‘I guess we won’t be eating lunch’ — stories about LDS apostle M. Russell Ballard

In 1985, M. Russell Ballard, then a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, traveled to Ethiopia, with Glenn Pace, who was in charge of the faith’s welfare services, to see the drought that was crippling the country and killing so many of its citizens.

For both men, it was a sobering, never-to-be-forgotten experience.

On one of the first days, the two packed a lunch in the capital of Addis Ababa, then journeyed north. They got out of their car and planned to eat their sandwiches in an open area, where there was no sign of human life. As they opened their sacks, however, hungry children with outstretched hands seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The two exchanged glances, shrugged and said in unison, “I guess we won’t be eating lunch.”

They tore the bread into pieces, parceling out as many morsels as they could.

Later, they walked through the camps, seared by the sight of little children carrying one another, fathers near death feeding their kids first, mothers with skin sores covering their whole bodies.

One man tried to give a baby to them; others mistook them for doctors. The food lines snaked endlessly across the desert and thousands more waited outside the camps, with little hope of staying alive.

“I’d been to Haiti and many other Third World countries,” Ballard told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2009. “But I had never seen massive suffering like this. It changed my life forever.”

His ‘dear friend’ Harry Reid

Speaking at Harry Reid’s 2022 memorial service in Las Vegas, Ballard praised the former U.S. Senate majority leader and Nevada Democrat — the highest-ranking elected Latter-day Saint ever to serve in the United States — as one who exemplified the New Testament’s instruction to care for “the least of these.”

“Harry cared for … those who were less fortunate, hungry, sick or those who had any number of challenges,” Ballard said at the time.

Throughout his remarks, Ballard repeatedly referred to Reid as a “dear friend,” with whom he would counsel and “share personal experiences of faith.”

“In more recent years,” the apostle continued, “we shared a similar plight. We each lost sight in one eye at about the same time; he in his right eye and me in my left. We used to remind each other that we could walk down the street, arm in arm. He could help me see things on the left and I could help him see things on the right!”

‘Too many meetings’

Michael Hicks, retired professor of music at Brigham Young University and author of “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography,” recalled a regional all-male priesthood meeting with Ballard in the late 1990s.

Here are Hicks’ five favorite quotes from the apostle:

• “You’re doing too much. You’re having too many meetings. Go sit under an oak tree and ponder what you’re doing.”

• “My best chance of helping you is to get you to go deeper.”

• “If we don’t leave a meeting a little closer to the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ, then why did we hold the meeting?”• “How to repent? Take a decision that isn’t as good as it ought to be and change it.”

• “At the end of the day, get on your knees and say, ‘I’ve done my best today, please accept it.’ If you can do that, you are all right.”

Quoting Jesus

Christian Anderson, who has reported on Latter-day Saint statistics, said he was “particularly touched by a talk four [General] Conferences ago, where [Ballard] contrasted the near-veneration of the family proclamation with the way ‘The Living Christ’ document has mostly been ignored, showing at least some awareness of how problematic the former is. He gave 85 talks in General Conference, referring to [church President Russell] Nelson by name in just seven of them and a total of 24 times, an exceptionally low total for the most-quoted prophet of all time; by contrast, he referred to Jesus 1,647 times.”