Love Quote by Orson Pratt

A hunger for certainty is doing most of the work here. Orson Pratt frames his ambition not as self-making, but as self-surrender: the strongest desire of his heart is not success, comfort, or even holiness in the abstract, but disclosure - for God to "manifest" a specific, personal directive. That verb matters. Pratt isn’t asking for vague reassurance; he’s asking for an intelligible signal that can settle competing claims, quiet anxiety, and authorize a life’s choices with divine backing.

The subtext is both intimate and institutional. In 19th-century American restorationist religion - and especially in early Mormon thought, where revelation is not a metaphor but an operating system - "God’s will concerning me" carries the weight of vocation. It hints at missionary calling, marriage, migration, leadership, sacrifice: decisions that were often costly and socially stigmatized, yet made legible through the idea that heaven had issued instructions. Pratt’s language turns personal desire into a kind of spiritual credential. If your deepest longing is to be commanded, then obedience stops looking like passivity and starts looking like integrity.

There’s also a subtle rhetorical shield. By locating agency in God’s manifested will, Pratt preemptively distances himself from ego, ambition, and opportunism - common suspicions aimed at new religious movements and their leaders. The sentence performs humility while insisting on extraordinary access: the heart wants revelation, and revelation is expected. In that expectation, you can hear a whole religious culture: anxious, disciplined, and radically confident that the cosmos will answer back.