From Bruce C. Hafen and his book ‘Spiritually Anchored in Unsettled Times’:
In 1898, Andrew Kimball, age forty, had a nice home and a young family in Salt Lake City, including a three-year-old son named Spencer. The First Presidency called Andrew to be the stake president in Arizona’s Gila Valley, to serve what turned out to be the rest of his life—twenty-six years. Moving to the deserts of Arizona in those days was so difficult that, as Andrew wrote in his journal, he and his wife, Olive, “bowed before God trying to pray while their hearts were so swollen with grief. They bubbled over with scalding tears.” The quickest route from Salt Lake City to Thatcher, their new home, was two thousand miles by train through California or Colorado. His friends thought that being sent to Arizona was like being buried alive. But Andrew wrote in his journal that he had been “called on a mission and to me there was but one answer and that was to go.
As an Arizona boy, young Spencer watched his parents repeatedly take their problems to the Lord. They always had family prayer. They frequently fasted. They always paid their tithing. When Spencer was old enough to gather eggs from their chickens, his mother taught him to put aside one egg in ten to pay their tithing. Once he walked with his mother to the bishop’s house to take what she called “the tithing eggs.” Little Spencer asked her, “Are tithing eggs different than other eggs?” She said the tithing eggs belonged to Heavenly Father. From then on, gathering eggs had new meaning to Spencer.
He also remembered hearing his father say at haying time, “The best hay is on the west side of the field. Get your load for the tithing barn from that side. And load it full and high.” The Kimballs gave Heavenly Father the very best they had. As a result, Heavenly Father gave them the very best He had. Many years later, the whole Church learned how growing up in the adversities had prepared Spencer W. Kimball to be a tower of spiritual strength as the Lord’s living prophet.
Reflecting on this pattern, Brigham Young called William and Elizabeth Wood in 1867 to help settle along the muddy river in southern Nevada. One historian wrote that this colony faced more formidable challenges than had any western settlers. To accept the call, the woods sold their profitable butcher shop and their comfortable home in Salt Lake City.
Conditions in the Muddy settlement were so demanding that the colonists lived in severe poverty. As one descendant of the colonists later put it, “Those people were so poor, they couldn’t even pay attention.”12 After five years of backbreaking effort, William’s family lost everything when the settlement failed in 1872. The Woods returned penniless and exhausted to Salt Lake where they lived in a dugout with a dirt floor and a sod roof. ~Bruce C. Hafen, Spiritually Anchored in Unsettled Times (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009), 24-26 (continued)
