By: Norberto Betita
In the premortal council God stood among those that were spirits and said, “These will I make my rulers.” Then He told Abraham, “thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born” (Abraham 3:23).
The Lord also told Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5).
“And this is the manner after which they were ordained—being called and prepared from the foundation of the world according to the foreknowledge of God, on account of their exceeding faith and good works; in the first place being left to choose good or evil; therefore they having chosen good, and exercising exceedingly great faith, are called with a holy calling, yea, with that holy calling which was prepared with, and according to, a preparatory redemption for such” (Alma 13:3).
However, such premortal ordination was never an assurance that we will be free from trials after we have proven our faithfulness and obedience during our first estate. Our premortal ordination is our mortal mission to again prove whether we are still willing to abide by the principles of truth and righteousness while in mortality---our second estate. Our foreordination in premortality does not even guarantee that we will be called to certain specific callings until and unless we exercise our moral agency in righteousness the same way that we were ordained in the premortal life.
Thus, each one of us who ever lived in this mortal world has had our foreordination in the premortal sphere with a duty to perform in accordance with faith and righteousness and each of us is never exempted from passing through the tests and trials of mortality.
My long time missionary friend which I met in the Philippines in 1986 and which I had the privilege of having continued communications during the last 31 years, understood that all the difficult and sanctifying experiences she has undergone in her mortal life, including that of her being born during the worst and most difficult times of the world---the great depression---are kind of her premortal assignment.
She was born in December 14, 1937 when the great depression---the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world which started after the stock market crash of October 1929---was still at its worst. It is historically recorded as ‘a period of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, lost opportunities of economic growth and personal advancement which reportedly was ended in 1939.’ But even after 1939, economic recession in America was still felt. Such was the economic environment when her mortal journey was started.
Early struggles
She recalls that even though she was still young, she still remembers when they have government stamps for sugar and gas. Her father was a truck farmer, one who grows and produces and peddled garden produce from home to home. While her father was peddling during the day, she and her siblings and their grandfather were charged to pick raspberries and other above ground fruits for the trip the next day. Her mother was involved with the house hold upkeep, child bearing and caring for the vegetables when they were brought in. She washed with a ringer washing machine and hung the clothes on a clothes line. One of her young jobs was to learn to fold clothes.
After peddling, her father would dig the potatoes and pick corn and clean them to be included in his next day’s peddling. She remembers that wash tubs were placed around the rhubarb plants to hold the leaves up out of the ditches so water could go through but became a place to play hide and seek at times.
The family owned a horse to plow the ground and a large barn where they milked their cow and stored their hay. While the family worked together, she did not feel the depression crisis as she was yet very young and she thought it was just the common daily routine of people. She and her siblings enjoyed life on the farm not knowing that there had been so much of a crisis in the world, because their parents were industrious as to be able to provide them with the necessities of life and even give them the opportunity to work and enjoy life in childhood.
The first six years of her life were spent in her grandfather’s house not far from town and the walk to the bus stop was an eighth of a mile. But when she started her second year of school the family had moved 14 miles from town and to catch the bus meant walking the 2 mile country road to the bus stop in all kinds of weather. Once in a while their mother had to go with them in the winter to break a trail for them to safely get through the snow drifts. They were always glad when the road dropped down along the river as it was warmer and broke the wind. Yet there were times when they would cry because of too much cold despite their overshoes. Their parents tried to impress upon them the value of education in their lives as a means to provide for themselves when they grew up.
They planted gardens and fruit trees and raised animals, but when cloudburst and rainstorm went over, water came rushing down the mountain and out over their fields sweeping everything with it into the river. Sometimes baby chicks were lost in the cloudbursts. Most of the ditches in the garden and field had to be cleaned out to once again carry water. They had no electricity and cooked on a wood burning stove and heated the house with wood. They harvested their fire wood from the cottonwood trees that were in the country. One of her worst experience was when, “One day we were cutting wood with what was called a buzz saw and I was taking the pieces of wood from the saw and throwing it in a pile behind her. I turned to talk to my father and got too close to the saw and it caught my glove and cut my middle finger into the end of my little finger. Everything shut down and my parents put a splint on it and wrapped it and hurried me to the Doctor. He stitched it back together and I have had full use of it, including being able to milk a cow or goat,” she related.
As a child growing up to the age of ten she experienced so much of hard work including watering their fields with a water wheel built by her father. Many rocks were carried into the stream to divert the water toward the wheel race. Willows were cut to line the rocks so as to save even more water to reach the waterwheel. From such assignment, her sister was floating an armload of willows to her father and lost her footing causing the water to catch the willows and was sweeping her toward the water wheel. Her father was quick to catch her before she got to the wheel. She also cherished those experiences dealing with a lot of rattle snakes and lizards, porcupines, skunks, ground hogs and squirrels that would eat their fruits.
Youthful challenges
Her earlier trainings as a child and her hardest of experiences working in the fields and the continued motivation from her parents about the value of education inspired and encouraged her to finish her high school education until her senior year, by herself, picking apples to pay for her school clothes, shoes and school supplies. She understood then that education will open the bolted doors of opportunities towards self-reliance for her. As a young woman she had done even men’s kind of work, milking cows and feeding rabbits for her parents; as a tractor driver for farmers during haying; picking fruit in the season; driving a Caterpillar that pulled the big hop machine.
She eventually lived in Houston Texas and worked as a messenger to be able to provide for herself and live independently. But she did not like the hot climate and returned back to Colorado and worked picking sour cherries, sleeping in her car. She suffered destitution; barely able to buy gas for her car, lunch meat and bread.
She thought of a school friend whose mother was a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) at the local hospital. She helped her got a job as an aide that allowed her to rent a motel room to live in. She worked there for two and a half years and then transferred to Grand Junction where she eventually became an LPN herself. Her work provided her only with $1.40 an hour. She also worked as Assistant Instructor for the Aide Class at St. Mary’s Hospital, then was asked to work in the ICU of the same hospital and stayed in such work for 12 years. Then she moved to Spokane Washington and worked in a nursing home in 1964. While on her way to Yakima with her cousins a car hit her as a pedestrian and her life started all over again. As she was on crutches and could not walk the hospital halls, she went to work at a nursery repotting plants from those planted in trays. At this time she was able to buy a trailer house for $3,000 through the help of a sister in the ward.
Church and community service
In the midst of her relentless efforts of conquering and persevering through the stretched hours of days and dismal nights, she remained as always faithful and active member in the church. She sings in the ward and stake choirs and was MIA Secretary. She tried to be as faithful as she could be with the full understanding that all the tests that she had passed through were all part of her premortal assignment to prove worthy of her second estate.
After recuperation and healing from accidental injury, she went to work for a boat company making their wiring harnesses for their boats and putting instruments in the panels. She did that for 6 years and moved to Orem, Utah. Utah Valley Hospital hired her and she worked on the Medical/Surgical floor. She took the Pharmacology course so she could pass medicine to her patients.
However, during all those several shifting of career, her heart drew her back to her childhood interest in the farm. She met a couple in the hospital that lived in the Uintah Basin. She moved her trailer from Spokane to Orem, from Orem to the Basin and set it up by herself each time. In the Basin she went to work at the County Hospital while growing up a herd of sheep, goat and cows plus three sows and chickens.
At this time of the prime of her career life, she was eventually called to serve a mission in the Philippines. She sold some of her animals and worked a full hospital 3-11 shift to spare her morning hours for another extra earnings changing the wheel lines of her branch president every morning earning enough to pay for her whole mission.
After a year in the mission she turned her life back to her medical career and the farm. She returned to her trailer house and gathered her remaining animals and started all over again. That was her home until the trailer burned down while she was at work. In 1990 she had a total hip replacement and became the Discharge Planner for the hospital for the next 12 years retiring in 2004.
From that time forth she focused her time in farming and serving in the church. She proudly labeled herself as a farmerette. Through all those years and with gut-wrenching determination she had put in fences, laid water line to her trailer house two times, owned 10 hives of bees and extracted the honey, delivered piglets, kids and calves, Hauled animals to pasture in different places, sheared sheep, trimmed hooves on goats and sheep, picked up hay from her fields that she had baled and stacked them 6 high, always had a garden, learned to maintain wheel lines and buy other pieces of land that provided her with a collateral to purchase her present home.
In the church she served as Librarian for 20 years and did the Bullletin. She has always been a Visiting Teacher and regularly works in the Temple. Apart from her full-time mission, she had been a Branch missionary twice and a Stake Missionary. She has always had a calling in one way or another in the auxiliary organizations of the church in their area.
With immeasurable faith and courage dredged from her remaining strength in old age and failing health, she performed her visiting teaching assignment faithfully even on a crutch. She serves regularly in the temple as savior of Mount Zion so far for 14 years. She was the special nurse on call of her missionary companion during her trying moments of sufferings from debilitating afflictions until her last days.
In the community she served as the President of their Culinary Water Company for 5 years, maintenance and meter reader for two years.
Generous disposition
In all that she did, she admits it was never easy, but she believes that all those harrowing encounters that she has undergone in life and the services she has done and are still doing in the church and to other people even at this time of her old age are all part of her premortal ordination and mortal mission.
She once had a boyfriend early in life which she dumped for obvious reasons. Always her hope was to find someone that would take better care of her than she could of herself. As time and opportunity for her to find her mate passed, she left all her chances of being married to God and asked Him instead for her to be a farmer. And it was granted of her, at which time she would raise her animals for the purpose of helping a person in need. She selflessly shared meat, vegetables and money from out of her hard labors, to the willing needy recipients.
When she was hurt in a car accident in 2015, her hospital bill came in and she thought she would have to start payments to clear the bill. When she went to the hospital she was informed that there was no bill. So in expression of gratitude the money which she was supposed to pay for her own bill and which she should have saved, was instead paid to the hospital in the amount of $2,000.00, to cover the bill, at the discretion of the management, of some patients who might not be able to pay their hospital charges. She admits, “Blessings have been coming my way ever since. I did not look back.”
Her enduring faith during those years of immense struggles in extremely unpleasant circumstances paints for her a portrait of an exemplary life of a single woman. Those who had been so closely associated with her could attest of the noble character that radiates from the inner chamber of her heart. I and my family have our hearts brimming with joy for having her as a friend despite the fact that we have never again met since those short days and months of her assignment as a missionary in our place, where I was then the branch president. Her love and friendship knows no bounds. She treated us even as her own family. The story of her life inspires us to move forward amidst great adversities.
Her generosity and love for people who are in distress defies not only barriers of oceans and continents but even cultural boundaries. In her own benevolent way, she had been extending her little abundance not only to people in her neighborhood, but also to some people in the far distant place of her mission---Surigao City, Philippines. She heard of the devastating earthquake early this year 2017 in our place where she served her full-time mission, and her first reaction was how she can help. From a timeworn wallet were drawn the old farmerette’s mite and sent to a foreign land to help build temporary shelters and materials for repairs to benefit some earthquake victims. She does not have much of the worldly goods and riches, but her heart overflows with boundless love for the destitute.
At this time of her 80th birthday when her own feet are already hard to steady and her hands need someone’s grasp, she still wanted to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down and strengthen the feeble knees” (Doctrine & Covenants 81:5), sharing her hard earned resources to Light the World at Christmas time with compassion and mercy to people she did not even know in a foreign land. Like President Harold B. Lee, “[she] understood those who suffered…because of [her] own poor and simple beginnings” (President Dieter F. Uchtdorf).
She always acknowledged the fact that throughout her mortal mission God has been so good to her. In grateful acknowledgement of the great love of Heavenly Father she testified: “He has been so kind as to let me wear myself out and still serve Him. I know He knows us personally and grants our righteous desires. He knows whether we will learn the lessons we need to, doing what we want to do, or if we need a calling to help us grow.”
She believes as did the Apostle Paul that, “God hath from the beginning chosen [her] to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth” (Ephesians 2:13), and “be holy and without blame before him in love” (Ephesians 1:4). As such, she consecrated her whole life to fulfill her premortal ordination and mortal mission and endure well no matter the required sacrifices and refining tests all along the path to eternity.
It’s December 24, 2017, the day before Christmas Day and the time when everybody seems to be very busy preparing for the Christmas Eve celebration. 
