Chapter 2
A Bite and a Stretch
The Knights of the Round Table always came to mind when Ginny attended her stake meetings with the Relief Society presidents sitting around the massive table in the high council room. Today was different because presidencies were also invited, and the stake president wanted to speak from the pulpit in the chapel. Ginny wondered what the occasion was as she entered the chapel and started looking for someone she recognized.
Ginny recognized most of the women, but only a few names came to mind. She found it amazing how the mantle of her calling had brought with it the ability to remember every sister’s name in her large ward, but the gift didn’t extend to the women in other wards. She just couldn’t remember their names. Ginny didn’t see any of her presidency yet, so she picked an empty pew to the side and sat down. Then she proceeded to pull out her pad of paper and four pencils.
“This is going to be good,” she thought.
Four pencils were essential for taking notes from Ginny’s stake president. President Blanding was a visionary man who always surprised her with something extraordinary in his message. She knew he had his issues like every other mortal, but when he spoke as the stake president, she was sure he was called of God. He always sent her home with amazing stories to ponder.
Ginny was good at taking notes. She used pencils instead of pens because she was fast enough to back up and erase when needed. She had gained a reputation among her friends for always getting the scoop on paper, and she considered it one of her solemn obligations to the ward sisters to bring the latest information back home to them. She always felt it was a little unfair that she had the privilege of hearing the inspired messages while her ladies were missing out.
“Ginny, do you mind if I sit with you?” Nikki Samaras interrupted Ginny’s reverie as she climbed over Ginny’s bulging computer bag. The bag was heavy enough to cause bursitis in anyone’s shoulder, but Ginny thought of it as her Mary Poppins bag. She was surprised and grateful when Nikki’s name popped into her head. Nikki was the Relief Society president for one of the three wards in Deerhaven, their city on the mountain, and the two women occasionally shared notes and insights. Nikki’s jet-black hair was striking, and Ginny always felt a little scruffy next to her elegance.
“Hey lady! Sure thing. Here, let me scooch this bag over a little.”
“Is President Blanding speaking tonight? Do you know what he is going to talk about?” Nikki asked.
“I have no idea, but with all the changes rolling out, nothing will surprise me.” Ginny smiled.
Nikki laughed. “You say that, but then he comes out with yet another shocker.”
Their attention was drawn to the front of the room as the women leaders and President Blanding took their places on the stand. He was a rather striking man, tall and thin, with light brown hair and a little silver coming in at his temples. The new stake Relief Society president, Patti Windham, had made a dramatic change in the style of these meetings and worked faithfully to implement a council format rather than a canned presentation. Ginny wondered how well that would work from the pulpit in the chapel.
“Not so much,” Ginny concluded. The logistics were difficult for group discussion. It didn’t matter, though. The announcements were brief until the Relief Society president came to the final item.
“Sisters, we have one more item—a special request from President Blanding. He feels strongly that we need to help the sisters get three months of convenient food storage into their homes by the new year. He is asking us to be the motivating force and to help them move mountains to get this done. I’m sure President Blanding will help us understand the urgency he feels.” With the business completed, the Relief Society president turned the time over to the stake president.
Ginny and Nikki looked at each other with curious eyes. “What could this mean?” they wondered, and Ginny’s mind turned immediately to her ward’s efforts to lay up a year’s supply. President Blanding had been sounding a warning voice for several years while Ginny was serving as a counselor with her good friend, Gwen Whitmore, as the Relief Society president.
Gwen and Virginia enjoyed each other’s fearlessness and work ethic. Three years earlier, Gwen had asked Ginny to head up their Relief Society’s preparedness efforts and provide an order each month for food storage or a self-reliance tool along with a preparedness class. It proved to be a heroic and exhausting effort. Most wards called a specialist to do what Ginny did, but she knew very well that the umbrella of the Relief Society could provide a mandate that the sisters would respond to. She remembered from experience that the Emergency Preparedness Specialist tended to be an orphan calling with no authority. Gwen had received her own witness that something was coming on her watch, and the two friends had moved mountains to get ready for it. Now Gwen was no longer the Relief Society president, but she had become the mayor of Deerhaven.
Ginny had charged ahead with that mandate and organized orders every month for beans, powdered milk, popcorn, stoves, seeds, and just about every other food staple and survival item. She would never forget when she was able to get an order placed with a wholesaler for an excellent price on the highest quality instant milk. Ginny provided a taste test in a Relief Society meeting with three kinds of powdered milk as well as whole milk, and the women were all amazed to find the high-quality instant milk was just as popular as the fresh milk. The ward sisters spread the word through their families and acquaintances, and the final order totaled more than $10,000 worth of powdered milk. “Who would think that was even possible?” Ginny marveled.
She did the math every month for the current order and informed the sisters of the recommended quantities per person for three months as well as for twelve months. They loved that kind of information; she made it so much easier for them to calculate what they needed. Ginny understood that the women didn’t want to have to do any research or to even give it much thought. They trusted what Ginny told them, and they wrote the checks. She considered it a sacred trust and was careful to give them reliable information and to guard their dollars. Then Ginny organized a class every month that she or another specialist taught to train the sisters on how to use the items being purchased.
Gwen had a gift for creating sound bites, so she coined the phrase, “A Bite and a Stretch,” as the means for challenging the sisters to reach a monthly preparedness goal. Gwen and Ginny brainstormed together every month to identify a big goal to stretch the strong women, plus a smaller bite of a project to suit even the most overwhelmed women. Ginny typed up the bite-and-stretch challenges every month and pasted them on a poster board at the front of the Relief Society room. She always included the recommended storage quantities per person, and the simplicity of the messages led to an enthusiastic and successful response. Now Ginny wondered how she was going to promote the request to store three months of convenient foods during the lead-up to Christmas.
President Blanding began to tell the assembled women a personal story of insomnia. He described with vivid detail a recent night when he woke up in the early hours and stepped outside with bare feet onto the deck of his house.
“The summer was waning, but the night was beautiful and clear, and the stars were all suspended overhead. I looked up from my home in the valley to the mountain that hovers above our stake, and suddenly I saw the lights abruptly blink off.” Ginny lived in the ward at the very top of the mountain above the two other wards that comprised the city of Deerhaven. The rest of the wards in the stake stretched down over the foothills into the valley below. The women were all aware of the recent power outage, but they waited expectantly for his response to it. They weren’t disappointed.
“My first thought was, ‘Is this it? Is this the disaster we’ve been preparing for?’”
At this point, Ginny quickly switched to a new pencil with a sharp point. She wondered, “Just what does he know about what is coming?”
By this time, one of the many tracks in Ginny’s mind had calculated that they had September, October, and November to shop for their three months of convenient foods. After Thanksgiving, everything would be about Christmas. That meant they had about ninety days or so. “How would Gwen spin that?” she asked herself. “The 100-Day Challenge,” was the answer that came. She would challenge the women to purchase one hundred days of food over the next one hundred days. She liked that. It would resonate with the sisters.
Nikki leaned over and whispered in Ginny’s ear, “Prepare urgently, but don’t panic.” They shared a rueful smile at the stake president’s familiar mantra. Ginny realized that President Blanding was switching gears to a new story, so she quickly yanked her attention back.
“You all know that I work occasionally with the brethren. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, so keep this under your hats.” He grinned a sheepish grin, and Ginny’s lips twitched. He never could resist telling them a good story. Or maybe he was only telling them a fraction of what he knew. “That’s probably the case,” she thought.
“Recently I was at the Church Office Building, and one of the apostles invited me into his office. I won’t tell you which one.” Ginny felt the collective sigh of disappointment in the room.
“We had a wonderful conversation, one-on-one, just the two of us. We were sitting directly across from each other, knee to knee, and he reached over and placed both his hands on my forearms. He looked me in the eye and said, “Something is coming, but it will be alright because God is with us.”
Ginny felt the statement resonate through her mind. She had heard it before—maybe a Moses movie? Yes, that was it. God is with us. That’s what the Israelites said.
Ginny and Nikki turned to look at each other again with even bigger eyes. They didn’t say anything, but they could guess what the other was thinking.
President Blanding was concluding his remarks. “Sisters, remember the Relief Society sisters who squirreled away the wheat that was eventually used to feed the troops during World War I. We need you to do all that you can to get your wards ready. Don’t be afraid—remember that God is with us—but move quickly because something is coming. I don’t know what it is; I don’t know if it is just for our stake. But I know that it is the sisters in your wards to whom this responsibility is given.”
As the meeting concluded, and the sisters began talking together in hushed voices, Ginny unfolded her cramped fingers and realized that she had worked through three pencil leads. “A shorter message today,” she said, “but boy, did that pack a punch.”
Nikki stood up, hefted her own bag, and said, “He’s a scary guy sometimes, isn’t he?”
Ginny responded, “No kidding!” Ginny found him to be a study in contrasts as he always had a ready smile while he was proceeding to warn everyone about a coming emergency.
All the way home, she pondered “The 100-Day Challenge.” She decided that she would teach the ladies how she purchased canned goods. Years ago, she had developed the habit of choosing seven canned fruits—one for each day of the week—and multiplying by 52, the number of weeks in a year. Then she did the same for vegetables as well as for meats. In a crisis, she would be able to feed her family one fruit, one vegetable, and one meat each day in addition to her long-term wheat and beans. When her family was larger, she multiplied by two cans to get 104 or by three cans to get 156. It was easy peasy, except that her family didn’t care much for canned vegetables anymore. She would suggest dehydrated or freeze-dried fruits and vegetables for the sisters who didn’t want to purchase the canned ones. Ginny would challenge the sisters to purchase one hundred cans of fruit in September, vegetables in October, and meats in November. What sounded like a big stretch could be reduced to manageable bites. Ginny smiled with delight at the simplicity of the way, even as she wondered about what was coming.