Our Journey to the Promised Land

There is a beautiful metaphor in the story of the Brother of Jared. Like all Promised Land stories, this story is instructive in teaching us how to return to the land our Father in Heaven has promised us, which is the Celestial Kingdom.
In Ether 2 we are told that the Brother of Jared was building a vessel to take himself, his family, and his friends to the Promised Land. We too are making out journey in a vessel. The vessel we use to make our journey is our physical body. We didn’t build that vessel with hammer and nails as the Brother of Jared did, but we built it through rest, exercise, eating properly, etc.
When building his ships, the Brother of Jared encountered two problems. He needed to get air and light into the vessels. When he went to the Lord in prayer to ask how to solve the problems, the Lord told him exactly what to do about getting air. In other words, the Lord provided the solution. But as to the problem of light, the Lord told the Brother of Jared he would have to find the solution to that one himself.
This is the instructive part. The Hebrew word for spirit, ruwach, is also used to mean wind and breath. Thus in the scriptures the spirit is also called the Breath of Life and wind or air and spirit have symbolic connections that have great meaning in this story. We, as in the story of the Jaradites, need two things to make our journey through life. We need spirit (symbolically air) and light. The Lord solved the first problem for us when he placed our spirits or Breath of Life in our earthly vessels. But as with the Brother of Jared, He has instructed us to find the light, and we must search to find a way to bring the light that will illuminate our way back to God into our lives. It is essential that we do this because we cannot navigate without it.
There are many sources purporting to be the light, but the only true source comes from the hand of the Lord. As we pray and allow Him to touch us and light our way, we can travel the path to our promised land with confidence.