Come unto Zion

23 November 2025, Sunday    

This past week I read a talk given by Elder D. Todd Christofferson in October 2008 titled ¨Come to Zion¨.¨ I really loved so much in this talk and decided to share my thoughts about it.  In it he outlines three requirements, or things we ned to try to ¨establish Zion in our homes, branches, wards and stakes...¨  And this is using the definition of Zion found in Moses 7:18, "they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness and there was no poor among them."  The first is to become unified in one heart and one mind (as the scripture says). The second is to come, individually and collectively,  a holy people.  The third is to care for the poor and needy with such effectiveness that we eliminate poverty among us.

This last one is what really struck me because i have relationships with so many people living in poverty.  Most of them I know through the church, so it makes me painfully aware of how different people at church live based on their wealth or lack thereof.  I think I probably notice this kind of thing more than I should and this is why it bothers me so much.  I feel like we are falling way short of the ideal of caring for the poor and needy so well that we eliminate poverty.  My brother Paul pointed out to me the other day that he learned on his mission and has seen it also since then, that when people turn their lives over to God, they are usually able to lift themselves out of poverty.  I have certainly seen this too.

One of the things that I've observed holding a lot of people back is the lack of responsibility they have to care for themselves.  As I've struggled to help my own children learn to care for themselves, I've noticed that they rarely learn to do things if someone is always doing something for them.  I used to always say that when you're capable of doing something (like tying your shoes, getting dressed, or even making dinner), my job is to let you do it, even if I could do it faster or better.  Because you will never learn to get better at it yourself if I am always doing it for you.  

This has been particularly hard for me with Ellie lately, because she doesn't drive.  I want her to be successful at work, but she is afraid to walk OR drive there by herself, so she depends on me to get there.  I feel like she's not going to learn to be independent if I keep driving her everywhere.  But, if I don't drive her places, she won't get the help she needs with therapists and job coaches, for example.

Similarly, many people I know have been dependent on money from the government for their whole lives. This has made it really hard for them to figure out ways to not depend on this money.  And so they don't.  They have planned their lives around it so when it disappears all of a sudden, it's a crisis.  I really want to help them, but in the long run, sometimes rescuing people in these circumstances doesn't help because they didn't have to figure out how to do it on their own.  This is a really tricky balance to strike and I'm still working on it.