Random Thought #59

So I was reading from the Book of Mormon to our girls the other night and was reading from 1 Nephi chapter 3, v 1-3. It talks about how Lehi had his dream that his sons should return back to Jerusalem to get the Brass Plates from Laban. I was trying to get the girls to repeat back to me what was happening in those few verses. I brought up the Brass Plates and one of them said "Daddy, we have plates here and we made food for you so you can eat on the plates". I didn't think she was paying attention and was going off on some tangent so I corrected her and went over the summary of those 3 verses again and she just looked at me like I was some sort of moron and repeated her statement, as if I hadn't heard her the first time. We obviously weren't connecting so I went on to tell them why they wanted to get the plates. It was because of the genealogy of their ancestors that it contained. Since they didn't know what genealogy was, I tried to explain it as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. As soon as I said that, they again replied with "we don't like ants daddy...we don't have any ants". I, of course, missed what they were saying completely and felt like I was never going to get through to them. Finally my brilliant wife told me that they were listening to me but did not understand the context in which I was using these words. They heard a word they recognized and related to me their experience with that word as they understood it. Needless to say, I felt a little stupid. That got me thinking. Do our Sunday School discussions of the scriptures and our own personal study sometimes miss the point due to the lack of contextual understanding of the scriptures? Do we look at the language nuances that played a role in writing the various books? Do we understand the religious and political events that took place during those times? Do we understand the cultural norms, traditions, history, and perspective of the people? If not, are we perhaps missing the full story the scriptures have to teach us? I think so. Perhaps we need to do a little more than simply read the scriptures 30 min a day or read a book from cover to cover. Perhaps we need to feast upon the words of Christ and try to understand them at the deepest possible contextually-rich level.