Open Thine Hand Wide

In the law of Moses there was a “year of release” described this way: “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord’s release.” As I thought about this I wondered at how the behavior of people would change as the year of release approached. For example, if the year of release was the following year, people might be less willing to lend as opposed to the year after the year of release. The Lord seems to have anticipated that: “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the Lord against thee, and it be sin unto thee. Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto” (Deuteronomy 15:1,9). The Lord did not want the timing of the year of release to affect their willingness to lend to those in need. I love this phrase that “thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest”—the Lord does not want us to mourn the fact that we give or lend to those in need but rejoice that we have the opportunity to do so. And here He promised to bless us “in all [our] works” when we give generously. This passage reminds me of these words of the apostle Paul: “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7).    

               After describing the year of release and warning the people against holding back when the seventh year approached, the Lord said this: “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land” (Deuteronomy 15:11). This is somewhat a discouraging statement to know that there will always be poor—at least until the Millennium—and the Savior confirmed this when He said in mortality, “For the poor always ye have with you” (John 12:8). But the fact that there will always be poor does not mean that we shouldn’t do our best to help alleviate suffering. The Lord commanded in our dispensation, “And remember in all things the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted, for he that doeth not these things, the same is not my disciple” (Doctrine and Covenants 52:40). The Church is certainly committed today to fulfilling this command, and I had the opportunity yesterday to volunteer at the mill where we helped process packages of rice by putting them in boxes. Three of us put over 6000 two-pound bags of rice into boxes as part of the line producing the rice packages. We wondered where these this food would end up, and it was rewarding to feel we could make a small contribution to the Church’s efforts to open wide its hand unto the poor. Last year the Church distributed over 37 million pounds of food from its storehouses to humanitarian organizations and food banks, so what we helped process was just a tiny part of an enormous effort to reach out to those in need. The Lord’s command in the law of Moses to “open thine hand wide” to those in need is a reminder that we should do whatever we can to help our “poor brother,” and we have His promise that as we do the Lord will bless “all that [we] puttest [our] hand unto.”