An Instrument in His Hands

Part 2 Chapter 1

Part 2 

90 BC

Chapter 1

Nobody in Antionum wanted to hear about Jesus Christ. They all moved to Antionum to get away from him. Since I could not speak of Christ, my only recourse as a missionary was to demonstrate to them what he did.

I was lonely. Why, oh why, had I come to this faraway place?

In the wee hours of the night I often lay there and wondered if I should have let Muloki follow me so I could have been found, or maybe have waited those two weeks for Aaron to come home so I could have told him how I felt, or have let him persuade me not to heed the angel. Perhaps being a queen would have been easier than the fork in the road I chose to follow.     

When those nights came, I went to my trunk and dug out my rabbit’s foot and went back to bed with it tucked between my face and my pillow. Where was Aaron? What was he doing? Was he safe? Then I would remember that I too was a missionary, and that I wanted to be a good one, maybe as good as he was, and I would get up the next day and try harder.

Mostly, I toiled and worked so hard those years that the time passed quickly.

When I arrived in Antionum, it was a newer settlement, much, much smaller than the city of Zarahemla. I secured room and board with a humble woman named Chariott, and set to work to make a living. What could I do? What marketable skill did I have? Tree climbing – no! Cooking? Cleaning? What a joke! I could not weave, nor form clay, nor work with metal. I walked up and down the rows of the marketplace, looking at the wares for sale and wondering what I could manufacture to sell with the few skills I possessed. Was there one commodity that people would desire that was not sold there?

Antionum was situated in a valley of wet lowlands where the Sidon River overflowed twice a year, like the Nile River in Egypt. Much rice was grown here and people cooked more dishes of rice than corn. After a week of eating rice, I was hungry for corn cakes and discovered that nobody was selling corn cakes in Antionum! With so many people moving here from Zarahemla, perhaps they too might be hungry for them.

I decided to make corn cakes for a living. I could do that! I would start out small and get faster. So I puchased a blanket to sit on and another blanket to shelter me from the sun, set them up in the marketplace, and made a fire pit. Then I bought ground cornmeal, a pitcher for water, a baking stone, and went to work.

I wasn’t used to the local corn meal, so the first day the dough stuck to my fingers again. Children walking by with their mothers laughed at me. I laughed too, for they reminded me of Muloki. Their mothers clucked their tongues.

The second day I got the dough right, but had trouble forming flat, even cakes. Nobody bought them. They could make them better at home. I gave my left over cakes to the poor neighbors next door to my home with Chariott.

The third day, I bought a rolling pin and some fat at the market. Now my corn cakes were beautiful. That day I made two dozen of them and sold ten. I passed out the rest to the neighbors again.

And thus, I was in business! I was a maker of corn cakes. I got so fast at making them, and had so many left over to share with the poor each day, that instead of ‘Abigail,’ I became known as ‘Christian Lady,’ a title I tried hard to live up to.

How had my life gone from being the future Queen of Zarahemla to being a seller of corn cakes in a faraway marketplace? What purpose did the Lord have for my life in this distant place? I was the only practicing Christian in the whole of the settlement.

Rather than toss and turn at night in distress over what my life might become, or what it had been, I often sat up with the sick and nursed them, or sat with children so their mother could rest. I became so busy serving others, as Christ would, that I rarely gave a thought to my unknown future. I wore myself out in service.