Do you know that story of Ammon and the king's flocks? That one where Ammon joins the Lamanite king's servants to take the animals to the watering hole, and some mean Lamanite guys scare the animals because they wanted to see the king's servants get into trouble?
There's something I missed before, all of the many times I've read this account in the scriptures. Following the scattering of the flocks, the servants weep because the king will kill them like their brethren before. Ammon comforts them and instructs them to gather the flocks while he contends with the troublemakers. His life is preserved, and he defeats a bunch of vicious guys on his own (Book of Mormon, Alma 17-18).
I have read that the king had killed his servants before, but when the king wonders if Ammon is God, it came to me: Why was Ammon sent at this time to the Lamanites instead of at an earlier time? If he had left his land earlier, he could have saved many more servants from the wrath of the king, right?
Maybe there are two reasons for this: first, maybe those servants with Ammon needed to fear for their lives and be at the depths of humility before they could trust Ammon and the gospel message he wished to share with them, and second, righteous fathers were needed to raise those stripling warriors that came later in the war chapters. Unlike their brethren before, the servants with Ammon were saved just as much as Ammon was, and they became converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Some of those servants probably are the fathers mentioned that sent provisions to their sons on the battlefield, not mentioned as often as the mothers of the stripling warriors (Alma 53-58), but they are there.
Just maybe we are saved for greater purposes than we see now. I'm sure the servants of the king were ecstatic to be alive, but they did not know that one day they, too, would be instruments in the hands of the Lord to bring good to pass. Maybe, just maybe, we are like those servants, hidden in the pages of an account and overlooked later on, but even the hidden heroes are still heroes.
And if that's so, I'm okay to be a hidden hero.
