“I like turkey better than chicken.”
Ammon, 11, frowned at the frozen bird his dad had scrounged up from the deep freeze. June 2012, read its wing clamp. Triumphant as Daddy appeared, this bird was a chicken. Nobody eats chicken for Thanksgiving.
I understood Ammon’s disappointment. I’m a traditionalist, myself. But where he saw a mistake, I saw a mercy: We had a chicken in our deep freeze.
It’s been a pioneering year—just the kind you would expect initiating an entrepreneurial enterprise. As my husband, his dad, and his brothers put their hands to the NutraTek plow, their womenfolk lightened the loads in the family handcarts. Seventeen pounds per person wasn’t far off, we sometimes felt, as we chucked the nonessentials from the carts. Powdered milk replaced the jugs and saved twenty dollars a week. Bread-baking ousted our trips to McGavin’s, and supper menus centered round the storage shelves’ number-ten cans. Our family piled Subway sandwiches and swimming lessons, book orders and birthday parties, date nights and dollar store sprees on the trailside and travelled on.
Of course, my pioneering metaphor deconstructs with even superficial probing. It reminds me of my first phone conversation with an Ensign editor, who called to discuss my 2500-word treatise on motherhood’s traumas. “It’s overwritten,” he broke it bluntly. “And while I don’t doubt you’ve expressed sincere feeling, it reads as though you’re whining.”
Whining. It’s what I do best. But I meekly bled that baby down to the seventeen-pound blip that the Ensign actually printed four years later.
That editor’s voice in my mind, I recalled my year; and yes, I was whining. Pathetic pioneer that I am, I prayed from the get-go for rescue wagons. They came, too, as little as I deserved them. Easter eggs appeared on our front lawn Easter weekend. A visiting teacher and a Relief Society leader each brought flats of strawberries. People passed on clothing. Neighbors shared produce and baking. A family friend employed our boys to dog-sit. When my oven broke down, another appeared out of nowhere in two days’ time, free for the taking. Our garden grew abundantly, despite hail damage in early June. Business didn’t boom, but neither did our expenses break the bank.
That was just the beginning of God’s rescue. The longer we pursued the trail, the more my perspective widened. I began to see the silver lining in our challenges themselves. Our children were starting to value the good things they possessed. I liked to think they were starting to value people even more than things. I began stretching, increasing my personal capacities to manage and make-do. Had we never commenced the journey, I never would have initiated business ventures of my own. The byproducts? I studied more, talked more, wrote more, thought more. I built new relationships, learned new skills, and (most the time) kicked my self-discipline and personal production to a whole new level.
And now, Thanksgiving morning, God sent another mercy: first a chicken in our deep freeze, and then a revelation.
“It seems like Joseph Smith just lived his entire life in misery,” Ammon mused Thanksgiving morning as we closed our daily devotional with the first four verses of D&C 121. “First he lived in confusion, then in persecution.”
“You seem pretty troubled by that,” I replied to his comment and frown.
Silence.
“Do you think Joseph Smith was always miserable?” I explored.
“Well, I would be! Hiding the plates, leaving state after state, eating poisoned food in prison with the rats and no toilet to pee.”
I nodded but flipped a few sections forward. “Listen to this,” I suggested, and I read from Section 128:
Now, what do we hear in the gospel which we have received? A voice of agladness! A voice of mercy from heaven; and a voice ofbtruth out of the earth; glad tidings for the dead; a voice of gladness for the living and the dead; glad tidings of great cjoy.
Brethren, shall we not go on in so great a cause? Go forward and not backward. aCourage, brethren; and on, on to the victory! Let your hearts rejoice, and be exceedingly glad. (vs. 19, 22)
I looked up from my reading. “Does Joseph Smith sound miserable?” I asked.
“No. He sounds elated.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because he knew what he had.”
Sister Carole Stephens’s words from last week’s General Conference fell from my lips and lodged in my heart.
“Do we know what we have?” I quoted Sister Stephens.
We have a chicken in the deep freeze. Despite eight months this year without an income, we still have surplus in our savings. We have each other. We have a prophet. We have answers to our prayers.
We have the priesthood of God to bless us; to seal us; to bind us to belong to each other, to our ancestors, to our posterity, and to Him after death and throughout eternity. We have the Holy Ghost to lead us in the more fertile parts of the wilderness (1 Nephi 16:16); and though worms destroy our bodies, yet in the flesh we shall see God (Job 19:26).
We may have suffered some slight tribulation, this pioneering year. In our feasting today, we may forego turkey for sixteen-month-old chicken. But this Thanksgiving, when I tally our blessings, I thank God for all that we have: seventeen pounds per person of priesthood, perspective, and promise.
So on, on to the victory!
Thank God for His Thanksgiving mercies.
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