President Monson Warned Us Of Hard Times Coming...and How We Can, By Being Grateful to God, Bring Back The Good Times

By Don White
It was only a few days ago that I wrote to my friends in Windermere, FL not to expect the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be where prophets and apostles would denounce what is going on in our nation today, the big spending, the unbalanced budgets, the bailouts, the irresponsible payments to some factions and groups such as unions, black farmers, and Indians, for example, at the expense of the rest of us and the Chinese.

No, it would not happen. But in the third session of conference, Sunday morning, October 3, 2010 the prophet spoke for twenty-five minutes. He told of a family, the Gordon Greens who lived with his father and mother who were ranchers and farmers. President Monson, I'm sure, would have liked to have told everyone that due to the coming depression and hard times everyone should have their one- or two-year supply of food storage and money, but he didn't. Instead, he did us one better. He referred to hard times by speaking about a family that had its food storage almost all used up when it came to the next year when the rains came and nothing grew except a small patch of turnips.

They set the thanksgiving table and the kids wouldn't eat. The grandparents lived with the Greens. Grandpa Green had installed electricity the year before. Before, they were using gas lamps to see. Grandpa Green went to the attic and got one of the gas lamps and turned off all the lights in the house and lit the gas lamp and placed it on the dining room table.

With the lamp's glow, they room was still almost dark. What a change electric lights had made. It was only then that they realized how much God had blessed them. They started to exhibit gratefulness to God for their blessings, instead of worrying about not having all the food they had the year before. President Monson said that suddenly they looked at things differently. Now they could see that they had been greatly blessed. The point of the message was that we should concentrate on our blessings, not on our trials already experienced and the looming 2010-2011 depression that will surely come. I feel almost a hundred percent sure that President Monson did all that a prophet in our church can do to prepare us for the coming time when a wheel barrow of money won't be able to buy a bag of groceries.

I'm convinced that Americans can turn it all around by being grateful to God today - by having a religious revival, a massive return to God by the population of fence sitters and unbelievers and by eliminating the pride  and arrogance of the recent past. By giving God credit for this great country, by returning to the Constitution - acknowledging our Founders who were men of God, that the Constitution was inspired by God - and our hard-fought-for blessings and rights guaranteed by that Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In a special way, President Monson was foreshadowing the coming of bad times in America - though he didn't talk about the weakening of the value of money or dollar devaluation because of the terrific food and commodity inflation that we are starting to experience. The American dollar won't be worth anything when this bottoms out - and the American people will have to turn to God and be grateful for blessings we do have. It's going to be a tough time for all of us, but it will have some positive implications. Maybe the prideful and haughty among us will turn to God. Maybe they will ask for the missionaries and decide being a Mormon could be good for their families and themselves. In that way, this rapid escalation of food and commodity prices could be a temporary good thing.

But the real blessing of the President Monson's address was that when we sincerely exhibit our gratefulness to God in prayer, at the pulpit, and to our family members and others, God immediately blesses us. It may or may not be in material benefits, but almost always spiritual blessings and awareness precede temporal blessings.

So while President Monson couldn't explicitly warn people over the pulpit to put their money in some other currency or that we were heading into a depression in America, he told us 1) that hard times are coming and 2) how to act to get us out of that mess - by being grateful for God's blessings. You see, Americans have strayed so far from God that bad times have come to us - the progressives took power and are inflicting us with their bad policies and misunderstanding of both the economy and God's blessings for this country. They don't know that all the good things in the world come from God. Man is not all powerful. God gives us everything and we don't ever want to forget the huge part God should play in our lives.

Maybe this way, if I read the prophet right, we can have a giant revival of faith in America and people will turn their hearts back to God, the Constitution, our freedoms, and spiritual things and away from materialism. That, by the way, is the hallmark of progressives. I hope I'm not stepping on anyone's toes here, but I sincerely believe that most progressives no longer believe in God.

I was greatly impressed with President Monson's talk. But I read into it an allegory - a lesson for all of us that was unseen by many viewers and listeners of conference, I'm sure. President Monson knows of the coming calamities. Prophets have long predicted this day. His dour face exhibited his concern for us. His story of the Gordon Greens told volumes if we were spiritual enough to pick up the metaphorical meaning that directly relate to our times, the assault on our freedoms by progressives, and the key to changing things in America - unconditional love of God and gratefulness for our blessings.



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