We know that Nephi, Laman and Lemuel literally took a journey through the wilderness, an eight-year-marathon that took them from Jerusalem to the shores of the Arabian Sea--and then beyond. This journey, however, was also a metaphor of everyone's life experience. It applies to all of us.
Here in mortality, we are cast into the wilderness, taking a wilderness journey, where, like Nephi's family, we experience the tremendous heat of trial, the tedium of the way, the wandering through a sometimes trackless desert, the hardship, the thirst.
We are place on a wilderness journey because the Lord is doing his work on us, because always the purpose of such a journey is to transform the travellers, burn out their impurities, strip them of the world, clarify their thinking, and sharpen their devotion that they may be candidates to dwell in the promised land. The wilderness journey is the Lord's kindness to us, to make us fit for His kingdom.
Nephi's journey, which is a type of our journey in life, was joyously transformed because he did know the dealings of that God who had created him. This core understanding changed the nature of his journey through the desert and later across the whirling, boiling sea because it changed his core, the very essence of who he was.
He did not face anything alone or without purpose. God walked by his side, led him to the more fertile parts of the wilderness. He knew who stood by him when he climbed into the crags of the mountain tops looking for just the right wood to make a bow. He had protective arms around him when the way was hard. Even when he became depressed later in the promised land, and Laman and Lemuel sought his life, he was lifted up again by remembering, "I know in whom I have trusted."
He had been given strength because he could say with confidence: "My God hath been my support...He hath filled me with his love...He hath confounded my enemies...He hath heard my cry by day, and he hath given me knowledge by visions in the nighttime" (2 Nephi 4:20-24).
(Maurine Proctor, "It Wasn't Because Laman and Lemuel Had a Bad Attitude," https://latterdaysaintmag.com/article-1-7193/
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