New Site Encourages Provident Living

By Lisa Ann Jackson

Say you would like to develop your food storage but you aren’t sure how to begin. Perhaps you are burdened with debt and would like to become debt free. Maybe you are looking for a new job or additional education and training. Or maybe you suffer from emotional challenges that are too difficult to manage alone.

With the launch of the new Church Web site www.providentliving.org, gospel-based guidance for these and other situations has been brought together to provide how-to assistance for managing a wide range of temporal affairs.

“The philosophy behind the site is really in its name,” says Jeff Newey, project manager of Provident Living. “It was created so people could learn to live more providently.”

Using universal gospel principles of welfare, self-reliance, and providence, the site focuses on eight areas: helps for Church leaders, physical health, social and emotional strength, educational literacy, employment, resource management, food storage and emergency preparedness, and caring for others.

Through these areas of focus, users will find articles from Church leaders and industry experts, instructional material from Church lesson manuals, interactive tools such as a food storage calculator and career tutorials, and practical how-to information on topics ranging from job interview skills to gardening. Users will also find information such as job listings, resources for adoptive and birth parents, food storage guidelines, instructions for compiling humanitarian kits, and tools to help find educational programs around the world.

“Never before in my life has the doctrine of self-reliance been more needed to be preached and encouraged for the benefit of the Saints,” said Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in October 1991 general conference (“Becoming Self-Reliant,” Ensign, Nov. 1991, 65). Church leaders continue to preach the importance of self-reliance and provident living. With the development of the Provident Living site comes a practical, gospel-oriented resource to help people manage their temporal needs.

“We teach emphatically the importance of self-reliance, the importance of education, of equipping our people so they can earn a living; the importance of saving and being prudent in the management of their affairs; the importance of setting something aside, a reserve, to take care of their needs if there should come a rainy day in their lives,” says President Hinckley (Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley [1997], 585).

Offering resources in eight areas, the Provident Living Web site promotes spiritual and temporal welfare.