Your Mission and the Parable of the Buried Inheritance

By Elder Joseph W. Sitati

President, Africa Central Area

The children of the rich man in the parable discovered that the time comes when you must rely on your own testimony of the truths of life—something that comes from personal effort.

A story that fascinated my young imagination in my teenage years is that of a rich man who owned a large orchard. He just had one problem. His children grew up at a time that his orchard had already made him rich. He had many servants and so the children did not need to do any hard work. He noticed that the children were not interested in the orchard. They considered working in the orchard to be the work of the servants. It was too hard and too boring for them. For the purposes of this article, I will refer to the story as the parable of the buried inheritance.

The rich man was concerned about the difficulties his children would likely face after his death if they continued in that attitude. So, one day, he gathered them and told them that he had written a will in which he would give each one of them a share of the treasure he had accumulated for their inheritance. He had sealed the will and they could only open it after his passing. So, there was great anticipation among the children after he passed away. Each one looked forward to taking their share of the inheritance and continuing to live lives full of ease and comfort with plenty to enjoy.

The day of discovering what was in the will finally came. In the will, he told them that he had secretly buried their inheritance in different places in the orchard. Each child’s share had their name on it. But it was up to them to find out the secret hiding place where he had buried it. The only way to do it was to dig up the orchard. There was only one caution. They must take care not to damage the fruit trees!

So, the digging began. They dug up the whole orchard but did not unearth any treasure. Knowing their father to be a just man who always kept his word, they dug up the orchard a second time. This time, they ensured thorough turning of the soil in all the orchard, but still did not unearth any treasure. Now, by the time they finished digging up the soil again in the large field for the second time, they noticed that the branches of the trees of the orchard were all drooping and heavy with much good, ripe fruit. So, they suspended their digging and each of them plucked of the fruit of the orchard according to their ability and sold it. That is when the riddle of their father’s will dawned upon them. The hidden treasure was in the digging up and caring for the orchard to produce good fruit. The trees would continue to bear plenty of good fruit so long as they were taken good care of. In his death, their father had taught them the important principle that money does grow on trees if they did the hard work of taking care of them. From then on, they determined to work hard and preserved to themselves the inheritance their father had left for them.

The parable of the buried inheritance is a good similitude for missionary work. As a young prospective missionary, you likely have spent many of your years as a youth in school, and for most of that time were under the care of your parents or of an adult guardian. If they are members of the Church, they likely introduced you to the gospel, and your own testimony has likely been influenced by theirs. Your personal habits of worship likely follow the habits they have established at home—of family prayer, family reading or study of the scriptures, family home evening, attending church, and attending the temple if one is near you. They paid your fees, bought your uniform and clothing, and provided for any other costs required by the school as well as your other personal needs. At school, life was planned for you—the timetable for classes and activities was given to you and you just fitted into it. You did not have to personally worry much about any of these things. So, it is quite normal to expect that life will continue to work like that.

However, as the children of the rich man discovered, the time comes when you must rely on your own testimony of the truths of life. This results only from making a personal effort. If you don’t do so, you may likely continue believing that solutions to the normal problems of your life as an adult should be provided by others. You may fail to recognise your own responsibility in solving the difficulties of life that you will inevitably encounter as an adult. In that attitude, you may default to blaming others for not doing for you the things you should do for yourself. As they put effort into digging up the orchard, which they previously considered to be hard and boring work, the children of the rich man came to learn that it is their own effort which unearthed the real treasure buried in the orchard—the fruit which flourished as they dug up and made the nutrients of the soil available to the roots.

Based on this parable, I suggest the following three steps that will help you prepare well to serve a mission—a choice that will bless your life forever.

The first step begins with having an unwavering trust in the Father’s plan of happiness, made possible by the Atonement of His Only Begotten Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. They want you to be happy and successful. They have provided the means and opportunities for you to achieve this goal for yourself. Serving a mission is one of those opportunities. There is great joy in learning more about and sharing the plan of happiness with others.

As Alma taught, it is essential to “awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith”¹ in them that seek your personal eternal happiness and that of all Heavenly Father’s children.

This will lead you to the second step which is to desire this blessing for yourself and for others. You will “let this desire work in you, even until you believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion”² of your faith to become alive in you. If you are not yet serving a mission, like the children of the rich man who trusted in the promise of their father, you will then begin to actively seek opportunities to start preparing yourself diligently to serve a mission. You will join a missionary preparation class where you will get a personal copy of the training booklet: Missionary Preparation Lessons, Africa Central Area, available through your elders quorum president or bishop. Lessons in this pamphlet are designed to help you try out each principle learned so you can develop a personal testimony of the truthfulness and power of that principle. Each of the twelve lessons invites you and provides resources to guide you to 1) ponder, 2) study and discuss, and 3) prepare, to gain your own testimony of each principle over a period of twelve weeks covering one lesson per week. If you are already serving a mission, you will seek to obtain this pamphlet from your mission president and use it to refresh your understanding of each principle during your personal study and in your work each day.
Working diligently through the missionary preparation lessons is like the children of the rich man digging up the field the first time. They believed in their father, but their first digging did not yield the treasure they had hoped for, although they may have seen at that stage that the trees of the orchard were starting to change for the better. The third step is therefore to do what the children of the rich man did after the first digging—be more thorough and diligent in applying the principles you have learned when you get into the mission field as a full-time missionary.

If you do this, your testimony of the promise of the plan of happiness of the Father will then blossom, and your mission will become to you “a tree springing up unto everlasting life”³. You will become an instrument in Heavenly Father’s hands to bless your own life, the lives of those you will serve as a missionary, and your future family. As you internalize these principles throughout your future life, there will be many occasions when you will often receive this testimony in your heart: “well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord”⁴.

Joseph W. Sitati was sustained as a General Authority Seventy in April 2009. He is married to Gladys Nangoni; they are the parents of five children.