On Solving Our Own Problems – Sunday, July 21, 1946
This week in the valleys that fringe the Great American desert, we pause again to commemorate the lives and labors of the pioneer empire builders of the inland west. It is ninety-nine years—one year before the centennial—since they made their entrance into this forbidding wasteland, and, with hard work and the help of God, here created one of the garden places of the world.
Recalling these events brings to mind the pioneers and pilgrims of all times past, all who have ventured forth to carve out a way of life for themselves, and one cannot help being moved by how much they sometimes did with so little, and, by comparison, how little some of us sometimes do with so much. Those who succeeded best with least material advantage were those who were driven by firm conviction. Usually they could have lived more comfortably in established places—that is, more comfortably as to the physical man, but not more comfortably as to conscience, for the compromising of principles, convictions, and ideals never brings comfort inside, where a man has to live with himself and all his thoughts. And so they ventured forth in the spirit of self-dependence as to the favors of men, but with great dependence on the providence of God, and set about to do what had to be done.
Now a man who is breaking the wilderness a thousand miles from populous places has no one to run to the minute life becomes difficult or the minute problems become perplexing. So they did as men have always done when face to face with necessity: they solved their problems with what they had. Now comes, a century later, the year 1946, with all of its realities, all of its headaches’ all of its perplexities, and we are led to ask what would we do if the props and the pampering were taken away from us. It would be shocking to begin with, of course. There would be much confusion, much consternation.
Walking is always difficult to one long accustomed to riding—but when the machinery breaks down, forgotten energies and common sense and neglected resourcefulness come gloriously alive again, and some of the artificial props which we seem to be so desperately dependent upon are not missed so much nor so long as might seem to be the case. Our sons have proved this over and over again in the unexpected extremities of war. And, given reason enough for doing so, the same stuff that made men and women self-reliant in the pioneering past would make them so again. It is not good for men “to be commanded in all things.” They should “do many things of their own free will.”
“The Spoken Word,” heard over Radio Station K S L and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System, from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, July 21, 1946, 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon, EDST. Copyright 1946.
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July 21, 1946
Broadcast Number 0,883