Tribune Feby 22-56 for Time of Need By Ivy Baker Priest Treasurer of the United States Shortly after I came to Washington, a friend asked me what was the most difficult problem I ever had to face. I found myself answering without thinking: “Poverty.” It seems odd to people that the treasurer of the United States, who is concerned with billions of dollars, was once concerned with poverty. Time and again our families made plans for the future, then abandoned them because there wasn’t enough money to carry the plans out. My father worked in the Utah copper fields. He would lease out a stake from one of the companies and work it himself. If he hit it right, times were good. But if anything went wrong, times could be very bad indeed, and it seemed that my father was constantly getting hurt in the mines. His income stopped. Feast or Famine From the first, we had to get used to this feast-or-famine existence in my family. Once, when we were in a feast time, my father and mother moved into a large house in Bingham Canyon. It was just a frame building, set on a hill along with a row of other mining-town houses, close up to a narrow street, and yet even Mother’s home was not really hers for long. One day there was another accident at the mine. My father’s leg was broken, and he was out of work for months. We very shortly ran out of money. Mother turned the home she was so proud of into a boarding house. Then, in addition to 50 children romping around outside, seven children of her own, an injured husband to care for, there were 30 miners to feed three times a day. Even such things as family prayers, for instance, were far from normal in my childhood. Prayers had an unusual function in our home. With most families mealtime is a family time. Mealtime in our house was just the opposite because we all had to work getting food ready for the men. Being Together So we grew to depend heavily on family prayers as a time to be together in the presence of God. My mother and father were Mormons. We have a belief in the Mormon Church that each of us is given a separate set of talents. Our objective in life is to use these talents. Our objective in life is to use these talents to the utmost, wherever they lead us. This is the kind of objective my mother and father had. This is why, hard as they worked, they weren’t even fazed when material plans seemed to fail. “If we don’t use our talents, that is where we fail,” my mother used to say, out in the kitchen, whenever one of her own best-laid plans went wrong. “We must try to make sound plans. But we should never set our heart on one goal so firmly that our world will come tumbling down around our feet if we can’t reach it. How do we know what path God has in mind for our talents?” Wanted to Be a Lawyer I have found this very helpful all my life. When I was a young girl, I decided I would like to become a lawyer. I actually did get as far as entering the University of Utah. Then one snowy day in 1928, when he was still a vigorous man, my father was run over by a car. His skull was fractured. He never recovered. He lay ill for the last six years of his life, and his income stopped completely. There was no choice but for me to go to work. “Don’t worry,” Mother said. “Education is not a separate and complete experience. It is a preparation for the experience of living.” I never did get back to college. I went to work immediately as a telephone operator. The younger children took whatever jobs they could find such as caddying and selling newspapers. But when we pooled all our incomes, there still wasn’t enough to go around. A Welfare Program It was at times like this, all through my childhood, that one of the very finest of the Mormon practices came to our aid: our welfare program. We tithe our income in the Mormon Church. Part of our tithes goes to what we call the Lord’s Storehouse, modeled after the Lord’s Storehouse in the Old Testament, where people in trouble could come for aid. I don’t know how we’d have made out without the storehouse. But on of the most beautiful parts of this Mormon program is that we were always expected to contribute to the storehouse, even while receiving. We contributed time, instead of goods. It kept us from feeling we were charity case, which we weren’t. Even accepting aid was a part of our religious life. In 1934, my father died and just three years ago my mother joined him. But they had used their talents to the utmost. Their Gifts My father, for instance, contributed his gifts for careful, prayerful judgement and his innate wisdom both to his family and to literally hundreds of miners who might never have known such a man if my father had become a judge. My mother contributed her cheerfulness, her astounding ability to accept her lot, roll up her sleeves and start again. All their lives my mother and father had a security that was astounding under the circumstances of their lives. They knew they could depend on their storehouse. That storehouse took away the fear of not having enough to eat. But even more important they had a spiritual storehouse within themselves that they contributed to always. Thursday - Cliff Milnor, newspaper columnist, tells the ordeal of a boy who accidently killed a playmate and how a minister taught a whole school a lesson in forgiving. (From the magazine Guideposts)