Unheralded stalwarts

In 1953, when I was about 10 years old, we were a young family living in LaVerkin, Utah, a farming community of about 150 people. We had little money (my father was a schoolteacher/farmer) but I look back on that time as one of the best of my young life. I roamed the hills and orchards with my great friend, Leon Duncan; we had no television, no video games, no IPODs, no cell phones (we did have a 4-party line phone), and the movies were 5 miles away in Hurricane in a small building with a pot-bellied stove for heat. I had no idea that I was deprived of the finer things in life, and indeed, I was not.


One of the great things we did have was a community of saints who truly cared about each other. One of those was my Blazer B Primary teacher, Sister Woodbury. All any of us (even adults) ever called her was Sister Woodbury; I didn’t learn her first name until many years later. She was 85 years old, but she reached the boys in her class in a way that I have remembered all my life.

Her circumstances were humble -- she and her husband lived in a small house with a pump in the kitchen for water and an outhouse for bathroom purposes. She had a large yard full of flowers and shrubbery, including a large clump of pampas grass at the gate to her yard. But those things are only incidental to the story I want to tell.

Regularly, I walked by Sister Woodbury’s house hoping that she was outside working her yard, which she often was. If she saw me, she would call to me: “Russell! Come here.” Music to my ears. If she didn’t see me, I called a hello to her, with essentially the same result. She always had some little chore for me to do while she taught me some small gospel principle (her real objective). We would then adjourn to her kitchen, where she plied me with some treat, usually milk and cookies or a piece of cake or pie (my real objective). I wasn’t alone in this – all the boys (including Leon Duncan) in her class received the same kind of subtle and loving treatment.

She insisted that each of the boys in her charge memorize the Articles of Faith – a requirement for graduation from Primary at that time. But we didn’t just memorize them, she helped us to understand them, at least as much as our 10-year-old minds could comprehend.

I firmly believe that if I could not recite the Articles of Faith word for word today, Sister Woodbury would descend from her no doubt busy life in paradise and chastise me. I owe her a debt of gratitude that I cannot thank her for until I see her in eternity.

While we were somewhat isolated in LaVerkin, the Church was all around us. Sister Eliza R. Snow declared:

"There is no sister so isolated, and her sphere so narrow but what she can do a great deal towards establishing the kingdom of God upon the earth." ("An Address," Woman's Exponent, 15 Sep. 1873, 62.)

Certainly, that was true of Sister Woodbury.

A few years ago, I learned from her nephew, Vernon Woodbury, that her first name is Maxine, but I still cannot think of her in any way except as Sister Woodbury.

She was, and is, part of the great body of the Church who are unheralded stalwarts in the gospel. These are they who serve faithfully without fanfare and in so doing, affect lives for the better. The Church is full of them. They are part of what Elder Jeffrey R. Holland called:

"…the great faithful but often unheralded body of the Church who play their part in the ongoing saga of the Restoration." (Conference Report, October 1994)

Sister Woodbury passed from this world after we moved from LaVerkin to California. Her passing was largely unnoticed outside the small town in which she lived. I’m not even sure where she is buried. But she remains alive in my heart and in my mind. President David O. McKay could have been speaking about Sister Woodbury when he said:

“There is a possible never-ending influence of a word or deed. Therein lies the compensation and joy of the unheralded teacher, whose name is not emblazoned before the public gaze; but whose instructions, like echoes, roll from soul to soul, and go forever and forever.”

Sometimes we think that our contributions go largely unnoticed, to be quickly forgotten after the eulogy, unremembered and unnoted. Nevertheless, we quietly go about our lives, rendering service where we can and fulfilling our callings as best we can. We cannot measure the worth of our own lives, the worth of our contributions to the lives of others, or the worth of our testimonies, both spoken and unspoken, to our posterity. We will probably pass out of this life without wide recognition just as Sister Woodbury did, but her love and concern for me continues to be poured out on future generations through me.

As I write this, my wife and my mother are tying quilts in our family room for missionaries who will never know the names of the faithful sisters who made them. Others in our ward are doing the same in response to a plea from a mission president’s wife for help for their missionaries. They are not unique; this kind of anonymous, selfless service goes on all over the Church every day.

It is my prayer for me and for each of you that we might be included in that group of saints that Elder Neal A. Maxwell described:

So it is that the real but unheralded heroes and heroines of our time are the men and women of the earth who uncommonly resist the world's common temptations, who surmount the common tribulations of the world and continue to the very end in righteousness, arriving home battered slightly, yet much bettered. Such individuals may get little mortal applause or recognition, but there is real rejoicing elsewhere by those who really know what a good performance is! (We Will Prove Them Herewith, p. 45.)

I believe that I am a little more able to resist temptation and to give of myself without thought of recognition because of Sister Woodbury’s example.