The July 107 Ensign
had an article called “Kindness” in which one of the example stories was of a
time the prophet Joseph Smith showed kindness. To me this story is familiar,
but I was struck by a deeper truth in it when I read it this time.
The prophet Joseph Smith showed
kindness one day when two children got their feet stuck in the mud on the way
to school. They both began to cry because they couldn’t get loose. When Joseph
saw the predicament, he bent down and pulled each child out of the mud. He
cleaned the mud from their shoes. Then he took a clean handkerchief from his
pocket and wiped away their tears. The children smiled as he spoke kind words
to them and then sent them on their way. (p55)
When I think about the context of this story, I imagine it
was after a hard rain, and with no hard pavement, the roads were a morass of
mud and this was what the children got stuck in, simply by heading for their
destination at school. I noticed Joseph went above and beyond the hoped-for
help. Not only did he free the children, but he cleaned them off and comforted
them. He may have been thinking that if he sent them to school muddy they would
get a tongue-lashing from their teacher for coming in with such muddy shoes. He
probably had to scrape clods of mud off and rinse their shoes at a pump nearby.
I also noticed this little story is a neat analogy of how
Christ saves us. He finds us stuck in the mud of sin on our journey through
life. He finds us crying because we can’t get loose ourselves. He pulls us out,
cleans us up, dries our tears and comforts us, and gets us moving again in the
right direction so we can arrive clean at our destination of eternal life.
