At stake meeting, a member of the stake presidency told the following story.
My sister was traveling from LA to SLC when she fell into conversation with a woman from Rexburg who said she had been helping her sister with the delivery of her ninth child. It seemed clear the woman was LDS. Soon her story unfolded. I'll call her Ann. When Ann was a teenager her family moved to Beaverton Oregon. They were active in the church, in fact her best friend's mom was her Laurel adviser.
When Ann found herself pregnant out of wedlock, her family disowned her. Her mother gave her a list of homeless shelter's and kicked her out of the home. Shortly after, the family moved to Texas and did not keep in contact with her. Ann was indeed homeless, and remained so during the pregnancy. She begged for food in Portland and lived under a bridge. After the baby was born, she realized she needed a better life plan. She learned of a program that would pay for her to become a kindergarten teacher, even providing daycare for her baby.
Things started to improve for Ann. She went to school and got an apartment. At this time, the father of the child was released from prison (on a DUI charge, which evidently was representative of his lifestyle). He sought out Ann and asked for her assistance. After moving into the apartment, they didn't have enough to survive and eviction was threatened.
One evening they were arguing. The fight turned loud and ugly. In the heat of the argument, there was a knock at the door. The man at the door said simply, "I am your home teacher. What do you need and how can I help?"
They told him that they had no money, and the boyfriend needed a job. The home teacher asked what kind of work he did. He said he had done some construction. The home teacher said he had a concrete business and needed a worker. Could he start tomorrow?
Well, the boyfriend worked for the home teacher for several years. He joined the church and eventually married Ann. Ann says she has no idea how her home teacher found her as she had no contact with the church or her family for several years.
The stake presidency member concluded with, "We are often told to magnify our callings, but we usually interpret that to mean 'make larger'. Instead of making our callings larger, let's try to cause them to increase in intensity."
I loved the home teacher angle, but I couldn't get over why anyone would give their daughter a list of homeless shelters and then leave town. That is totally unbelievable. So you people who live in Rexburg and Beaverton, do you think this really happened?
1 comment:
I haven't heard of anything like that happening, but its not exactly something you would brag about, would you? In our own ward, something similar happened, althought not as a result of the sin of a child. A family moved into our ward about 4 years ago. When they first got here they were so protective of their kids, and wouldn't even allow them to ride home with a group of YW and leaders - they always walked from the church home. Their kids couldn't have sleepovers (which, by the way, I adopted as my own policy) and they all worked to help their father, a plumber, advertise his business ventures as he sought to get plumbing work and further the roto-rooter company he bought. Last year the mom had some kind of breakdown, although I am not privy to any of the details. I know they were struggling financially, so they made plans to move back to California, where they could charge a lot more. The next thing I know they are moved, and their three oldest children have stayed in Rexburg. One of them makes sense, he is attending college at BYUI. The next oldest basically was left to her own resources. She had graduated from high school, but didn't want to go to college, so she has just been a teacher's aide this year and lived with a family in the ward. The younger daughter, still high school age, is living with grandparents. Only the two younger sons, 12 and 14, moved back to California with the parents. I think there was just no money, the parents were strapped and the kids didn't want to go, so they were kind of scooted out of the nest, willingly or not, and the parents left them on their own. Strange to go from over-protective to no protection, but there you have it.
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