I read in the Book of Mormon today about King Limhi, with his guards, capturing Ammon and planning to kill him, but just in case, asking Ammon what on earth he was thinking by coming up to them while the king himself was outside the city walls with his guards.

Ammon tells Limhi that he’s part of a small group looking for a larger group that had left their homeland of Zarahemla many years before. That group, led by Zeniff, had disappeared. They’re wondering what became of the larger group, to the point that their relatives in Zarahemla have wearied their king with their concerns. Limhi stops in amazement; Limhi is the son of Zeniff! He is the king of a broken people, lost from Zarahemla and currently subject to another king and his people, the Lamanites.

Limhi had sent a group to find Zarahemla, hoping for rescue. His search party had been lost in the wilderness for a long time. They had found a desolate land covered with men’s bones and ruined buildings. In the ruins they had found rusty weapons and a set of gold plates covered with engravings that they couldn’t read. They believed it was probably Zarahemla, but couldn’t be sure. So they had gone back to Limhi in despair.

Now Limhi is astonished and thrilled. Zarahemla still stands! There are others who will not kill them. He and his people are so desperate to get away from the Lamanites that they are willing to become slaves to the people of Zarahemla. Then Ammon tells him that, not only will they not become slaves, because slavery is illegal in Zarahemla, but there’s a man with a gift from God: the ability to translate unknown languages. They can find out what happened to the desolate land, why the people all died, and who wrote this record about them. Limhi really really wants to know; he’s afraid that there’s something that kills whole masses of people. He wants to defend against it.

Now, at this point in the Book of Mormon, we don’t find out much about the desolate land and why the people died. But after the author of the Book of Mormon has condensed an entire thousand years of history into it, and died, his son included a translation of those 24 gold plates. Turns out the thing that destroys whole masses of people, is themselves. By the time Moroni is transcribing the translation, he has watched his own civilization implode and destroy itself. The plates Limhi’s people found in a ruined, uninhabited area, tell the story of another entire civilization that killed itself, everybody except two men. Of those two men, one hid from the other to prevent the last king from killing him.

The society around me is pretty patchy. There are cohesive groups within it, but more and more the overall civilization isn’t holding together. Matthew 9:16 tells what happens when new and old try to hold together; the cloth falls apart, because the new doesn’t mesh with the old. The reason our society is changing, is because it needs to. We have taught each other and ourselves for years, that everyone is valuable, that everyone has the right to an education and a vote, some say in the government, and the right to life, freedom to move around, and ownership of their own stuff. We’ve failed in a lot of ways. We need to improve, and more importantly, we need to forgive each other. Changes to allow for growth and freedom and valuing everyone while not letting us hurt each other, must come, or we are all hypocrites. But if we do this without forgiving past mistakes, we trade one pain for another, worse pain. Lack of forgiveness leads to hatred, continuing hurt, and worse crimes against each other.