Introduction

This is the text of a ten-minute talk I wrote three years ago (September 24, 1989), in which I felt a profound outpouring of the Lord's Spirit. Any greatness evidenced is attributed to God, not myself. I wrote this talk just after finishing the first major draft of a book I wrote that details the parallels of Book of Mormon history to our day and also to our individual lives. The talk reflected the insights I gained while writing that book. Pulling this out of my files recently, I wondered out of curiosity if it might have a chiasm in it. Sure enough, I could see that it did. And then later I found that it also had the "substructure" as well as a huge triple parallel.

I do not present this in any attempt to set myself up as anything more than another sincere seeker of truth, grateful for the Lord's influence in my life. Every individual born to this world has complete access to all the spiritual gifts God bestows on man. Prophets who have been called of God are not intended to be super-heroes; they are role models; and we should seek to emulate the things they do. We should be grateful when God works through us to help further his work here on earth. My desire is that by showing this, the reader might be encouraged to refer to something he/she has done under the inspiration of God to see if it might also contain some sort of structuring.

We can count on finding chiasms and parallels in the standard works because we know they were inspired of God. Might looking for such arrangements in non-canon sources be a reliable means of assessing the level of inspiration behind them? Doing this sort of analysis may serve to be a useful tool in the approaching days of increased deception in the world as we seek to determine what comes from God and what does not.

At this point in our experience, we are probably safe in concluding that anything which comes from God will have his "signature" on it, which will include chiasms and parallels. We have seen it everywhere we have looked in the scriptures. We found one in the Declaration of Independence, which was written about 100 years before chiasmus was even discovered. One of the hymns we looked at -- also written over 200 years ago, had the same signature. A talk of our living prophet, Ezra Taft Benson, had a chiasm in it: which happened to have as its center point the statement that we should be using "the words and the way they are used" in the scriptures as our source of understanding.

So now we offer this talk, written by a lay member of the Church under the inspiration of God: a gift anyone is entitled to.

The following page diagrams the overall structure of this talk, listing the pages on which the various main structures are located. The normal text comes next, to give you an overview of the message, flow, and context of the talk. Then comes the triple parallel, followed by the main chiasm. Because of its size, we chose to spread this main chiasm onto four pages. As you proceed from the first to the last of these four pages, the points will be converging from the beginning and from the end to come to the middle, which has two peaks rather than the usual, one. The substructure comes next, followed last by two, larger chiasms that are located toward the center of the talk.