Extraordinary

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared that the COVID-19 virus was a global pandemic. The next day, President Russell M. Nelson closed every temple in the world, canceled all church events including local sacrament meetings and even one-to-one ministering visits, and started chartering flights to return missionaries to their home countries immediately.

When I read the Church announcement, I had a crystal clear thought and posted this on Facebook:

Today I’ve had a mental picture of standing in a line on a beach, linked arms with my Relief Society sisters, and a massive ocean wave is coming straight for us. We’re going to get submerged and when the water recedes, there will be a big mess to clean up. We will have sand in our hair and seaweed in our bras. But we will still be standing with our arms linked. Because the Relief Society women are extraordinary and we will take this on.

When things were hard in 2020, as they often were, the Spirit reminded and encouraged me with the single word: extraordinary.

It comes from when the Relief Society was organized in 1842. There was some discussion about what to name the group. Eliza R. Snow hesitated about the title Relief Society, because it sounded too dramatic to her – “as though we are responding to extraordinary occasions instead of meeting the common occurrences.”

Emma’s response was: “We ARE going to do something extraordinary. When a boat is stuck on the rapids with a multitude of Mormons on board, we shall consider that a loud call for relief. We expect extraordinary occasions and pressing calls.” [1]

The past twenty (not just the last five) years have been one extraordinary occasion and pressing call after another, around the world. The Covid-19 pandemic and quarantine was just one thing on a very long list. There have been more so-called “once in a lifetime” events than I can even think of – financial crises and economic recessions, extreme weather conditions and massive natural disasters, political upheaval and wars … and the social pressures that respond get tighter and higher every year. 2025 is a continuation of the international demolition derby.

It’s intimidating to ponder what to do or how to be extraordinary to deal with it all. So let’s back up to 1842 again.

The Relief Society was not introduced by Joseph Smith, and the women who thought of it were not Emma Smith and Eliza R. Snow. The original creators of the Relief Society were Sarah Granger Kimball and Margaret Cook, and they wanted to start a sewing group. The Nauvoo Temple was under construction, and they noticed that the workers’ clothing was wearing out. They wanted to help with the temple and decided to make new shirts for the men. These were not women of influence in the Church – they were not Apostles’ wives (Sarah’s husband was not a member, and Margaret was single), they had no callings or responsibilities (those didn’t exist yet). They were regular, ordinary people of the community who wanted to contribute and basically said, “This is what I’m good at. This is what I’m capable of doing.” And they did it. [2]

Little ideas can become big things. The entire Restoration of the Gospel, the translation of the Book of Mormon, and the creation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came about because a teenager prayed to ask which church he should join.

Women have had plenty of ideas throughout the history of the Church. Emma Smith had a chat with her husband about cleaning her floor after the men spit tobacco during their meetings, and we got the Word of Wisdom. Aurelia Spencer Rogers was annoyed with rowdy boys in her town and saw that their moms needed some assistance, so she talked to her bishop and other Church leaders. They started Primary. Young Women Girls Camp grew out of concerns that Emily Higgs had about urban working girls’ lack of opportunity for spiritual and psychological healing in nature. And the Relief Society began with a sewing group of twelve women. [3] All of these things started at the local level by women who saw a need and took action to find a solution. 

The Church is of course much bigger now than in the 1800s, and our individual ideas are unlikely to get to Salt Lake to be enacted church-wide. At the same time, decrees from the top aren’t necessarily going to meet local needs. 

Bottom-up revelation is real. We don’t have to wait for someone at Church headquarters to announce something about a concerning situation; we can make changes locally. We all have different perspectives and can see and understand things that others don’t. If something affects us directly, I believe we can get revelation about how to respond. Before the youth program was revised, my ward’s Activity Day leaders noted that all of the youth groups participated in summer camp except the Faith in God girls, so they created a day camp similar to the Cub Scouts. It was so successful that a stake day camp for girls was started the next year.

This is not a suggestion that we bypass the process to work with our ward and stake leaders. That process is councils! Ward council all the way up to the top councils at Church headquarters. I hope that all leaders – from bishops all the way to the First Presidency – listen to the spiritual promptings of the members and collaborate to find on-the-ground solutions to our challenges. 

At the local level, we also have Eliza R. Snow’s phrase: a “common occurrence.” Taking someone dinner is a very common occurrence. Not extraordinary. Except to the receiver, it could be.

In 2017, my husband had a health situation that landed him in the hospital emergency room and he took eight weeks off work. Ward members rallied around us immediately and brought us dinners. None of the dinners were elaborate. Two people didn’t cook at all – they both called restaurants and had take-out delivered to my house. It was such a relief because meal planning even in good times is a substantial mental burden for me. And I didn’t have to even think about it for two whole weeks! It was not extraordinary to the people who gave us dinners, but it was extraordinary for me to receive the dinners. The motto of Relief Society is “Charity never faileth,” and the charity extended to my family – love and care through dinners – was amazing. Common occurrences can be extraordinary.

I heard a quote on a podcast – “God uses raindrops to carve canyons.” The Doctrine and Covenants says many times that “the fulness of the gospel will be proclaimed by the weak and the simple.” If you are feeling intimidated by the idea of extraordinary, we’re not talking about each of us being a flood to carve a canyon. We are referring to individual raindrops of service, and all of us together make the flood.

I love this quote from Elder Clayton Christensen: “There is a calling far higher than that of stake president, bishop, or Relief Society president. It is to be a doer of good, a disciple of Christ, an intermediary through whom God answers others’ prayers.” [4]

Relief Society women are extraordinary doers of good, and our raindrops have carved more than one canyon of service. Sister Sheri Dew was in the Relief Society general presidency in the 1990s, and the Church was contacted about refugees in Eastern Europe due to war in Kosovo. Winter was coming and the Relief Society church-wide was asked to make quilts. They wanted 40,000 quilts in 60 days. The women of the Church made 140,000 quilts in 60 days, and Sister Dew says they’ve “never been able to turn the spigot off” for quilt donations. [5]

A couple of weeks into the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a call in Utah for Relief Society women to sew one million masks for people to wear, since personal protective gear was in such limited supply. There’s no way to count how many masks the women of the Church actually made – millions, plural. They only counted the ones made in Utah that the Church could officially keep track of. Every mask made and donated was a raindrop carving the canyon of help and health.

Another analogy of working together in Relief Society extraordinary-ness is from Sister Sharon Eubank, when she compared living the gospel and working together in unity to being on a crew team. 

“There is a thing that sometimes happens that is hard to achieve and hard to define. It’s called ‘swing.’ It happens only when all are rowing in such perfect unison that not a single action is out of sync.

Rowers must rein in their fierce independence and at the same time hold true to their individual capabilities. Races are not won by clones. Good crews are good blends—someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve, someone to fight the fight, someone to make peace. No rower is more valuable than another, all are assets to the boat, but if they are to row well together, each must adjust to the needs and capabilities of the others—the shorter-armed person reaching a little farther, the longer-armed person pulling in just a bit.

Differences can be turned to advantage instead of disadvantage. Only then will it feel as if the boat is moving on its own. Only then does pain entirely give way to exultation. Good ‘swing’ feels like poetry.” [6]

Here’s the catch that stood out to me about this analogy: rowers do all of this without looking where they’re going – their backs are to the finish line. The coxswain is the only person who sees where the boat is going and directs the team. If you look at anything except the person directly in front of you, you will throw off the rhythm of the whole boat and swamp it.

We’re past the pandemic now, but we don’t know what’s going to happen next with politics or war or natural disasters or anything in general. We can’t see anything past today. Fortunately, our coxswain is Jesus Christ. He sees what’s coming. He guides us to focus our raindrop efforts and to respond to common occurrences with the extraordinary. He links arms with us when we’re submerged in the massive waves of life and helps us clean up the big messes. All the time, not just during quarantines.

Joseph Smith said at a Nauvoo Relief Society meeting: “If you live up to these principles of charity and benevolence … If you live up to your privileges, the angels cannot be restrained from being your associates.” [7]

THAT is extraordinary. I want to be supported by angels through life. I want that for myself, and I want that for you. I invite you to join the Relief Society in doing – and being – extraordinary.

[1] Exchange between Eliza R. Snow and Emma Smith – The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, editors Kate Holbrook, Jill Mulvay Derr, Matthew J. Grow, (Church Historians Press, 2016), section 1.2.1. churchhistorianspress.org/the-first-fifty-years-of-relief-society/part-1/1-2/1-2-1?lang=eng

[2] “Relief Society Foundations,” Church historic sites, churchofjesuschrist.org/learn/history/sites/historic-nauvoo/relief-society-foundations?lang=eng

[3] Erin Cowles, “Revelation: Shared, Diverse, and Proactive,” LDS Women Project Essays of Discipleship, June 7, 2020, ldswomenproject.com/2020/06/revelation-shared-diverse-and-proactive/

[4] Clayton Christensen, “My Ways Are Not Your Ways,” Ensign, February 2007, churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2007/02/my-ways-are-not-your-ways?lang=eng

[5] Boyd Matheson, “A Conversation with Sheri Dew: Can American men and women ever be created equa?” Deseret News, October 3, 2018, deseret.com/2018/10/3/20655062/a-conversation-with-sheri-dew-can-american-men-and-women-ever-be-created-equal-podcast/

[6] Sharon Eubank, “By Union of Feeling, We Obtain Power With God,” October 2020 general conference.

[7] Daughters in My Kingdom (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2011), chapter 10, page 171, churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/daughters-in-my-kingdom-the-history-and-work-of-relief-society/live-up-to-your-privilege?lang=eng