Michelle D. Craig once said, “Never suppress a generous thought…. a good deed is never wasted, for ‘charity never faileth’—and is never the wrong response.”
Once upon a time, I heard a true story told by Thomas S. Monson about an overworked, grief-stricken mother named Tiffany. Feeling as though she were sinking underwater and that all her prayers were going unheard, she slipped into a deep depression and quit eating. She just couldn’t eat. Her family was desperately worried.
One day, her dear friend said to her, “There must be something that sounds good to you.”
Tiffany replied, “The only thing I can think of… is homemade bread.” But of course, no one had any on hand.
The next day, Tiffany’s husband opened the front door to see Sherrie—a friend of Tiffany’s sister and someone they barely knew—holding a loaf of fresh, homemade bread.
Tiffany called her sister to thank her for sending Sherrie with the bread. To her shock, her sister knew nothing about it.
Upon investigation, Tiffany and her sister learned that when Sherrie made the bread, she felt in her gut that she needed to make two loaves instead of one. And when she went to visit a friend that day, she felt the nudge to take the extra loaf with her. As she left the friend’s house, she felt like taking the bread to Tiffany—who lived 30 minutes away and who she hadn’t seen in several months.
But the feeling wouldn’t go away.
So, she took the bread to Tiffany, having no idea just how much she needed it.
Thomas S. Monson concluded, “[Tiffany] had an urgent need to feel that she wasn’t alone—that God was aware of her and had not abandoned her. That bread—the very thing she wanted—was delivered to her by someone she barely knew, someone who had no knowledge of her need but who listened to the prompting.”
I heard a quote recently by Neal A. Maxwell that hit me like a bag of sand to the face, “The hands which hang down and most need to be lifted up belong to those too discouraged even to reach out anymore.”
This is why we must never suppress those generous thoughts. Many people in despair don’t say a word about it, and that generous thought might be exactly what they need to begin to heal.
Where Rose Writes Very True Stories 