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This time last year the Houston area struggled after the effects of Hurricane Ike . Most of the city and surrounding areas lost electrical service; we lost service for a couple of weeks.
My neighbor across the street had a huge pine tree crash through his house letting the heavy rains pour into his living room. With little in the way of “construction materials”, a couple of tarps, some nails and bungee cords; a couple of us pitched in to assemble a make shift patch to reroute the water, not that it helped all that much.
My business truck has a small generator which we enlisted to keep our food stores, the outside freezer and kitchen refrigerator cold. We would crank it up for awhile several times during the day and night to make the most of a limited supply of gasoline, there being no power to gas stations in the area either. We were able to run a small fan, the computer and, remarkably, internet service after the first week, you can read a couple of other blog entries about it here and here ; but that’s not the purpose of writing today, I wanted to compare our modest inconvenience with hardships of others.
Today’s Sunday School lesson, “ A Mission of Saving ”, had to do with the Mormon Pioneers who crossed the Great Plains under extremely harsh conditions and their brothers and sister in the Gospel who came to their rescue.
I should step outside the box for a moment and explain that I’m a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the “Mormons”. Prior to doing any serious investigation of the Church’s teachings, about the only thing I knew about the Mormons was how they’d crossed the Plains in covered wagons; oh yeah, that and they had lots of wives. I didn’t know that much as you can see, that part about having lots of wives had been done away with a very long time ago and my understanding of the “afternoon trek” across the plains was the result of the magic of television and my imperfect understanding of what that migration entailed.
The Sunday School lessons work on a four year pattern, that is if I have that part down. One year we study the Old Testament, then the New Testament, the Book of Mormon and lastly Church History. This year’s course of study is Church History through the pages of the Doctrine and Covenants.
Getting back to this morning’s lesson,
“President Gordon B. Hinckley said: “Stories of the beleaguered Saints and of their suffering and death will be repeated again and again. … Stories of their rescue need to be repeated again and again. They speak of the very essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (in Conference Report, Oct. 1996, 118; or Ensign, Nov. 1996, 86).
Referring to the pioneers, President Hinckley also said: “I will never get over being thankful to them; I hope you never get over being thankful to them. I hope that we will always remember them. … Let us read again and again, and read to our children or our children’s children, the accounts of those who suffered so much” (Church News, 31 July 1999, 5).”
You may think you have an understanding of what those hardships were; but I learned about the Handcart pioneers for the first time not long after joining the Church back in 1978 and have listened with moistened eyes every fourth year as the lesson plan unfolds.
The handcart pioneers were the poorest, unable to afford the “luxury” of a covered wagon. Handcarts were hastily put together to enable a small family to “make a go of it”, for lack of a better way to put my thoughts, to join with the Saints in the Great Salt Lake Valley. I often wondered what kind of testimony would be powerful enough to strengthen those undertaking such a trek across the vast distances of unknown territory, many of whom would walk the whole way with only the clothes on their backs.
Then there are the stories of the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies which suffered the worst, the. These folks started late in the season and got caught by the onset of an early winter out on the plains many miles from the Salt Lake Valley. When I think of the human suffering these folks went through my tears well up quickly.
Folks in our day would have hired lawyers to sue the organizers of such an ill fated company of travelers, pointing the finger of blame and a desire for justice. That’s not the way it went down, my apologies for inserting a little cop slang.
An account from one of the survivors, William Palmer:
“I was in that company and my wife was in it. … We suffered beyond anything you can imagine and many died of exposure and starvation, but did you ever hear a survivor of that company utter a word of criticism? … [We] came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with him in our extremities.
“I have pulled my handcart when I was so weak and weary from illness and lack of food that I could hardly put one foot ahead of the other. I have looked ahead and seen a patch of sand or a hill slope and I have said, I can go only that far and there I must give up, for I cannot pull the load through it. … I have gone on to that sand and when I reached it, the cart began pushing me. I have looked back many times to see who was pushing my cart, but my eyes saw no one. I knew then that the angels of God were there.
“Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart? No. Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay, and I am thankful that I was privileged to come in the Martin Handcart Company.”
I count my blessings for the trials, limited as they may be in comparison. We each are given opportunities to test our testimonies, remembering the promise that we would never be tested beyond that which we are able to endure. Perhaps our character testing is around the next corner and those little bumps in the path, our Hurricane Ike’s if you will, are only minor trials with the really tough test yet to come.
Recalling the words of a return missionary from Samoa and the mild rebuke he got from his partner when a little rain dampened his desire to spread the Gospel, “What, you’re going to let a little rain stop you from doing what the Lord would have you do? You come from a pioneer heritage which had your people walk across the Great Plains, some of them without shoes in the middle of winter.”
Photograph credit to Walter Reed via Flickr .
You might have noticed the font changes; these were brought about through the interpretation of Blogspot's wonderful compose mode functions which took a large dose of LSD, not LDS, while posting this article; sorry, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to fix these unwanted magnifications.
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