May 12, 2025
For the past few months, I’ve been reading my mom’s journals. It has been a sweet experience. My Mom started writing in a journal during a very difficult time in our family. I’m so glad she made time for it. I discovered something as I read: I knew I loved the little town I grew up in, but I didn’t realize exactly why until I read these journal entries.
It was 1978 and my mom was a student at BYU, with one year left to get her Special Ed Teaching degree. I was 13 and me and my two older sisters still lived at home. We lived in Fairview, a little town in central Utah that is about an hour south of BYU in Provo. My Mom and Dad divorced that year, and for a few years our financial situation was pretty desperate.
I think we survived that time only because there were so many good people willing to share with us and help us. I am in awe at the support that the people of Fairview gave us during those years. We had no car, so we “bummed” rides or our neighbors sometimes lent us a car if we had to go further than our feet or bikes could take us. For two years, men from Fairview who worked in Provo gave my mom rides to and from BYU every school day so she could get her teaching degree. Men from church brought us loads of firewood and coal so we could heat our drafty old house. Others came to help my mom repair things or till the garden or dig out the septic tank when it was broken or hundreds of other little things-Little things that made a big difference.
That period of desperate need only lasted a few years, but it was typical of our little town. Eventually, through incredible effort, my mom climbed out of that difficult time and for many years was on the giving end. She served as a Special Education teacher, an EMT, an artifacts director at the museum, a member of boards and councils, in addition to serving many people and filling many assignments at church. I remember often being on the phone with her and telling me that she had to hang up because she was off to help the “old ladies” in town-when she was usually several years older than them (she didn’t tell me that part)! She served as she had been served, with all her heart, and with pure love.
For the last several years of her life, my mom was again on the receiving end of this cycle. Me and my siblings lived far away and weren’t there to help her with many basic needs as she became increasingly dependent. She had friends who took her swimming several days a week so she could get exercise, friends who would take her shopping or pick up groceries for her, friends who drove her to doctor appointments (even ones an hour or more away), friends who remembered my mom on Mother’s Day or her birthday when there was no family around to celebrate with her, friends who I could call to check on her when I was concerned, friends who brought her meals and treats, and so much more than I know of or could name here.
No wonder my mom never wanted to leave her beloved Fairview. Almost all of the men and women that helped us in the early years have passed away now. The ones who helped in more recent years have carried on the tradition of observing, then serving that has been part of this wonderful town.
Do they know what a difference they made in our lives? Do they know that they are a big part of the reason we survived those desperate early years? Do they know how they taught us to see and love and serve those in need?
I want to tell them, and tell you, thank you for your effort to be there for others. You may never know the vital part you played in someone else’s life. Thank you for your efforts to bear another’s burdens, especially those whose lives are full of desperation and uncertainty. Thank you for being the hands of God as you serve.
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction…” James 1:27