"So how might we “do what we can”?
For
one thing, we can, as King Benjamin taught, cease withholding our means
because we see the poor as having brought their misery upon themselves.
Perhaps some have created their own
difficulties, but don’t the rest of us do exactly the same thing? Isn’t
that why this compassionate ruler asks, “Are we not all beggars?” Don’t we all cry out for help and hope and answers to prayers? Don’t we all beg for forgiveness
for mistakes we have made and troubles we have caused? Don’t we all
implore that grace will compensate for our weaknesses, that mercy will
triumph over justice at least in our case? Little wonder that King
Benjamin says we obtain a remission of our sins by pleading to God, who compassionately responds, but we retain a remission of our sins by compassionately responding to the poor who plead to us.
In
addition to taking merciful action in their behalf, we should also pray
for those in need. A group of Zoramites, considered by their fellow
congregants to be “filthiness” and “dross”—those are scriptural
words—were turned out of their houses of prayer “because of the
coarseness of their [wearing] apparel.” They were, Mormon says, “poor as
to things of the world; and also … poor in heart”—two
conditions that almost always go together. Missionary companions Alma
and Amulek counter that reprehensible rejection of the shabbily dressed
by telling them that whatever privileges others may deny them, they can
always pray—in their fields and in their houses, in their families and
in their hearts.
In
that regard, I pay a personal tribute to President Thomas Spencer
Monson. I have been blessed by an association with this man for 47 years
now, and the image of him I will cherish until I die is of him flying
home from then–economically devastated East Germany in his house
slippers because he had given away not only his second suit and his
extra shirts but the very shoes from off his feet. “How beautiful upon
the mountains [and shuffling through an airline terminal] are the feet
of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” More than any man I know, President Monson has “done all he could” for
the widow and the fatherless, the poor and the oppressed" ("Are We Not All Beggars?" General Conference, Oct 2014).
