Dog Food and Other Gifts

  "In a testimony meeting I attended not long ago, at the, very end of the service, a girl arose and  made her way to the front of the room where she stood for long moments in silence, her lips trembling and her eyes overflowing. At last, when she had her emotions under control, she related to the congregation the following experience: Some three years previously, while her father was stationed with the military in Germany, he had made a thorough study of the principles of the gospel and at length had joined the Church. Within a year he was transferred back to the States, and his family settled in Maryland, where they immediately affiliated with one of the local wards. This young woman, in her teens, found that there were four other girls in the ward her age, and with great expectations she looked forward to a close association with them as they all grew in the knowledge of her so-recently reemphasized gospel. Yet she was to discover, quickly and painfully, that the girls in her new ward had a totally different idea about things. They were a close group, their families were long-time residents, their fathers held important ward and stake positions, and they could see no need to disrupt their unity and established pattern of living by becoming friends with an 'army brat,' as they called her. At first the girls were subtle in their persecutions, snickering when she was brave enough to make a comment in class, ignoring her when she spoke to them, and turning as a group and walking away laughing whenever she approached.  For a time she tried to ignore their rudeness, assuming that it was because she was new in the ward. She felt that with a little time they would all become good friends. It seemed, though, that she was wrong. Time seemed merely to aggravate and intensify the problems. A strong girl, she was initially able to handle the situation emotionally, but after a period of weeks and months she began to wonder what was wrong with her and even to feel that she was the one who was at fault.  To eliminate the snickering and giggling when she participated in class, she stopped taking part. To keep the girls from pointedly ignoring her when she spoke to them, she quit speaking, at first to them and then almost altogether. At school it became the practice of the four girls to call out and jeer in derision whenever she appeared, and it wasn't long before she was slumping down and hiding her face simply so the girls wouldn't notice her. At home her mother worried about her poor posture, but the pattern was established and was not easily changed. For a year this ridicule and persecution continued, and it was so intense and so constant that it had a severe impact on her image of herself. If they thought of her as nothing, how could she be anything else?  Her parents, of course, did all in their power to correct the situation. They went to the parents of each of the girls and talked it over with them, and those parents agreed to help. Yet when they confronted their daughters the girls denied their guilt. And the situation remained unchanged. At length, realizing that their daughter was being destroyed emotionally, the girl's parents decided that they would send her west to live with her grandmother. She agreed, and soon the word was around that she was leaving.  On her last Sunday in the ward, following another rough experience in Sunday school, she went to sacrament meeting as usual.  During the meeting she noticed that a counselor in the Relief Society presidency was having trouble with her baby, so she took the child and tended it out in the foyer, thus freeing the woman to listen to the service. As the meeting ended and people began filling up the foyer the four girls ran breathlessly up to her. They were all smiles and cheer and bubbly enthusiasm, and as she searched their radiant faces and listened to their expressions of sorrow that she was leaving she found it difficult to contain her emotions.  "Was it possible?  Could it be that after a whole year they were finally changing?  She held the fussing baby and wondered aloud that they were suddenly interested in her. " The girls giggled and assured her that of course they were concerned. They felt badly about Sunday school and had all gone in together to purchase her a going-away present. That, if anything ever could, would prove their concern for her, and tell her how they really felt about her. She was so astounded that she stood mute while they handed her a gift, beautifully wrapped, and then scurried away. She was still standing silently, gazing in awe at the present, when the counselor came after her baby.  She too noticed the brightly wrapped gift and so stood excitedly near as the girl carefully untied the bows and unwrapped the paper. And as she unwrapped it she was struggling with her tears. It was incredibly wonderful that the girls had finally changed. She had waited so long and had tried so hard and had been rebuffed so many times but it had finally worked out. At last she had the paper open, and as she gazed down into the box she could hold her tears back no longer, and they fell freely as she stood quietly and sobbed out her feelings.  The Relief Society counselor, silently wondering at the girl's burst of emotion, leaned over so that she might also observe, and there she saw, carefully placed in that beautifully wrapped package, the girl's gift from her friends, from her Latter-day Saint friends.  And she too felt the tears start in her own eyes, for inside the box the girl was holding was a can of dog food."

Remember 2 things. The worth of souls is great in the sight of god, and to love one another.