LDS (Mormon) President Gordon B. Hinckley - House of Order 2

TrueMormonDoctr...
I wish to speak to you about temporal matters.
As a backdrop for what I wish to say, I read to you a few verses from the 41st chapter of Genesis.
Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, dreamed dreams which greatly troubled him. The wise men of his court could not give an interpretation. Joseph was then brought before him: "Pharaoh said unto Joseph, In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of the river:
"And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow:
"And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed. . . .
"And the lean and the ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine: . . .
"And I saw in my dream . . . seven ears came up in one stalk, full and good:
"And, behold, seven ears, withered, thin, and blasted with the east wind, sprung up after them:
"And the thin ears devoured the seven good ears: . . .
"And Joseph said unto Pharaoh, . . . God hath shewed Pharaoh what he is about to do.
"The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one. . . .
". . . What God is about to do he sheweth unto Pharaoh.
"Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt:
"And there shall arise after them seven years of famine.
". . . And God will shortly bring it to pass" (Gen. 41:17¬20, 22¬26, 28¬30, 32).
Now, brethren, I want to make it very clear that I am not prophesying, that I am not predicting years of famine in the future. But I am suggesting that the time has come to get our houses in order.
So many of our people are living on the very edge of their incomes. In fact, some are living on borrowings.
We have witnessed in recent weeks wide and fearsome swings in the markets of the world. The economy is a fragile thing. A stumble in the economy in Jakarta or Moscow can immediately affect the entire world. It can eventually reach down to each of us as individuals. There is a portent of stormy weather ahead to which we had better give heed.
I hope with all my heart that we shall never slip into a depression. I am a child of the Great Depression of the thirties. I finished the university in 1932, when unemployment in this area exceeded 33 percent.
My father was then president of the largest stake in the Church in this valley. It was before our present welfare program was established. He walked the floor worrying about his people. He and his associates established a great wood-chopping project designed to keep the home furnaces and stoves going and the people warm in the winter. They had no money with which to buy coal. Men who had been affluent were among those who chopped wood.
I repeat, I hope we will never again see such a depression. But I am troubled by the huge consumer installment debt which hangs over the people of the nation, including our own people. In March 1997 that debt totaled $1.2 trillion, which represented a 7 percent increase over the previous year.
In December of 1997, 55 to 60 million households in the United States carried credit card balances. These balances averaged more than $7,000 and cost $1,000 per year in interest and fees. Consumer debt as a percentage of disposable income rose from 16.3 percent in 1993 to 19.3 percent in 1996.
Everyone knows that every dollar borrowed carries with it the penalty of paying interest. When money cannot be repaid, then bankruptcy follows. There were 1,350,118 bankruptcies in the United States last year. This represented a 50 percent increase from 1992. In the second quarter of this year, nearly 362,000 persons filed for bankruptcy, a record number for a three-month period.
We are beguiled by seductive advertising. Television carries the enticing invitation to borrow up to 125 percent of the value of one's home. But no mention is made of interest.
President J. Reuben Clark Jr., in the priesthood meeting of the conference in 1938, said from this pulpit: "Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you" (in Conference Report, Apr. 1938, 103).
For full transcript, visit www.lds.org

[@Sixalienasa]

President Hinckley was indeed a funny man, but his fun never caused offense or was never at the expense at another person. Yes a lot of his jokes were corny I guess you might call them that, but sometimes corny is funnier that anything else. It depends on the mod you happen at the time and certainly on the teller. I look forward to the day I can hear some more of his jokey manner.