Personal
A Letter From the White House
What it means, what it does not mean, and why none of the credit belongs to me
In June, a copy of The First Horseman, Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy was placed in the President’s hands at the NBA games. I did not expect to hear anything back. He may be the busiest man on earth, and the number of books, letters, and packages that arrive at that address every week has to be staggering. I sent it, I prayed about it, and I let it go.
On August 5 a letter came. It thanks me for my prayers and for the gift, it speaks about the work ahead, and it closes by asking God’s blessing on me and my family. It carries his signature.
I want to say the honest thing about it before anyone else says it for me.
I have no way of knowing whether President Trump read the book, and the letter does not claim that he did. Correspondence at that level moves through an office, and I am not going to stretch a kind letter into something it is not. It thanks me for prayers and a gift. That is what it says, and that is all I am claiming.
But somebody opened that package. Somebody noted it, and somebody took the trouble to answer a man in Sparks, Nevada who has no standing, no office, and nothing to offer in return. That says something about how that operation is run, and I think it says something about him. I am grateful for it, and I would be ungrateful not to say so publicly.
Alongside the letter came a certificate from the President and First Lady marking two hundred fifty years of American independence. I will be framing both.
What I Have Been Thinking About Since
The book describes events I believe are coming, and some of them are enormous. So the question sitting in my mind since that envelope arrived is one I cannot answer.
Will any of it matter? Will it help a single member of the Church recognize what is happening when it starts? Will it reach someone who does not believe any of this yet? Could it, in some way I will never see, touch a decision made at the highest level of a government?
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I truly do not know. Most likely the answer is no, and I am at peace with that. But the mere possibility that a man like me could have anything at all to do with events of that size is sobering to sit with. I have not gotten used to it and I do not expect to.
None of This Came From Me
This is the part I need to be clear about, because I have watched what happens to people who forget it.
When the Lord asked me to write this book, I put down every commentary I owned. I have not been able to read them since. Everything in that book is something I was taught, and most of it I had never heard anywhere before in my life.
I want to be precise about how that happened, because people assume more than actually occurred. I saw no visions. No angel appeared to me. I have had no near-death experience. What I had was scripture and pondering, hour after hour, year after year. And I cannot tell you how many times I was awakened at three thirty in the morning and had to come down to this computer and write or dictate what had come into my mind. That happened over and over. I will never forget any of it.
So when I say the material in that book is significant, I am not paying myself a compliment. I can say it plainly precisely because it did not come from me. Ammon gave the only answer to this that has ever satisfied me, and he gave it when his own brother accused him of boasting:
“Yea, I know that I am nothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things.” (Alma 26:12)
I am also still being taught. The future is not fully laid out to me, and there may be another book in time. We are going to recognize most of these things only as they actually happen.
Where We Actually Are Right Now
Let me say something that runs against most of what you will hear online.
I watch people strain to match every headline to a verse in Daniel or Isaiah or Revelation. A war begins and it is the sixth trumpet. A currency wobbles and it is Babylon falling. A treaty is signed and the clock has started. From what I have been shown, we have a long way to go, and most of those identifications are wrong. I have written about why in The One Framework That Keeps You From Being Deceived and in No, We Are Not in the Seven Seals Yet.
There is one thing worth watching for, and it is the calling of Donald Trump to the role of the first horseman. When that happens, we will know precisely where we stand in the book of Revelation, and the sequence after it will not be a mystery. Until then, patience is the more faithful posture.
John was commissioned to reveal the turning point and the close of the last days, and he was given it in imagery so strange and so graphic that it has been carried down to us nearly intact. I am convinced that is not an accident. If the men who copied and preserved that text through the centuries had understood plainly what it was describing, a great deal of it would have been softened or removed. The strangeness protected it. It arrived in our hands almost perfectly preserved, waiting for the generation that would need it.
Why This Humbles Me
The Lord said at the very beginning of this dispensation how He intended to work:
“That the fulness of my gospel might be proclaimed by the weak and the simple unto the ends of the world, and before kings and rulers.” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:23)
The weak and the simple. That is the labor pool He recruits from, and it has always been the labor pool He recruits from. I am a member of this Church with no calling to teach anyone anything, no authority over any person, and nothing that qualifies me for this except that I was willing to do what He asked.
That is the whole message, and it is not about me. God can take anyone who wants to serve Him and is willing to do what He asks, and He can make that person useful in ways they will never fully see. If that is true of me, it is true of you.
I pray I will always be faithful to what I have been given. I am grateful to President Trump and to whoever in that office took the time to send this. And every bit of the thanks for what is in that book belongs to God, who taught me things I had never heard and then asked me to publish them to the world.
I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman, Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy, available at FirstHorseman.World.
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