Will Your Kindness Come Back to You?

The day before Valentines Day in 1969, I went to Albertsons and got a box of Valentines cards. Our housekeeper Agnes took me. We had a housekeeper because my mother, who had multiple sclerosis, could not walk or cook or drive. When we got back, I set up the card table in our family room and filled out a card for everyone in my class. I was 11 years old. (By the way, I still have that card table. I inherited it after my parents died. It's old and torn up, but I can't seem to let it go.)

The next morning at school, however, I noticed that no one in my fifth grade class was giving out Valentine cards. My school bag was secretly full of them, but they never were to see the light of day. Somehow, I had missed the memo on Valentines cards. When the chance presented itself, I slipped into the boys bathroom across the hall and threw all my cards in the garbage can. That day, I believe, marked the official end of my childhood.

In retrospect, this experience is pretty funny and a little sad, but at the time, it was traumatic. That's why I remember the details so clearly.

It's been on my mind for several weeks, and as I've thought about it, I've wondered about the love and kindness that we all give out that seems to be discarded or falls to the ground unnoticed.

I am sure you can instantly think of experiences in your life when you have shown the tender part of yourself—perhaps in the form of romantic intentions—only to find your love unrequited, or worse, rejected and then strewn across your memory like shrapnel from a bomb. It is one of the unavoidable disasters of human life. Everyone seems to go through it, and most of us get over it to a degree. Some of us hold onto those sad feelings and they haunt us throughout our lives.

But we have promises from our Heavenly Father. Here is one that is very powerful:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.—Galatians 6:7

Doesn't that mean that if you sow seeds of kindness and love that you will reap kindness and love again? But notice the analogy of planting and reaping. The harvest takes time. It doesn't happen immediately. Seeds planted in the spring pass through two or three seasons before they are harvested. And for every seed you plant, you get 50 to 100 seeds back. That is the law of the harvest.

No wonder the Lord says:

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. —Matthew 7:12

If we will always reap what we sow, we would be wise to do to others what we would like done to us or for us.

Earlier in that same sermon, Jesus said something similar:

...With what measure ye mete [give out], it shall be measured to you again. —Matthew 7:2

My favorite promise of returned blessings is from the apostle Paul:

...Whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord.... —Ephesians 6:8

The Lord's promises are sure. Whatever good you do, whatever love you show, will come back to you, though the harvest will likely take a season or two to deliver its bounty.

All really good things take time. Fruit takes four or five months before it is ready to harvest. Babies still need nine months to be born. Romance may sprout in a few days, but may take many years to reap. Just wait in faith. God will not fail you. The end will be worth the waiting.

Those little Valentine cards will come back to me, though probably not in the same shape or form. I'll take them in the form of hugs and kisses from my grandchildren. That will be payment enough for whatever sorrow lingers from February 14, 1969.

Leaves

Leaves, beautiful in death,
lie scattered on the ground like
memories fallen in battle,

The voice of color
lighting up the earth with the
last plumage of the dying year.

They clatter in the golden breeze,
in language too old to remember,
too familiar to forget.

Mother tree, drowsy with cold,
sings a lullaby to her windswept children,
a tender farewell that only they can hear.

Lingering sunshine eases the pain of days.
The light’s constant purpose
draws our eyes forever to the sky.

—Mike Fitzgerald

To Everything There Is a Season Presentation

Here are the slides from yesterday's presentation on youth and dating.

To Everything There Is a Season (LDS)

View more presentations from Michael James Fitzgerald.

Click here for the text of the slides as a PDF. They would be good talking points for a discussion with your teenager or for a family home evening.

Here is the link to the table of contents of the resource I mentioned at the end of the presentation: A Parent's Guide.

Here also is a link to a PDF version of the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet.

To download the short story about Marli and Luke in PDF, click here. If you would like a printed copy, just contact me by email and I'll get you a copy.

Thank you for reading.

A Wedding on the Trail—November 2, 1856

One of the rescuers that traveled from the Salt Lake valley to assist the handcart companies was 28-year-old James B. Cole. James had had a dream in which he saw his future wife, a beautiful young woman who wore a fur cap bound on her head with a green scarf. He told his dream to a friend and fellow rescuer William H. Kimball.

As the two men rode into camp of the Willie Handcart Company on October 21, 1856, William spotted the girl with the fur cap and green scarf and told James, "There is your dream girl." It was 23-year-old Lucy Ward who had been traveling by handcart with a group of young women.

It was on this day, November 2, in 1856, that less than two weeks after meeting, that James B. Cole and Lucy Ward were married at Fort Bridger. They spent the winter of 1856–1857 at nearby Fort Supply which had been built by the Mormons in 1853. Lucy regained her health and by the spring of 1857, James and Lucy were able to move to the Salt Lake Valley.

Waiting Patiently

Last Sunday, during Relief Society, I had an opportunity to thank our outgoing Relief Society presidency and to welcome a new presidency. While I was waiting for the meeting to begin, the Spirit opened my mind to a dimension of a woman's life that I had not seen clearly before.

I saw how women of faith, those that I have known personally and from afar, are called upon to wait patiently on the Lord in so many ways, but especially for their husbands and children and boyfriends. Certainly men must wait, too, but it is our wives and mothers and daughters that bear it in so many ways. It was to me at that moment almost the supreme office of their calling. (I am wrong on that point, but it seemed that way.)

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. —Ecclesiastes 7:8

In an instant, I saw how young women wait patiently for young men to grow in maturity and stature so they can be treated the way they deserve and want to be treated—with kindness and dignity and respect and love and concerned attention. They wait long years for missionaries to come home, or perhaps for their boyfriends to straighten out and prepare themselves for missions or the temple or even baptism.

Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations [or trials]; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience...let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. —James 1:2–4

They wait to turn 16 and then to be asked on dates from boys they hope will ask them, or endure in patience the dates they wished they had never been asked on! Then much later there's "When will he ask me to marry him?" After the proposal, they wait for the wedding day, for that first baby to be born, for graduation day, their own or their husbands, for that "real" job and paycheck.

Perhaps the most difficult kind of waiting is for that boyfriend or husband or son or daughter to see the light, to straighten up and fly right, to get their priorities set, to repent of sins or bad habits, many of them serious and troubling. This is the most difficult kind of waiting.

Be patient in afflictions, for thou shalt have many; but endure them, for, lo, I am with thee, even unto the end of thy days. —D&C 24:8

To the women of our ward, and to all women who read this message, I sincerely thank you for all your patient waiting. Patience is a not only a virtue, it is a powerful form of faith. It is a quality of love that beckons the wayward home. Your patience does not go unnoticed, nor unheeded, though you may be waiting even now for something that is taking an unbearably long time to resolve.

You have a promise from the Lord:

Waiting patiently on the Lord, for your prayers have entered into the ears of the Lord...and are recorded with this seal and testament—the Lord hath sworn and decreed that they shall be granted. —D&C 98:2

May God grant you each of you the end of your patience. I love you and thank you with all my heart for bearing long with me as your bishop. It is one of the things that has gotten me through many trials and much anguish. May God bless you all.

Another Miracle for the Willie Handcart Company

"Robert Smith had left his mother and five siblings in Scotland and traveled to Salt Lake in 1854. He settled in Lehi. When he learned that his family was traveling to Utah in one of the troubled handcart companies, he joined in the rescue.

"Elizabeth Smith, his 13-year-old sister, was encouraging their six-year-old brother, Alexander, to keep walking as they neared the Green River. Elizabeth related that Alexander had expressed his strong wish to see their brother, Robert, as they approached a creek bank.

"Just then Robert appeared in his ox-driven wagon.

"Robert rejoiced to see them and asked where their mother and sister were. His mother, Marjorie McEwan Bain Smith, age 51, and his younger sister, Mary, age 15, had sat down exhausted. It was just at that low point that Robert came running to them.

"He loaded them in his wagon and brought them with the rest of the company to the Valley. Once in the Valley he took them to his home in Lehi."

 —From Betsy Smith Goodwin, “The Tired Mother: Pioneer Recollections,” Improvement Era 22, no. 9 (July 1919): 780 (see The Travels of the Willie Handcart Company).

Tested to the Very Limit: The Willie Hand Cart Company

October 19, 1856 was a very cold autumn day in the Nebraska Territory. After the Willie Handcart Company passed what is known as Ice Springs (nine miles west of Jeffrey City, in central Wyoming), snow fell for about half an hour. Due to low rations and exposure, many were sick and had to ride uncomfortably in wagons. Five members of the company died that day—the most to die in a single day since leaving England.

Just as things started to look as bleak as ever, a miracle happened. Four men—an advance party of the rescuers who had left the Salt Lake valley a few weeks earlier—suddenly appeared, Cyrus H. Wheelock and Joseph A. Young, a 22-year-old son of Brigham Young, among them. Their news of the coming rescue party with teams and wagons loaded with provisions, filled the weary handcart company with cheer and hope, in spite of the cold.

Joseph Young recognized Emily Hill (20 years old) from when he served in Great Britain. When he saw Emily in her near starved condition, Emily reported later the Joseph burst into tears. He gave her an onion to eat, but she saved it. When she saw a man near death, lying near a fire, she gave the onion to the sick man. The man later said that this small act by Emily saved his life.

Susannah Stone Lloyd, who was age 25 at the time, wrote of her own experience about a week before: "Only once did my courage fail. One cold dreary afternoon, my feet having been frosted, I felt I could go no further, and withdrew from the little company and sat down to wait the end, being somewhat in a stupor. After a time I was aroused by a voice, which seemed as audible as anything could be, and which spoke to my very soul of the promises and blessings I had received, and which should surely be fulfilled and that I had a mission to perform in Zion. I received strength and was filled with the Spirit of the Lord and arose and traveled on with a light heart."

When we are tested to the very limit, if we are living by genuine faith, we can expect a power beyond our own to reach down and lift us, whether by the voice of the Spirit or by hand of His servants.

It is through our extremity that we find that God is real and involved in the details of our lives.

For more information, see The Travels of the Willie Handcart Company.