Abstract: Sometimes, obedience to the principles of the Gospel and tending faithfully to our stewardships can seem — and can be — a burden. Moreover, we mortal humans are fallible and weak, and we’re free. Accordingly, I’m convinced that the Father (a supremely masterful strategist and tactician) builds in redundancies so as to ensure that his purposes will be achieved even when his mortal servants falter. At the very heart of his plan, though, there could be no redundancy. Only one person could do what absolutely, desperately, needed to be done.

I grew up in a religiously mixed home. My mother was a somewhat marginal though occasionally-attending member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had been born and raised in southern Utah. My father was a non-communicant Lutheran, born on a farm in North Dakota to Scandinavian immigrant parents. In or just before my very early teens, however, I began to pay serious attention to the claims of the Restoration and to find them both intellectually and spiritually appealing.

I was never even remotely tempted to do drugs, and because of my growing commitment to the Church, I continued to live according to its teachings. However, this was California in the 1960s. I was very attracted to the music and to some of the other elements of the era’s “counterculture.”

Meanwhile, many of my friends were living lives quite different from mine, seemingly without the slightest pangs of guilt. By contrast, I began to feel remorse if I were even a few minutes late to Sunday School. And I sometimes asked myself, “How is this progress? Why do I feel regret for failing to meet high standards while at least some of my friends, having abandoned many of those standards, feel none at all?”

You might think, at this point, that I’m intending to raise the troublesome question of perfectionism and to discuss the difficult problem [Page viii]of the depression and other maladies that can follow in its wake. But I’m not, and I’ve never been especially prone to depression, neither then nor now. Instead, I want to go a slightly different direction in this very brief essay.

Sometimes, the yoke of the gospel doesn’t seem all that “easy.” Sometimes, the burden doesn’t seem exactly “light.” And my adolescent meanderings are nothing at all compared to what some have undergone — for example, the martyrdoms, the grueling missionary journeys, the travails of the handcart pioneers — for the cause of the Lord.

It has periodically crossed my mind that, at least at certain points in his life — say, while being tarred and feathered in Hiram, Ohio; while languishing in Missouri’s ironically named Liberty Jail; or while sweltering in Carthage Jail, anticipating his murder at the hands of a mob with painted faces — the Prophet Joseph Smith must have said to himself something along the lines of “All I really wanted was to know whether I should join the Methodists or the Presbyterians!”

I’ve occasionally speculated as to whether there might have been a backup for Joseph, somebody who would have picked up the torch had he dropped it. I have no real idea, of course. But these thoughts were triggered by thinking about my maternal ancestors Joseph Knight Sr. and Joseph Knight Jr.

Many will recognize the prophecy attributed by the Book of Mormon to the ancient biblical patriarch Joseph, which we recognize as pertaining to the modern prophet, Joseph Smith:

Yea, Joseph truly said: Thus saith the Lord unto me: A choice seer will I raise out of the fruit of thy loins; and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of thy loins. And unto him will I give commandment that he shall do ...