesus Christ, His Atonement and resurrection.  The Book of Mormon not only confirms the existence of all these people, places, and happenings, but adds many significant and interesting details that were previously unknown.

If scholars would study the Book of Mormon, they would discover valuable information and clues about ancient civilizations and people the world is still either unaware of, or about whom they have only uncovered hints, and about whom they’re scrambling to learn more.  Scholars are of the opinion that the world’s first civilization was Sumer in Mesopotamia.  Only in the past 100-150 years did the world even become aware of early civilizations in the Americas.  It is still widely accepted that the early American civilizations arose independently of any Euro-Asian influence.  Students of the Book of Mormon, however, know that the earliest Americans came from that same Sumerian area, and that the civilization those immigrants founded was greater than its parent civilization.   Only in my lifetime have scholars assigned the name “Olmec” to that early American civilization about which they know so little.  The Book of Mormon called the people “Jaredites,” and invited the world to learn about them a hundred years before archeologists even became aware of their existence.

The Olmec/Jaredites were the greatest civilization in the world.  Scholars say their civilization ended about 400 B.C.  They don’t know why.  The Book of Mormon does.  The Book of Mormon describes in detail the great civil war that brought the Jaredites to an end.  The Book of Mormon tells how the last survivor of that race was discovered by the precursors of the next great civilization to inhabit the American continent.  That second civilization had its origins from two groups of immigrants who came from Jerusalem after 600 B.C.  They were contemporaries of the Romans, and established a civilization that outshined their European counterpart.  That civilization, too, ended in a great civil war a thousand years later.

In three successive eras the Americas have been home to the greatest civilizations in the world.  The United States is the latest of the three, and could learn much from the previous two.

My scriptures are a gold mine of information about past people and events.  They’re also a gold mine containing information about how to live our present lives, and about how to prepare for our future.  They teach us how to avoid the mistakes of the past, and give us much information about where we go when we die.  The world knows as much about that realm as Americans know about Vanuatu, or as Ni-Vans know about Chile.  When Jesus told the thief on the cross who had the privilege of dying with him, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43), most people have no idea what place He was referring to.  They might well ask, “Is that in Africa?”

If people believe in religion at all, the popular notion is that upon death a person goes straight to heaven or hell.  They know that one place is good, and that the other is supremely bad.  That’s about the sum total of what they think they know.  As far as the geography of these places is concerned, heaven is “out there,” presumably beyond some distant star.

“Is that in Africa?”  It may as well be, for all they know.

The fact of the matter is that in my scriptures there is a very great deal of knowledge available about future geography to the scholar who makes the effort to dig the information out.  I have four books that constitute the Standard Works.  If one lays them all out together, they provide a wonderful road map which can be profitably used to plan the big trip each of us will one day take.

He is wise who takes the time to study them.  He who ignores them, or discounts them as being of no value, runs the risk of becoming hopelessly lost when he launches forth on his big trip.