Not just in name only

Close encounters of the LDS kind

A group of about five of us started stocking and furnishing the apartment "our" evacuees will be moving into. Just as we were getting started, a couple of the missionaries who live downstairs asked if we needed help. I tasked them with moving a big, heavy couch up two flights of stairs, around three tight corners, and into a living room. And they did. Then they stayed and kept helping, and refused offers of pizza.

I didn't realize one of the women helping out was also a Saint until I started unpacking box after box of Number 10 cans of macaroni, flour, sugar, rice, beans, baking mixes, oatmeal...basically everything you'd need to cook for a month, she'd brought. Everything you'd need to wash your clothes, yourself, or your dishes for a month, she'd brought. She had all of this stuff stocked as extra, even though she's been living off of it since losing her job last year.

All that and a first-aid kit, too. It was a wonder to see. Every time one of us said, "Do we have X?" she'd answer "Hang on, got one right here" and yank some new thing out of her bag. When I asked her about it, she shrugged and said, "Hey. It's what we do."

So the folks coming in have a pantry crammed full of food, a closet crammed full of clothes (in the right sizes!) and a bathroom so stocked they won't have to buy toilet paper or shampoo for, like, six months. Either that or they'll be *very* clean.

We also have a wad of cash for gas cards, gift cards, grocery shopping, deposits to get the electricity turned over to their name, phone service, odds and ends, you-name-its, and a nice dinner out.

Everybody contributed according to their ability, I guess. It was a shock, though, to see a woman who's been unemployed since December who was still able to give so much, simply through storing this stuff since God Knows When. And the two missionaries who helped haul heavy things? Did it with smiles on their faces and in their dress clothes in the 100* heat.

Saints? You betcha.