I remember encountering Amos first on my mission, which I served in Portland, Oregon.

In my personal study, I reflected on a scripture that's used frequently in the first lesson taught to investigators and retought to recent converts.

While I read the King James version at the time, I prefer the wording of the NIV.

This is chapter 8, verses 11 and 12.

The days are coming, declares the sovereign Lord, when I will send a famine through the land,

not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.

People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.

At the time, I applied this only to those whom I was teaching, those who I was trying to introduce to the gospel,

or to help them find the spark that would help them to find meaning and joy in it.

But I came to realize that we are all searching for the Word of the Lord.

We need revelation. We need contact with the Spirit to be the best that we can be. This includes all of us, perhaps especially people who care for the elderly, for children,

who are puzzling over work situations or agonizing over long-term decisions that affect not only them, but others.

In this episode of Abide, a Max Wants 2 podcast, we explore what it means to search for the word of the Lord,

to pray for those who need it, and much, much more. My name is Joseph Stewart. I'm the public

communication specialist of the Neely Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship of Brigham Young University.

Christian Hill is a research fellow at the Maxwell Institute. In each week, we discuss the week's

block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ's, Latter-day Saints, Come Follow Me curriculum.

We aren't here to present a lesson, but rather to hit on a few key themes from the scripture

block so as to help fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify

Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the world of religious ideas. Today we are once again joined by

Joanna Olson, one of our research assistants. Joanna is a pre-business major at BYU from Fort Collins,

Colorado. After Joanna graduates, she plans to attend graduate school and go into medical administration.

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