A family history class using as a title Jane Eyre’s famous line, “…I am poor, obscure, plain and little…” was taught at Rootstech last week. The large room was full, every seat was taken and many stood to the side and in the back. The volume of people was an indicator that most of us owe our existence to someone who was “poor, obscure, plain and little.”
Having been orphaned before the age of ten, Caleb Summerhays was “pressed” into the service of His Majesties Navy as a teenager and participated in the War of 1812 with the United States. Returning from his service, he married and was eventually left childless and a widower twice. One summer night, Caleb lay awake wondering if he would pass through this life without family, without anything or anyone left behind to mark his presence in the world. He left his bed and went to the window where he saw three bright stars, one of which seemed to tip a shower of smaller stars. He understood that he had been shown his future and that there would yet be a shower of children and posterity.
Caleb was fifty two years old when he married Margaret Moore, a widow with two daughters and together they had three children. The potato blight that devastated Ireland also caused a rise in food prices throughout Europe and brought hunger to their family as well. Their son, Joseph, recalled that his energetic father, who worked as a stone mason and also as a lamp lighter in London, would sometimes lean against the wall for support when he was suffering from want of food. He must have felt “poor, obscure, plain and little”, yet this family’s efforts to live and do good in the face of adversity continues to ripple through time and posterity.
Though we are all small in this vast world, “God knows that some of the greatest souls who have ever lived are those who will never appear in the chronicles of history. They are the blessed, humble souls who emulate the Savior’s example and spend the days of their lives doing good.” (President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, October 2011)
As small as we are, we can take courage from the promise that with the “weak and simple” of the earth, God will do His work.