Helping Hands

On Saturday we had a service project in our student stake. I was responsible for the details and was a bit stressed about some last minute glitches. But - the morning came, and all went beautifully.

We had elders from one of the wards come to help us unload the truck of supplies. We set up 6 staging areas and counted out the 1900 toothbrushes, 950 bars of soap, combs and towels, and 475 tubes of toothpaste.

We began at 10am with a brief opening session. A quartet of young sisters sang a beautiful song about miracles and then President Olson spoke. He is Bruce's second counselor and is the manager of the Idaho Falls Cannery. He shared some of what the church is doing to bless lives all over the world. He told us that in the past few years there have been more that 6 million volunteer hours given at various welfare projects and that did not count activities like the one we were having that morning. He showed two short video clips of what the church has done to help in Haiti and how farm workers gave up their Christmas Day to come, unbeknown to the director of the grape orchard in California, to prune the vines. They told him, even though it was their only day off in months, being there was their gift to the Christ child. President Kusch ended the session by sharing his thoughts about the work we were about to do and telling us that one great lesson for us to learn is that when we see a need, we should act immediately. It was a wonderful way to begin.

We had 120 women who then assembled 475 hygiene kits. Four elders from another ward were there to seal and load the boxes, and went with Bruce to deliver them to our humanitarian center here in Rexburg.

I am grateful for a church that practices what it preaches. It was a great day at BYU-Idaho!