I had read the Book of Mormon my whole life. I had never once finished it without skipping.
By Peter S · A lifelong member · 8 min read
All 15 books. Every chapter. Nothing skipped.
I need to admit something I have never said out loud in a church building.
My testimony was real. I had never actually read the whole book.
I had owned every volume my whole life. But the bookmark had not moved in years. It sat a few chapters into 2 Nephi, right where Isaiah begins. That is where I stopped every time.
I did not stop reading. I skipped. I skipped Isaiah. I skipped the long allegory in Jacob. I skipped most of the war chapters and nearly all of Ether. I read the stories I already knew, the ones everyone quotes, and told myself I would come back to the hard parts later. I never did.
So it sat on the shelf. A book I had testified of hundreds of times and had never read from the first verse to the last without stepping over half of it.
I thought that made me lazy. Not spiritual enough. I figured the hard parts were meant for people further along than me.
It took me thirty years to understand. I was not skipping those parts because something was wrong with me. I was skipping them because nobody had ever explained them. You do not skip what you understand. You skip what was never made clear.
And the pages I kept stepping over were the ones that held the most. All that time, I had been skipping the exact chapters that would have changed how I read everything else.
Then someone explained the skipped parts to me, verse by verse, in plain English, right beside the actual scripture. And for the first time in my life I read the Book of Mormon the way it was meant to be read. All of it. The first verse of First Nephi to the last verse of Moroni. Nothing skipped.
I found the bookmark on the floor a week later. I did not need it anymore.
This is the set someone finally explained it with.Let me show you what was hiding in the parts you have been skipping too.
01 THE ISAIAH WALL
2 Nephi is where I quit every time.
Chapter after chapter of Isaiah, and I could not have told you what one of them meant. Nephi did not put Isaiah there to slow you down. Every line points at Christ. With the meaning beside each verse, I read the whole stretch in one sitting and did not skip once. That night I underlined half of it.
02 THE ALLEGORY IN JACOB
Jacob 5 is the long one about the olive trees.
Pages of branches and roots, and I had glazed over it since I was a boy. It is the story of the Lord gathering His people across thousands of years, and how He does not give up on a single branch. The Sunday it made sense, my grandson asked why the old man kept going back to the same tree, and I got to tell him.
03 THE WAR CHAPTERS
I skimmed the battles for years and could not see why they belonged in scripture.
Then I understood what the title of liberty was, and why a man would tear his own coat and write on it. Those chapters are about holding the line when everything is coming apart. Now they are the pages I turn to on the hard weeks.
04 ETHER
I never made it into Ether.
I knew the word Jaredites and nothing else. It holds the barges crossing the sea in the dark, and the brother of Jared watching the Lord reach out and touch the stones with His finger. I had skipped it my whole life, only because no one ever walked me in.
The meaning, inside the verse
This is why I stopped skipping. The full scripture and the explanation sit on the same page. Every hard verse has plain English right beside it, written by a teacher of thirty five years. You never flip between your scriptures and a separate book. You never lose the thread. You read the verse, you understand it, you keep going. All fifteen books. First Nephi to Moroni. Nothing skipped.
Why the whole set, and not one volume
Reading it alone.
You skip the hard parts, because no one is there to explain them.
One volume at a time.
You start strong, stall, and never reach the end.
The complete set.
Every hard verse explained on the same page, all fifteen books, first to last. You finally finish it.
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I thought I was the only one who had been skipping. I was not even close.