The Woman Who Ran

◆ Alma 19:16

There was a woman in the king's house named Abish, and she was a servant to the queen.

◆ Alma 19:16

She had believed in God for a long time — since she was a girl. Her father had seen something remarkable, a vision, and he had told his daughter about it, and she had believed him.

◆○ Alma 19:16; the details of the years are ours

And then she had told nobody. Not for a year. Not for many years. She carried the most important thing she knew through the ordinary days of her work — carrying water, folding the queen's linen, walking the same corridors — and never once said it out loud to anyone in that house.

○ imagined

Think about how long that is. Long enough to stop expecting anything to ever change.

◆ Alma 19:13–17

Then came the strange afternoon. In one room of the king's house lay King Lamoni. Beside him lay the queen. Beside them lay Ammon, and one by one the servants of the household had fallen too, all of them overcome, all of them still, the whole room silent in the middle of the day.

◆○ Alma 19:17; the noticing is ours

Abish came in. And she did not scream, and she did not run for a physician, and she did not stand there wondering what had happened.

◆ Alma 19:17

She knew exactly what she was looking at. She understood that it was the power of God, and she understood something else in the same breath: this was the thing she had been waiting for since she was a child.

◆ Alma 19:17

So she ran. Out of the king's house, into the street, from house to house, all over the city — telling everyone she met to come and see.

○ imagined

A woman who had not spoken about her faith in years did not walk out and mention it politely to one neighbor. She ran down the whole street knocking on every door she passed, and whatever she said at those doors, it worked, because people came.

◆ Alma 19:18

They came from everywhere, and they crowded into the king's house, and they saw them all lying there.

◆ Alma 19:19–22

And then it went wrong. The crowd began to argue. Some said this was wonderful. Some said it was terrible. Some blamed the king for letting a stranger in. Some said the stranger was a monster sent to punish them. The arguing got louder and angrier, and a man in that crowd — a man whose brother had been at the waters of Sebus — drew his sword.

○ imagined

So this is what Abish had run for. She had gone door to door all afternoon to bring her city a miracle, and her city had arrived and started shouting at each other in the doorway.

◆ Alma 19:28

Abish saw the argument and it made her weep.

◆○ Alma 19:28–29; the wording is ours

And here is why this woman has a story at all. She did not stand there crying. She was sorry for about as long as it takes to decide something, and then she walked through that whole shouting crowd — all the way through it — and she reached down and took the queen by the hand.

◆ Alma 19:29

And the queen stood up.

◆○ Alma 19:29–30; the quiet is ours

The queen stood up on her feet in front of everyone and spoke, and the room went quiet the way a room does. Then she took the king by the hand, and he rose too. And the arguing stopped, because you cannot go on arguing about whether something happened while it is standing up in front of you.

◆ Alma 19:31–36

What followed was one of the great days in that city's history: the king spoke to his people, many of them believed, and a church was established among them.

◆○ Alma 19:17, 28; the reflection is ours

And all of it — the whole day — turned on a servant who was not invited to anything, who had no title, who had never told anyone what she believed, and who saw one chance in her entire lifetime and ran.

○ imagined

The scriptures never tell us what she said at those doorways. We do not know her father's name. We do not know what happened to her afterward. We know two things about Abish, and they are the two things that matter: she believed it for years when it cost her the risk of saying so — and when the moment came, she did not wait to be asked.

— The End —

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[ILLUSTRATION NOTE — ART NOT YET CREATED]
Needed: a full-page original illustration — Abish mid-run in a village street, water jar set down and left behind in the corner of the frame, one hand out toward an opening doorway. Real motion: cloth trailing, weight forward, feet off the line. Late-afternoon light. She is the only figure fully in focus; the doorways and the people beginning to emerge are softer.
Constraints: original composition only — there is no widely known published artwork of this scene, which is an advantage; do not go looking for one to reference. Lamanite dress, ornament and hairstyle should be specific and considered, and must differ from the Nephite figures by culture and costume only — never by skin tone. Adult woman, capable, ordinary working clothes. No weapons anywhere in the frame. Distribute a range of skin tones across the street scene with no relationship to faction.

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