An Elect Lady: Emma at Harmony
Before Emma Smith was a president or a hymnbook editor, she was a young wife in a farmhouse beside the Susquehanna River, keeping watch over the most fragile treasure she had ever known. This is the story of her first years in the Restoration: the nights she guarded the gold plates, the days she wrote as her husband translated, and the revelation that called her by a name she carried for the rest of her life.
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The right person
In the first hours of September 22, 1827, Joseph Smith prepared to go to the hill where the gold plates were buried. The angel Moroni had told him to bring the right person with him, and Joseph knew through personal revelation that the right person was Emma. She waited while he received the plates and hid them in a hollow log, and she rode home beside him as the sun rose. From the very first night of the work, Emma was not watching from a distance. She was in the carriage.
She kept watch in the months that followed. When word came that men were plotting to steal the plates, Emma took a spare horse and rode more than an hour to warn Joseph, who moved the record to safety. On the journey to Pennsylvania she helped hide the plates in a barrel of beans. At Harmony she gave Joseph a linen cloth to cover the plates as they rested on the kitchen table, and she asked her brother-in-law for a box that stayed under their bed, where the plates were locked each night. Her care was practical and constant, the kind of faithfulness that shows up in cloth and boxes and borrowed horses.
A ride to warn Joseph
Family history tells how Emma learned that men were plotting to steal the gold plates, took a spare horse, and rode more than an hour to warn Joseph so he could move the record to safety. Lucy Mack Smith told the story years afterward. It is not a moment anyone stood by to witness. It is a true family memory of a young wife who was watchful, practical, and willing to go herself.
A pen in her hand
Emma also served as Joseph's first scribe. She sat with him during the early translation of the Book of Mormon and wrote down the words as he dictated them, carefully setting down verses that families now read together. She sewed a pouch for a seer stone Joseph sometimes used in the translation. Long afterward she remembered that season plainly: "I was an active participant," she said. She did not describe herself as a bystander in her own story, and we should not either.
Those same months carried deep sorrow. Emma was expecting their first child while she helped with the translation. On June 15, 1828, their son was born and died that same day, and Emma herself nearly died. The young couple buried their baby and kept going, with grief and work side by side in the same small house.
Called by name
Emma was baptized on June 28, 1830, in Colesville, New York. A crowd gathered and her confirmation was delayed, and Joseph was arrested, but the following month, in July 1830, a revelation came that spoke to Emma directly. It called her "an elect lady, whom I have called." It asked her to be a comfort to Joseph "in his afflictions, with consoling words, in the spirit of meekness." It set her to expound the scriptures and exhort the Church, and it gave her a charge no one else received: to make a selection of sacred hymns for the Saints.
Notice the order of that calling. Comfort came first, before teaching, before the hymns. In the revelation's own framing, her ministry begins with consoling words spoken in meekness to one suffering person she loved. Watch for that pattern as her story goes on: a woman who knew how to sit with another person's pain and stay.
Pause and reflect
Emma's protection of the plates was mostly ordinary work done carefully. What ordinary, careful work has God trusted you with?
Emma's faithfulness showed up in cloth and boxes and borrowed horses. Look for the quiet work He has put in your hands.
The Lord called Emma to comfort before He called her to teach. Who in your life might need consoling words from you this week, before anything else?
Comfort came first in Emma's calling. It may come first in yours too.