Zion!

This last weekend was an incredible weekend. Lisa and I are the Stake Humanitarian Specialist. We have 2 things that we are responsible for. Once is a clothing exchange that takes place each summer before school starts. Everyone in the stake or elsewhere can donate clothes that are in good condition. With so many little children in Eagle Mountain you see clothes that they grow out of but are still in great shape. This relieves the burden of families when getting clothes for school. The other thing that we do in our calling as Humanitarian specialists is something called HEARTS for the Holidays.

The way this program works is each auxiliary and quorum in the stake selects 2 projects to do. For example, a High priest group can collect bicycles for one project and build doll houses for another. Some of the primaries asked the children to do extra chores around the house for loose change. Every week they would bring in their pennies, dimes, and nickles and put them in a jar. They raised over $200 in change and the primary president went out and bought toys to be donated. The auxiliary are High priests, Elders, Relief Society, Young Women, Young Men, and Primary. With each one doing two projects that makes 12 projects from each ward in the stake.

Around October the Bishop of each ward prayerfully selects families from his ward that are having a hard time and can not afford to do Christmas for their families. Our goal is to make Christmas a time of joy instead of a time of stress. Then in mid November these families are assigned an escort to take them through the stake center shopping. The escort is someone in ward leadership who is a part of the Ward welfare committee. They have sat down with the family prior to this event and evaluated what their needs are so when they are going through they know what to look for. Kind of the same concept as making sure you do not go grocery shopping when you are hungry.

We had just over 80 families attend and we met almost every need that was asked for. The stories are what is amazing. There were miracles that happened all day long. I would interview people who would say "the only thing my daughter wanted was X and I walked into the room and there it was." These incidents seemed to happen all day long. I have read the story in the New Testament that tells of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with only a few loves and fishes and this weekend I saw something similar. No matter how much went out that door there was always more. No matter what a family needed it seemed to be there. The spirit of God was there all day long. From time to time I would walk through the building and just look at things to make sure everything was still in order and I felt as though there were angles in attendance assisting all those who were there.

Most of the people who made it all possible never saw what I saw and probably will never know the impact they all had. I realized this weekend what Zion really is. Zion is "Every man seeking the interest of his neighbor..."(D&C 82:19) and what took place was the very picture of Zion. If such a program could be extended throughout the entire year I could say of us like the Nephites after the visit of Jesus "...there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God."(4 Nephi 1:16)

The pictures do not do it justice but here they are. The entire Stake Center was full.