Comments on: Overcoming the Great Depression and Establishing Zion at Moon Lake

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:43:28 +0000

No! You’ve made an important point. I’m idealizing the hands-on welfare experience, and I hope that it is/was ideal more often than not, but a poorly planned, poorly executed project would be just as off-putting as a poorly planned lesson or a poorly executed talk.

By: lindberg

lindberg — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:40:04 +0000

I’m sometimes ambivalent about the value of welfare projects. I love the idea, but I get annoyed at the inefficiency of it sometimes. Sometimes (e.g.) working at the cannery is a great experience and I feel glad I was there helping. Other times, particularly if things aren’t very well organized, I find myself thinking that rather than take vacation time from work to do it, I could have gone to work and then paid an unemployed ward member $10/hour to do the welfare service for me, and we all would have come out ahead.

Am I evil? Am I missing the point? Yeah, probably…

By: kevinf

kevinf — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 21:27:41 +0000

I remember many times as a young man and in the first 10 or 15 years of married life, helping out on welfare farms in Utah. We thinned beets (something I was already far to familiar with), harvested potatoes, picked grapes and peaches, and hauled hay from one stake farm to a nearby stake that had a dairy.

Even then, back in the 70′s and 80′s, I could see that mechanizing the potato and other harvests would get the crops out of the ground and into the welfare system more quickly and efficiently than our admittedly amateurish manual labor. I remember thinking they should make that conversion, and it wasn’t long before it happened.

Now, we never talk about welfare assignments in our area. They have closed the wet pack cannery, and there are no welfare farms that I know of in Western Washington that I know of. The nearest we get to large, organized service projects is collecting food for the local foodbanks every year, or our youth doing car washes to raise money for the local VFW post to mail packages to the troops in Afghanistan, which we’ve done twice now. Our most valuable collective asset is time, it seems, and no particular skills are required. While I gladly support these things, I recognize that we are not “producing” anything. That kind of makes me sad. There was something dramatically more satisfying at seeing those sacks of potatoes piling up on a flat bed trailer, and seeing all the dirty knees, hands, and faces that went with it.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 21:07:05 +0000

If only I could get some of that polish, my shoes would look good when I’m carried out.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:25:26 +0000

Mark B., your unit produced shoe polish as its project in the [American] Church-wide welfare program of the 1930s — a truly urban contribution!

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:19:52 +0000

Great story, Ardis. One more reason to rue the urbanization of American society. (Said by one who lives in a city of nearly 8,000,000–and who isn’t going to move until I’m taken out feet first.)

By: charlene

charlene — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:16:30 +0000

Very inspiring. Both of my parents acknowledged that their families survived the great depression by living only on what they could grow. The congregation that my Mennonite cousins attend still live in much this same way. Maybe it takes a shared devotion to God to trust each other enough to succeed in a communal society.

By: The Other Clark

The Other Clark — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:46:53 +0000

Our ward in Northern Idaho has a “”bishop’s woodshed.” The ward purchases logs not suitable for lumber from a logger in the ward by the semi-truck load. Last month, the entire ward showed up with chainsaws, splitting mauls, and hydraulic log splitters to tackle the 6-8 semiloads of wood at the site.

By lunch, we’d filled the shed with 15 cords of wood, with another 10 stacked outside. Even the primary kids helped. The YM will distribute this to needy members over the course of the winter.

My Utah ward would have been amazed; there’s no similar opportunity there.

By: The Other Clark

The Other Clark — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:41:06 +0000

Inspirational!

The problem with the modern system is that it not only deprives us of the feelings of consecration, but that it also is inefficient. (Even in this story, Pres. Murphy laments the inefficiency of buying goods instead of making them.)

When speaking on this subject in General Conference last week, the presiding bishop had to recycle a story from the same session six months ago. Evidently there’s only one ward in the entire church that’s figured out how to apply “lived consecration” to the modern world we live in.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:55:55 +0000

I suppose all these concerns are a (maybe the) reason for our operating on an almost exclusively cash basis today with money donations to the fast offering fund, plus the very occasional, very scattered couple of hours once in a while working on a stake welfare project or assembling something for Humanitarian Services. That may be more practical and efficient in today's conditions, but emotionally and spiritually it doesn't satisfy: Donations become a little accounting to do and a check to write, rather than a contribution of ourselves. Even if we were able to get in mind the idea that, whatever we do for a living, all hours worked on Tuesday afternoon and all day Wednesday are the hours that pay the donations and so should be thought of as something special, it wouldn't feel like the same level of consecration. But I admit to having failed to come up with even the silliest possibilities for improvement. Nobody wants what I have to offer; they only want my money, so that's what I give.