Hank Smith: 00:02 Hello, my friends. Welcome to followHIM Favorites. This is where John and I share a single story to go with each week’s lesson. John, we’re in Helaman 13 through 16 today, and I have a story for you. This set of chapters is all about Samuel the Lamanite, and at one point he says this, he’s talking to the wicked Nephites. “You have sought all your days for what you could not obtain. You have sought for happiness in iniquity,” or in sin, which thing doesn’t exist he basically says. It’s contrary to the nature of God. And then later on he says, If you’re going to perish, you’re going to perish unto yourself. This is how this works. You’re free. You can act for yourselves, but just know that you can choose life or death, and it made me think of a story about David O. McKay’s horse named Dandy.

  00:52 This is what David O. McKay said about Dandy. He said, “I once owned and had great pleasure in training a well-bred colt named Dandy. He had a good disposition, a clean rounded eye, well proportioned.” That’s what I think when I think of my pet. “He was well proportioned under the saddle.” So when he was riding him, he said, “He was willing and responsive and cooperative.” He said, “He and my dog, Scotty, were real companions. He had confidence in me that he would not be injured, but” and this is the important part here, John, “Dandy resented restraint. Can I say that again? Dandy resented restraint,” which means he didn’t like fences and he didn’t like ropes. He said, “He would nibble at his tie rope until he was free. He wouldn’t run away. He just wanted to be free. Thinking that other horses felt the same, he would untie their ropes.” So he comes over, you probably don’t want this, do you?

John Bytheway: 01:49 We’re breaking out tonight, Lefty.

Hank Smith: 01:52 I don’t want to go. He hated to be confined to a pasture. He would hunt the fences for where there was smooth wire, and then he would paw the wire carefully until he could step over to freedom. He said, “More than once my neighbors were kind enough to put him back. He learned to push the gate open.” He said, “Sometimes this damage was expensive, but I admired his intelligence and ingenuity.” He said, “But his curiosity kept getting him into trouble. Once on the highway, he was hit by an automobile.” I would think the automobile was hit by Dandy.

John Bytheway: 02:26 Yeah, no kidding. A horse.

Hank Smith: 02:27 It injured the horse and injured the driver a little bit. He said, “I just could not keep him restrained.” And then he said one day, and I think he knew the day would come. It’s very sad. He said, “Dandy found an unlatched gate, took a horse with him and went over to visit a neighbor’s field. They went in an old storage shed. Dandy’s curiosity prompted him to push the door open, and just as he thought, there was a sack of grain, what a find, but what a tragedy. The grain was actually poisoned. It was bait for rodents.”

John Bytheway: 03:03 Oh, man.

Hank Smith: 03:05 And within just a few minutes, Dandy and his companion were in spasmodic pain and shortly both were dead. He gets kind of frustrated as you might, and he said, “Oh, that horse could not understand that that fence was there to protect it, not to restrain it.” He said, “So many of our youth are like this. They’re not bad. They don’t intend to do wrong. They’re full of life and curiosity. They don’t see that the commandments the Lord has given us are meant to protect us.”

  03:35 We can go back to Samuel here, John, and he says, “You have sought for happiness on the other side of the fence, on the other side of the commandments, and they don’t exist.”

John Bytheway: 03:46 I read a book years ago called, I think it was called The Worth of the Soul by Steven Cramer. It’s got to be 20 or 25 years ago, but he had some really bad temptations and habits that he was dealing with. Felt like Satan whispered to him and said, “Listen, give into all these temptations, and you’ll enjoy all the happiness of which you are capable.” He bought into that for a while. It said, “It seemed so logical,” and eventually he said, it was such a great moment as I’m reading it, “I discovered you cannot find happiness outside the plan of happiness.” Oh, well put. If you’re living the plan of misery, probably you’re not going to find happiness there, and that’s Samuel the Lamanite saying, “You sought for happiness in doing iniquity.”

Hank Smith: 04:33 Doesn’t work that way. Don’t be Dandy. Be Brother Cramer. That’s the lesson from today. Come join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. We are with Sheri Dew. Sister Sheri Dew through these chapters, and if you’ve ever heard Sheri speak or teach, she’s out of this world. She’s so wonderful. Then come back here next week, we’ll do another followHIM Favorites.