Reg Christensen lives in the Midwest with his wife, Carol. They have seven children and seventeen grandchildren. Reg has fulfilled a variety of callings in the Church and he and Carol have been blessed with many service opportunities as Pathway missionaries and service volunteers at the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, to mention a few. While living in Jerusalem, they served in the Bethlehem branch, Carol as the Relief Society president and Reg as the branch president. His happy times come from being with family and friends, reading, writing, woodworking, leathercrafting, exploring nature, and blessing lives with his handyman skills. He has published several books, including Unlocking Isaiah: Lessons and Insights that Draw Us to the Savior.
Enter Reg…
Of all the virtues we could seek to attain and develop, we are admonished to “cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all.” (Moroni 7:46)
Striving For Charity
Charity is “the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever.” (Moroni 7:47) This love of God and Christ is described as “most joyous to the soul.” Charity is “perfect love” and “everlasting love.”
We demonstrate our charity when we develop and share pure love, without thought of personal praise or reward, for all children of our Heavenly Parents in all their circumstances. Pure charity springs from pure hearts.
A Charitable Investment
We are free to invest our time and resources in whatsoever we choose. A well-planned stock portfolio may be the means of providing temporal blessings for many, but such investments can vanish in a day. In contrast, an investment in charity is a pure and eternal investment—free from the rust and devaluation of our temporal whims and pursuits. When we learn and practice charity, we make an eternal investment that blesses lives—including our own—forever.
Our investment in charity may take many forms; we each become charitable according to our own talents and capacities. There are some charitable acts we simply may not be able to do in our mortality, but there are other qualities that may be universally developed by anyone and everyone. Elder Marvin J. Ashton taught,
“Perhaps the greatest charity comes when we are kind to each other, when we don’t judge or categorize someone else, when we simply give each other the benefit of the doubt or remain quiet. Charity is accepting someone’s differences, weaknesses, and shortcomings; having patience with someone who has let us down; or resisting the impulse to become offended when someone doesn’t handle something the way we might have hoped. Charity is refusing to take advantage of another’s weakness and being willing to forgive someone who has hurt us. Charity is expecting the best of each other.”
Noticing Virtues of Others
During the organization of the Relief Society in Nauvoo, President Joseph Smith said,
“Don’t be limited in your views with regard to your neighbors’ virtues…. You must enlarge your souls toward others if you [would] do like Jesus…. As you increase in innocence and virtue, as you increase in goodness, let your hearts expand—let them be enlarged towards others—you must be longsuffering and bear with the faults and errors of mankind. How precious are the souls of men!”
In the book Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, President Smith taught more about the effects of charity on our views and feelings:
“The nearer we get to our Heavenly Father, the more we are disposed to look with compassion on perishing souls; we feel that we want to take them upon our shoulders, and cast their sins behind our backs.”
As frightening and sad as the pandemic was, there were countless acts of charity coming from the trial, mostly from dedicated health care workers who risked their own lives and stress their own families by reaching out in love and service to those who are suffering. In many ways, the world will be a better place because of our trials. Oh, that we could just permanently remember how we are helping and loving each other.
Charity Towards Neighbors
The 1918 flu outbreak impacted my grandparents and they had to move to Idaho to try and homestead. How dark the world must have looked during the great flu pandemic. And yet there were those bright and shining stars of hope and charity, such as when a neighbor came and cared for us through our recovery and prevented us from needing to go, by order of the county, to one of the makeshift hospitals, where it seemed that “corpses were being carried out nearly as fast as patients were carried in.” Imagine that—a neighbor, who could not have known my grandparents for long, offered them the pure love of Christ by helping them through their trials. I am confident it was not convenient or fun for him. Our Savior could have just as well referenced him rather than the Good Samaritan in answering the tempting question of the haughty lawyer: “And who is my neighbour?”
I hope to someday, in the next realm of life, meet this neighbor and personally thank him for helping my family. He must have understood that we are not to judge whether others are worthy of our service by thinking, “The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand.” He must have known, as we should all remember, that we are all “beggars” and “depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment.”
Elder Vaughn J. Featherstone, who served as a member of the Seventy, related the following account by his friend Brother Les Goates. Brother Goates’s father, George, farmed sugar beets west of Lehi, Utah. In 1918, when the events he described took place, more than 20 million people around the world died in the Spanish influenza epidemic.
“Winter came early that year and froze much of the sugar beet crop in the ground,” wrote Brother Goates. “My dad and brother Francis were desperately trying to get out of the frosty ground one load of beets each day.”
One day they received a telephone call that George’s nine-year-old grandson Kenneth “had been stricken with the dread ‘flu,’ and after only a few hours of violent sickness, had died.” George was asked to go to Ogden and take the boy to Lehi for burial. When George arrived at the home he found his son Charles was also sick. Charles asked his father to take the boy and return for him the next day.
“Father brought Kenneth home, made a coffin in his carpenter shop, and … with [my brother] Franz and two kind neighbors [dug] the grave. … The folks had scarcely returned from the cemetery when the telephone rang again.”
They learned that Charles had died and four of his young children were also sick. Charles’s body was sent to Lehi by train, but the next day George had to return to Ogden to get one of the grandchildren, seven-year-old Vesta, who had since died. Before he returned to Lehi with Vesta, a call came again that one of her sick sisters, five-year-old Elaine, had also died. So George made yet “another heartbreaking journey to bring home and lay away a fourth member of his family, all within the week.”
The next day George told his son Francis, “Well, son, we had better get down to the field and see if we can get another load of beets out of the ground before they get frozen in any tighter.”
“As they drove along the Saratoga Road, they passed wagon after wagon-load of beets being hauled to the factory and driven by neighborhood farmers. … On the last wagon was … Jasper Rolfe. He waved a cheery greeting and called out: ‘That’s all of ’em, Uncle George.’
“My dad turned to Francis and said: ‘I wish it was all of ours.’
“When they arrived at the farm gate … there wasn’t a sugar beet on the whole field. Then it dawned upon him what Jasper Rolfe meant when he called out: ‘That’s all of ’em, Uncle George!’
“Then father sat down on a pile of beet tops—this man who brought four of his loved ones home for burial in the course of only six days; made caskets, dug graves, and even helped with the burial clothing— … and sobbed like a little child.
“Then he arose, wiped his eyes with his big, red bandanna handkerchief, looked up at the sky, and said: ‘Thanks, Father, for the elders of our ward’”
Charitable service is often not convenient, nor is it always happy or fun. President Thomas S. Monson taught,
“Our opportunities to give of ourselves are indeed limitless, but they are also perishable. There are hearts to gladden. There are kind words to say. There are gifts to be given. There are deeds to be done. There are souls to be saved.”
The harvesting of the sugar beet crop could not wait for a more convenient day. My grandparents in Idaho had no control over the timing of their flu, and they needed help. When we see opportunities to serve, we serve. That is how charity works. Sure, God who created the planets and placed them into orbit and parted the Red Sea and destroyed the Assyrian army could have extracted a few sugar beets from the ground to help a grieving family. Instead, He provides us the opportunities to show charity to our neighbors.
President Spencer W. Kimball said,
“God does notice us, and he watches over us. But it is usually through another person that he meets our needs.”
The Ultimate Charity
As noble and essential as is our quest to become charitable beings, the Atonement and pure love of Jesus Christ is the ultimate manifestation of charity. The prophet Moroni, in remembering the words of the Lord, said,
“I remember that thou hast said that thou hast loved the world, even unto the laying down of thy life for the world, that thou mightest take it again to prepare a place for the children of men. And now I know that this love which thou hast had for the children of men is charity; wherefore, except men shall have charity they cannot inherit that place which thou hast prepared in the mansions of thy Father.” (Ether 12: 33-34)
The Atonement is Christ’s ultimate charity!
In the book, Christ and the New Covenant, Elder Jeffery R. Holland taught,
“The greater definition of ‘the pure love of Christ,’ however, is not what we as Christians try but largely fail to demonstrate toward others but rather what Christ totally succeeded in demonstrating toward us. True charity has been known only once. It is shown perfectly and purely in Christ’s unfailing, ultimate, and atoning love for us…. It is that charity—his pure love for us—without which we would be nothing, hopeless, of all men and women most miserable. Truly, those found possessed of the blessings of his love at the last day—the Atonement, the Resurrection, eternal life, eternal promise—surely it shall be well with them. This does not in any way minimize the commandment that we are to try to acquire this kind of love for one another. We should ‘pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that [we] may be filled with this love’ [Moroni 7:48; see also 1 Corinthians 13:4–5, 7–8]…. As Christ lived so should we live, and as Christ loved so should we love. But the ‘pure love of Christ’ Mormon spoke of is precisely that—Christ’s love. With that divine gift, that redeeming bestowal, we have everything; without it we have nothing and ultimately are nothing, except in the end ‘devils [and] angels to a devil’ [2 Nephi 9:9].”
An Invitation
I conclude this topic by sharing a little personal exercise with you, prompted by Elder Holland’s teaching, which I have completed many times. As you read and ponder the following verses from the book of 1 Corinthians, I invite you to simply consider the phrase, “The Atonement—The pure love of Christ” alongside the word “charity.” As you will see, I have added [The Atonement—The pure love of Christ] to prompt your ponderings.
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity [The Atonement—The pure love of Christ], I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity [The Atonement—The pure love of Christ], I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity [The Atonement—The Pure Love of Christ], it profiteth me nothing.
Charity [The Atonement—The Pure Love of Christ] suffereth long, and is kind; charity [The Atonement—The Pure Love of Christ] envieth not; charity [The Atonement—The Pure Love of Christ] vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity [The Atonement—The Pure Love of Christ] never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity [The Atonement—The Pure Love of Christ], these three; but the greatest of these is charity [The Atonement—The Pure Love of Christ]..”
May we all seek charity—both in our striving to become more charitable, and in our seeking to follow our Savior, who, through His pure love, gave us the ultimate charity.
