A young couple spoke in church one Sunday, and I enjoyed their thoughts very much. The young husband referred to an experience he had as a young boy living on a farm where his dad raised horses. His dad had given him the responsibility to raise a young colt and train it to be a valuable work horse one day. The young horse was playful and uncooperative, and he said that he would become impatient and even get mean with the young colt. The harder he tried to force the horse to do what he wanted, the more the horse resisted. Realizing that everything that he had been trying was not working, he asked his father what he should do. His father had been observing him and thought he would let him continue to learn a very important lesson, hoping that sooner or later he would come to him for advice. His son asked him how he could train it if it wouldn’t do what he wanted him to do. The father wisely sat the boy down and asked him, “Have I ever tried to force you to do something that you did not want to do? The boy’s answer was, “No!” The father continued: “If I had, do you think that you would have cooperated and did everything that I was forcing you to do and do it happily?” The young son began to get the picture and asked his father if it were too late to be able to train the horse now because of the way they started out. His wise father said, “I don’t know, son, but you can find out by changing and see if the horse can change too.” So the boy started being kind, and each day he would pet the horse and talk kindly to it. After a few days and weeks, the horse starting coming to the boy, and soon the boy was training the horse with kindness and love the way that he had been raised. Animals respond to love just as humans respond to love. The most important training tool the boy had was his hands. He loved the horse with his hands, he fed the horse with his hands, he directed the horse with his hands. With gentle hands and a kindly voice, the horse responded, and we do, too.
President Uchtdorf is the Second Counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he said, “When I think of the Savior, I often picture Him with hands out-stretched; reaching out to comfort, heal, bless, and love. And He always talked with—never down to—people. He loved the humble and the meek and walked among them, ministering to them and offering hope and salvation.” This is what He did during His mortal life; it is what He would be doing if He were living among us today, and it is what we should be doing as His disciples and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As we emulate His perfect example, we can become His hands; our eyes, His eyes; our heart, His heart.” He related the story of a large statue of Jesus that was severely damaged during a World War II bombing of a city. Experts were able to repair most of the statue, but the hands had been damaged so severely that they could not be restored. The statue remained without hands. The people of the city added to the base of the statue of Jesus Christ the following sign: ‘You are my hands.’ The people of the city had agreed to be the Savior’s hands. President Uchtdorf related his memory of other hands that served as he recounted the humanitarian aid from the Church that came to Germany after the Second World War. The aid came in the form of food and clothing. He said that “To this day, I can still remember the smell of the clothing, and I can still taste the sweetness of the canned peaches.”
I personally remember the war years very well as I was eleven years old in 1945 when the war ended, a boy possibly a little older than President Uchtdorf was at the time. I was fortunate to have been born in a country that was not devastated by war, as was Germany, but I can remember having to do without many things that were used in the war effort. After the war was over, the allied forces negotiated as to what should happen with Germany, and it was decided that the country should be divided into at least two sections. The sectors became the Russian sector and the American sector. Berlin was in the middle of that division, so there became an East and West Berlin. East Berlin was controlled by the Russians and West Berlin by the Americans. During the war, the Germans invaded Russia, and so many Russians were killed, and the country suffered so badly that after the war, the Russians were bitter and had little pity on the German people. After all, it was the Germans who started the war and caused the devastation with thousands of people having died from every country involved. The problem was that East Germany was between the American-controlled West and East Germany. Therefore, we did not have access to West Berlin, and the Russians were not cooperative and refused to give us access. In order to keep the West Berliners from starving to death, the Americans had only one option. They had to fly food, clothing and other supplies over Russian East Germany into West Berlin. There were thousands of flights, for a long period of time, before the German people in West Berlin could become self-sufficient. Germans in Russian East Berlin were defecting to West Berlin at an alarming rate, so the Russians built a wall with armed guards to keep them in East Berlin, even shooting anyone that they caught trying to crossover. Some of the supplies flown into West Berlin were from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. And that is where President Uchtdorf related that he could still smell the clean clothing and taste the sweetness of the canned peaches that came from the Church. They were Latter-day Saint “hands” that brought that joy to President Uchtdorf and others, and it is the same hands bringing food and clothing to people in all parts of the world today where floods, earthquakes and other devastating catastrophes may have happened.
People in these places, like President Uchtdorf, smell the clean clothing, and they are tasting the sweet peaches from the hands of Latter-day Saints. “His Hands!”