I remember going to Relief Society when I was a five-year-girl with braids. My mother, a single parent, worked, and my grandmother took care of me. She was a counselor in the Relief Society presidency in our ward and so I went along to the planning meetings, the Wednesday meetings (they met midweek in those days), and the “work meetings” that led to bazaars with stuffed monkeys and glass grapes. They were wonderful days because I was watched over by sisters who loved me, and for many years those sisters in the ward were my friends.
Isn’t that what Relief Society is all about? We watch over one another, and as Lucy Mack Smith said, “We gain instruction that we may all sit down in heaven together.” We learn to prize what each of us brings to the whole and to treasure what we take away.
It was the same during the early days of Relief Society. Only twenty women met at that first meeting. My great-great-great-grandmother Bathsheba Smith was one of them. She was only nineteen, the youngest one there. She drew close to women whose names, like Bathsheba’s, mark the annals of Church history: Emma Smith, Eliza R. Snow, Sarah Kimball, and so many others. Emma told the sisters, “We are going to do something extraordinary.” We can expect “extraordinary occasions and pressing calls.” Those were women living on the frontier of America, many of them lived in log cabins with no doors or windows, some in dugouts in the hillside. To proclaim their significance in the world was indeed extraordinary.
But Emma was right. Across the world, women are doing extraordinary things in seemingly simple ways. They are caring for their families and their neighbors, standing for gospel principles and showing love to all in their community. We are indeed extraordinary in a day when the world seems to applaud only the “me” in every sentence and every act. We know better and have done and will do better.
Bathsheba, who was called as the president of the general Relief Society in 1901 by the Prophet Joseph F. Smith, stood at a conference of sisters in the fall of 1905 and said, “I feel to ask the Lord to bless you, and give you wisdom, knowledge and understanding and give you faith in the Gospel and in each other.” Those tender words could well be spoken by our Relief Society president today, Sister Julie Beck, at the General Relief Society Meeting this coming Saturday, September 24. Our divine purpose, called of God as we are, is to serve the Lord and to reach out and help one another. Our assignment has never changed. It is the Lord’s way and in the face of difficult times it is indeed “something extraordinary.”