There Was Bread

It is not reasonable for the church to focus on encouraging people to establish emergency stores at a time when many people are in a position that they must rely on such stores if they have them.

Today we are blessed to be led by prophets who understand the need for us to prepare against the calamities “which should come” and who also recognize the limitations or restrictions that we may encounter in striving to follow their counsel.

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To all who have been affected, we express understanding and concern for your situation, as well as a firm conviction that better days are ahead. You have been blessed with bishops and branch presidents who seek out members of their congregations with temporal needs and who have access to tools and resources that can help you reestablish your lives and place you on the path to self-reliance as you apply principles of preparedness.

In today’s environment, with a pandemic that has devastated whole economies as well as individual lives, it would be inconsistent with a compassionate Savior to ignore the reality that many are struggling and ask them to begin building a reserve of food and money for the future. However, that does not mean that we should permanently ignore principles of preparation—only that these principles should be applied “in wisdom and order” so that in the future we might say, as did Joseph in Egypt, “There was bread.”

The Lord does not expect us to do more than we can do, but He does expect us to do what we can do, when we can do it. As President Nelson reminded us in our last general conference, “The Lord loves effort.”

This may not be the time for people to start preparing but it is the perfect time to remind them that careful preparation is an important principle in times of plenty.

When considering the principle of preparedness, we can look back to Joseph in Egypt for inspiration. Knowing what would happen would not have been sufficient to carry them through the “lean” years without a degree of sacrifice during the years of abundance. Rather than consume all that Pharaoh’s subjects could produce, limits were established and followed, providing sufficient for their immediate, as well as their future, needs. It was not enough to know that challenging times would come. They had to act, and because of their effort, “there was bread.”

It’s too easy to get caught up in the freedom that comes when we have excess means available.

With a spiritual foundation in place, we can then successfully apply two important elements of temporal preparedness—managing finances and home storage.

Key principles to manage your finances include the payment of tithes and offerings, eliminating and avoiding debt, preparing and living within a budget, and saving for the future.

Key home storage principles include the storage of food, the storage of water, and the storage of other necessities based on individual and family needs, all because “the best storehouse” is the home, which becomes the “most accessible reserve in times of need.”

In the depth of a faith crisis Laura complained that we had previously had a large amount of food storage and declared that she never wanted to have food storage. Thankfully we are now building it up again but we should remember that we were able to stay on our feet financially for at least 5 years because we had the storage in our home reducing our food expenses as we ate most of it.