Continuing from Church Historian, Kate Holbrook ‘A Harvest of Truth’:
Let me be clear. I don’t just study this Church, I live it. And I love it. I’ve raised my children in this Church as my own mother raised me. Aside from the many reasons I love this Church, I have chosen to live my life in the Church simply and finally because I know it is true. In this article, I have tried to bring more precision to that belief. I have spent my career studying Church teachings and history carefully. I’ve compared them with other options and chosen with my eyes wide open. When I say I believe the Church is true, I mean that I believe God is in this Church, and that both the leaders and members receive true inspiration from God according to their stewardships. I believe that the true power of God, which we call the priesthood, is in this Church. I’ve felt it, I’ve seen it, and my professional life immerses me in sources that reinforce it. My Church life reinforces it. My family life, which I hold particularly dear, reinforces it.
When it comes to the Church, both things are true. The Church is true because it contains eternal truths and saving priesthood power and ordinances, and because it teaches its members to seek and embrace all truth. At the same time, as Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf taught us, “the Restoration is an ongoing process.” This is part of what it means that our Church is “true and living”: the Church is always becoming true as it grows and adapts to new circumstances and challenges. One of the ways the Church becomes true is through our own efforts to build it truly. The truth of the Church must be constantly replenished by the faith, hope and charity of its members when we build Christlike relationships with one another, we make the Church true.
The True Church: Seek and Embrace All Truth
As a graduate student, I studied the history of Latter-day Saint foodways, the academic term for people’s eating habits and cooking practices. From the beginning, our foodways revealed the priority our people placed on the virtue of self-sufficiency. During the Latter-day Saints’ first years in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young worried about the reliability of a food supply that required Saints to trade with outsiders who might become hostile or mercenary. He pleaded with Church members to store grain and food for times of hardship, and in 1876 he put Emmeline B. Wells and the Relief Society in charge of grain storage. As a result, for just over a hundred years, Relief Society women worked together to raise, purchase, trade, glean, share, sell, and above all store wheat. The image of the wheat sheaf still appears on the Relief Society building on Temple Square, a symbol of hard work and resourcefulness that created abundance for all.2 This emphasis on self reliance was carried forward in the Church Welfare program, officially launched in 1936. The program encouraged members toward self-sufficiency in growing their own food, living frugally, and storing a supply of food in their own homes. The virtue of self sufficiency proved its worth when. . . . (continued) ~Kate Holbrook. For the concluding post click “A Harvest of Truth III”
For Kate Holbrook’s complete article, access the July/August 2023 issue or the LDSLiving magazine page 20. [560]
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