by David E Bay, High Councilor

For the last couple of weeks, we have been trying to get things ready for winter. Among the more traditional activities for this preparation, we worked on preparing our yard and garden. My sweetheart, Coleen, and I (truthfully, it was more her than me) have been pulling dead and dying plants. We have raked leaves and for us lots and lots of acorns out of our lawn.

We have drained the water lines for the underground sprinkler system, removed hoses from the outside of the house, and put away outdoor summer furniture.

On Saturday morning, right before our first freeze I was picking green tomatoes off the vines as it started to rain. We took those green tomatoes and put them near a window in our garage. In previous years, most of them would eventually ripen and turn red and extend our access to fresh homegrown tomatoes until the end of December.

And we are not the only ones doing these kinds of activities. Brigham City has an assigned cleanup time with extra trash pickups to help accommodate those preparations that almost everyone does at this time of year in our community.

Another project for us this year has been building new shelves in a shed so we would have room to store items that we won’t need again until spring. For me, building shelves involves the following kinds of activities.

• Plan what results I want to have.
• Figure out the materials that I will need to build it.
• Take inventory of which materials we already own.
• Next, I need to obtain those items that I am missing.
• Then I measure and cut the boards to the right size.
• Along with this I begin to fasten the shelves in place.
• Finally, the vision from my mind can be seen as real.

All of us do this kind of planning and interacting in some way or another. Whether it’s preparing food, shopping, making things, writing reports, driving to a destination or any number of other activities, we plan and make efforts to obtain the results that we want.

However, sometimes the project that we are working on deals with people. Building relationships with people is much more involved than putting up shelves in a shed. Relationships have all kinds of different aspects that we need to work with. A relationship is built out of the combination of everyone that is involved. There needs to be both give and take and lots of love, consideration, and understanding that the other person is very important.

While preparing for winter has lots of similar kinds of activities that need to be accomplished, preparation for the second coming of Jesus Christ may involve each of us preparing according to our unique talents, abilities and foreordained missions. I can’t know those things that are important to you and your family because that’s not part of my stewardship. You are the expert for being you. And if you seek, the Holy Ghost will give you directions on what you need to do to be prepared for those things that are to come.

What is it that you need to do?