have their year's supply

You have been reading the newspapers these past five days, which have been full of pictures and explanations of the terrible disaster that came to many of your brothers and sisters in Idaho and the Snake River Valley. It's pathetic; it's sad indeed, but we have found many of the people up there doing just as you are doing, we hope, with their year's supply. And when everything else was gone, in many of the cases they were able to go back to their year's supply.

I hope, and this is my brief message to you today, that no one ever reads one word about that terrible flood and the sadness that it has brought-the loss of life, the loss of livestok, the destruction of farms, the suffering that has come to those good people-I say again, I hope no one here will ever read another word about that disaster without saying quietly to himself, 'No moment will ever pass when I will not be prepared as the Bretheren tell me to do.' One year's supply of commodities, well cared for, well selected, is a minimum. It's the mimimum [President Kimball hit the podium for emphasis], and every family, if they only have been married for a day or a week, should begin to have their year's supply. Now that's basic, and we mean it! [He hit the podium again.] There should be no family under the sound of my voice who isn't already prepared for whatever eventuality may come. We can't anticipate it, of course. We don't know where another dam is going out, or where a river is going to flood, or whether an earthquake is going to come, or what's going to happen. We just are always prepared because the Lord said, 'If ye are prepared ye shall not fear' (D&C 38:30). And the only way to have peace and security is to be prepared.

May the Lord bless us that not one family of us will go from this room without a determination from this moment forward that there will never be a time when we will not be prepared to meet the hazards that could come.


Spencer W. Kimball, Pure Religion: The Story of Church Welfare Since 1930 by Glen L. Rudd. 1995. P.266. Remarks originally given at the dedicatory services of the Deseret Mills and Elevator in Kaysville, Utah on 10 June 1976. D&C 38:30