The Woodpile

One beautiful morning my family and I passed our bishop’s home. We noticed two enormous trees had been chopped down and the wood was in a huge pile. We have a fire pit at home, and we were almost out of wood. So we asked our bishop if we could have it. He told us, “You can have all of the wood you want.”

I was so excited. We would finally have more wood! When the day arrived to get the wood, we got right to work.

After a long day, our trailers were overflowing with wood. Then our bishop came outside and told us that a less-active family in our ward heated their home with a fireplace and they were out of wood. Mom and Dad decided to give the wood to them. That made me very upset. We had worked hard without any breaks.

I wasn’t quite sure if I should complain and ask if we could keep the wood. If I help give it away, all the work we did would be for nothing. We wouldn’t have the wood, I thought. What should I do?

It took us over an hour to unload all our precious wood. When we finally finished, we went home. We were very exhausted. When we got home, I went to check how much wood we had left. Guess what I saw? No wood at all. I thought we were giving some wood away, not all of it. I started pacing back and forth, thinking about how much work we did for nothing!

Then I remembered how the family heated their home with a fireplace. We just liked to have fires. It would have been really, really nice to have a surplus of wood. But the other family absolutely needed it. We just wanted it to do things like cook hot dogs and s’mores.

Giving the wood to the other family was hard, but I knew it was the right thing to do. After all, what would the Savior do?