Church makes history with COVID-19 relief

Over the past four months, while 50 million Americans filed new jobless claims, Deseret Transportation trucks have crisscrossed the United States carrying hundreds of thousands of pounds of food each week from Latter-day Saint storehouses to a vast array of organizations feeding the needy.

The far-flung effort to help America’s food banks during the COVID-19 pandemic is now the biggest humanitarian project in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Beginning in mid-March, the church began to roll an additional 15 trucks a week out of its Bishops’ Central Storehouse in Salt Lake City. Over 16 weeks, the church has dispatched 240 truckloads beyond its normal capacity. Each truck carries 40,000 pounds of food, enough to feed 1,400 people for a week, according to Bishop Gérald Caussé, the Presiding Bishop of the church.

The trucks have rolled out of Utah to points up and down the eastern seaboard, from New Hampshire to Tennessee and Florida, and across the breadth of the country to Oregon, Washington and the Navajo Nation Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico, according to a review of dozens of news reports.

The food relief is a single part of a global effort by the church to provide relief during the pandemic. The church now has provided pandemic-related aid through more than 630 projects in over 130 countries, Bishop Caussé said.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has now become the largest-ever humanitarian project of the church,” President Russell M. Nelson told the Church News. “Any way you want to measure it, this is now the largest.”

If each truck carried commodities worth as much the Indiana news outlet reported, the total of the food project in America alone so far would be in the range of $10 million to $11 million.

What I’m Reading ...

The inestimable columnist Jerry Johnston wrote about his friend, the only Latter-day Saint missionary to die from COVID-19.

LDS Living, on the anniversary of Joseph Smith’s murder last week, republished a piece about how newspapers reported his death in 1844.

The Mission Leadership Seminar for new mission presidents and their wives was held last week. President Russell M. Nelson spoke about how to receive divine tutoring like Joseph Smith. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, after his stay in the hospital, also talked about the 176th anniversary of Joseph’s death. He said that Joseph’s testimony on the eve of his death “is one of the 10,000 reasons I know the Book of Mormon is true.”

Here is the Church News’ roundup of all the talks at the Mission Leadership Seminar, which was held virtually because of the pandemic. A total of 135 couples participated from 79 countries.

Baseball players love their gloves. One of the best examples is Mike Gallego. As players ran out of the clubhouse during the earthquake that struck during the 1989 World Series, he ran back into the locker room when he realized he forgot his glove. “I couldn't leave my glove behind, that's my livelihood, my glove,” he said.

One of the names protesters are reminding us about is Breonna Taylor. I knew very little about her when I covered a protest, so I was interested when I came upon a story about her and how she died when police mistakenly executed a no-knock warrant at her house and shot her. This piece is very well done and informative. Warning, two quotations in the story contain profanities.