Imagine being trapped in a storm for days without food or shelter. How would it feel to finally see someone come to help?
At October general conference in 1856, Brigham Young sent the Saints on a rescue mission! He had received news that more than a thousand pioneers were trapped in ice and snow.
“They must be brought here,” President Young said. “Your faith, religion, and profession of religion will never save one soul of you in the Celestial Kingdom of our God, unless you carry out just such principles as I am now teaching you. Go and bring in those people now on the plains.”1
In other words: saying you’re Christian doesn’t mean much unless you act to alleviate suffering, the way Christ would!
Here’s another story. In 1980, Saints from Guatemala were traveling to the United States in order to go to the temple (the nearest one was in Arizona at the time).
Their caravan of rented yellow school buses was stopped by immigration. Somehow there was a problem with the paperwork! The people all had the correct documents and were allowed to cross the border, but their buses... did not.
What could they do? There they were, in “no man’s land” between countries, without a ride.
That’s when Church members in Texas came to their aid! These rescuers picked up their brothers and sisters in cars and vans. They fed them at the chapel. Then they drove them an additional 10 hours to the Mesa temple.
“They took us and waited for us three days in Arizona, in Mesa. And then they took us back again to El Paso,” recalled Blanca Estela Barrientos Pellecer de Alvarado, one of the temple goers. “It was incredible.”2
As Latter-day Saints, we have a legacy of being rescuers and bringing others to the Savior!
Any "Rescue" Stories?
Notes
- From Saints: Volume 2, Chapter 15.
- OH 13373-Oral History, Julio Enrique Alvarado and Blanca Barrientos Pellecer de Alvarado, 30 August 2018, Guatemala City, Guatemala, Church History Department.