I spoke in my ward’s sacrament meeting last week, on Mother’s Day – I laughed with friends that the bishopric had found the one way guaranteed to keep me from complaining this year about observing Mother’s Day at Church. This talk is essentially a set of stories about Latter-day Saint women of the past, all but one of whom, I think, will be familiar to long-time Keepa readers. The stories were new to most of my ward members, though, so were well received.

Short version: Although you may not think your life is extraordinary, good people – like you – make extraordinary contributions to the world simply by doing what you should do.

-oOo-

Most of us – men and women – probably don’t think of our lives as being especially heroic: Whatever good we do in the world is, for the most part, routine and undramatic. We just do what we’re supposed to do, meeting the challenges as they come.

Yet with the perspective of time, the ordinary, routine, just-doing-what-needs-to-be-done can be recognized as being actually quite special, and as having a role in advancing the work of the kingdom of God. As I have concentrated in the past few years on uncovering the lives of ordinary Latter-day Saints around the world, I’ve seen countless examples of goodness and service come from people’s just doing what they were supposed to do. I’d like to introduce you briefly to a few Latter-day Saint women of the past to illustrate what I mean:

Tsune Nachie was a widow, almost 50 years old, when she took a job in 1905 as cook and housekeeper in the mission home in Tokyo. She worked quietly, but she listened carefully, and a month after starting her work she asked the missionaries for baptism. Tsune spent almost 20 years working in the mission home, taking care of the missionaries and just doing what she was supposed to. That included organizing the few Japanese sisters into a Relief Society, helping to translate the Book of Mormon, and teaching a Sunday School class – without benefit of any formal lessons, none of which had yet been translated into Japanese, Tsune taught her way methodically through the Book of Mormon.

When Tsune was almost 70 years old, the missionaries decided she was too old to continue working. They took up a collection among all the elders who remembered and loved her, and helped her emigrate to Hawaii where she could work in the temple, doing the first work there for the Japanese people. Tsune looked around and noticed that no one was teaching the gospel to the Japanese residents of Hawaii. So Tsune called herself on a mission: This widow, “too old” to cook, spent her days walking through Japanese neighborhoods and talking about the gospel to anyone who would listen. Tsune lived to age 83, long enough to see the organization of the Japanese Mission in Hawaii in 1937, among the members she had found and taught, just by doing what she thought she should do, day after day.

Another one who inspires me is a young woman – a teenager – with the delightful name of Hettie Hilda Harper (when she married, she became Hettie Hilda Harper Hancock). When Hettie’s mother died in 1922, Hettie felt an obligation to raise her two small sisters in the way their mother would have wanted, so she began teaching them little gospel lessons in their home after school. There was no one else to do it – the Harpers were the only Latter-day Saints in Dudley Port, England, a rough lower-class neighborhood where the children ran in the streets unsupervised. Hettie allowed each of her sisters to invite one friend to join them for their gospel lessons … and soon many, many other children were asking to come. Hettie didn’t want them in her home – they were dirty, ragged, foul-mouthed, and they broke things. But when she couldn’t interest any of her own friends in the gospel, she decided she should be like the man she read about in the New Testament parable: When the guests he had invited to the wedding refused to come, he went out into the byways and brought in anyone who would come.

Her first lessons for the neighborhood children were on hand- and face-washing. She taught them to sing instead of swear, and to pray instead of steal. They came not just on the one day of the week they were invited, but almost every day, until Hettie had as many as 70 children in her small home: day after day, week after week. Hettie, in effect, invented Primary, under the same inspiration that had led Aurelia Spencer Rogers to begin the first Primary in Farmington decades earlier. It wasn’t many months before the missionaries were making regular calls in Dudley Port to teach the parents of Hettie’s children, and before long, a branch was organized there.

Hettie had only done what she thought needed to be done. Today’s Woodsetten Ward in England is the successor to the branch that grew out of Hettie’s teaching the children there.

I’ve learned to appreciate access to the Sacrament because of the example of two Latter-day Saint women of the past. One joined the Church in England in the 1920s when a friend who was renting a room to some missionaries introduced her to them. This new convert, Jeannie Bleakley, then went back to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where her husband was a government official, and for more than 20 years she was the only Latter-day Saint among millions of people living on that island. Jeannie wrote letters to the newspapers when they printed false articles about the Church. And she went down to the docks in Colombo whenever ships landed there, asking if there were any sailors aboard from Utah. If there was a sailor from Utah, he might be LDS – and if he was LDS, he might hold the priesthood – and if he held the priesthood, Jeannie might be able to take the sacrament that year.

Nellie Finguar, a young widow with two baby daughters, also was an isolated Mormon woman who missed the sacrament. She had had to leave her babies with her parents in 1904, when Nellie went to work at the boarding school on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. She lived 90 miles from the nearest Latter-day Saints. But with the encouragement of Joseph F. Smith, with whom she corresponded, Nellie held her own Church services every Sunday. She couldn’t bless the sacrament, but she could read the prayers aloud and recommit herself to the gospel every week, and she could read her scriptures, and she could study a sermon published in the Deseret News.

I mentioned earlier that our lives are generally routine and undramatic – but that isn’t always the case, of course. One young Latter-day Saint woman who lived in dramatic times was Yeranic Gedikian ((24 July 2017: Further research suggests that her name would be transliterated today as “Godjikian.”)), who had grown up as a member of the Church in Aintab, a city on the border of Turkey and Syria. You may not be familiar with it, but for 60 years we had a Church presence in Turkey and Syria and Iraq, mostly among the Armenian people who had settled there. In 1915, our Latter-day Saints there were caught up in the atrocity known as the Genocide, where Turks murdered between one and two million Armenians, mostly by driving them into the desert without food or water. We lost about a hundred Armenian Latter-day Saints in the Genocide, and I am working to learn their names and the stories of the survivors. Yeranic Gedikian, age 17, was driven with the rest hundreds of miles from home, down the Euphrates River, along the same path where the ancient Jews were taken captive to Babylon. Yeranic’s young husband was shot, and Yeranic was held as a slave for several years, until she escaped and was able to make her way back home, where she discovered about 50 Latter-day Saint survivors. Together they fled another anticipated attack, and settled in the relative safety of Syria. There Yerenic, who had survived so much horror before her mid-20s, became an officer in the Relief Society, caring for others who had been through as much as she had.

While Yerenic was a Latter-day Saint woman near the bottom, Josephine de la Harpe was a Latter-day Saint woman near the top of what this world has to offer. Josephine was born in 1813, the granddaughter of Swiss patriots who had helped Switzerland secure its independence from surrounding nations. She had grown up in the court of the Russian Tsar, wealthy, educated, and moving in the highest social circles. She married a German diplomat who served as the Tsar’s representative to Cuba. She traveled. She had everything a woman might want. Widowed at age 40, Josephine was on a visit to her native Switzerland when a friend suggested they go to a lecture and laugh at the awful Mormon who was going to speak that night. Josephine did go – but she was converted that night, and baptized soon after. Josephine took her young son, and with Anna Furrer, a Latter-day Saint girl with no other opportunity to emigrate, acting as her maid, Josephine left for the United States. It was 1856, the year of the handcarts, and Josephine, a woman used to all the luxuries of the European court, pulled a handcart across the Plains. For the rest of her life, especially after the railroad came through Utah, Josephine served as a sort of Church hostess to wealthy and cultured travelers touring the American continent, showing them that Latter-day Saint women were as gracious and as cultured any women in the world. We don’t know her here in Salt Lake, but she appears in travelers’ accounts in 19th century European publications.

The things these Latter-day Saint sisters did, and the things done by so many others, may not have seemed at all remarkable at the time. All they did, after all, was talk to their neighbors, teach children, greet visitors, and remember that they were Latter-day Saint women, daughters of God, who had made covenants in the past and served God and his children in the present. You probably don’t think you’re doing anything remarkable, either, when you teach a class, listen to a neighbor or a grandson who needs to talk, take a meal to a new mother, or are that new mother. But what you are doing makes a difference, and may well be remembered long after you think your service has been forgotten.

As Latter-day Saints, and whether you realize it or not, you do extraordinary things just by being who you should be, and doing what you should do.