With Hand and Heart

When we treat people merely as they are, they will remain as they are. When we treat them as if they were what they should be, they will become what they should be.

Prison warden Kenyon J. Scudder has related this experience: A friend of his happened to be sitting in a railroad coach next to a young man who was obviously depressed. Finally the man revealed that he was a paroled convict returning from a distant prison. His imprisonment had brought shame to his family, and they had neither visited him nor written often. He hoped, however, that this was only because they were too poor to travel and too uneducated to write. He hoped, despite the evidence, that they had forgiven him.

To make it easy for them, however, he had written them to put up a signal for him when the train passed their little farm on the outskirts of town. If his family had forgiven him, they were to put a white ribbon in the big apple tree which stood near the tracks. If they didn’t want him to return, they were to do nothing, and he would remain on the train as it traveled west.

As the train neared his home town, the suspense became so great he couldn’t bear to look out of his window. He exclaimed, “In just five minutes the engineer will sound the whistle, indicating our approach to the long bend which opens into the valley I know as home. Will you watch for the apple tree at the side of the track?” His companion changed places with him and said he would. The minutes seemed like hours, but then there came the shrill sound of the train whistle. The young man asked, “Can you see the tree? Is there a white ribbon?”

Came the reply: “I see the tree. I see not one white ribbon, but many. There must be a white ribbon on every branch. Son, someone surely does love you.”

In that instant he stood cleansed by Christ.

His friend said, “I felt as if I had witnessed a miracle.”

Indeed, he had witnessed a miracle appropriately described by the third verse of a favorite Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:

“How silently, how silently, The wondrous gift is given!

So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heaven.

“No ear may hear his coming; But in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive him still, The dear Christ enters in.”

—Hymns, no. 165

We, too, can experience this same miracle when we, with hand and heart, as did the Savior, lift and love our neighbor to a newness of life.

-Thomas S. Monson
"With Hand and Heart"
OCT 1971