What Would He Do?

More Ants Than Grasshoppers

On seeking truth, standing together, and the ripple one brave choice can make.

In college I took a world religion course, and I loved every minute of it. The professor came from an Asian country, and I'll never forget the first day. He began calling roll in a thick accent, and as everyone around me nodded along, a small panic set in — I couldn't make out a single name, and I had no idea whether I'd even recognize my own. (I caught my last name just in time to raise my hand. Barely.)

A few classes in, my ear adjusted. I figured out that "oman" was woman and "uman" was human — and once the words came into focus, so did the brilliant man behind them. I learned more in that room than in almost any other. It was my first real lesson in something I keep relearning: understanding usually lives on the far side of a little patience. The truth is often right there; you just have to stay long enough to hear it.

One radical question

Because it was a Christian college, I took my share of religion classes. One was taught by a son of Ezra Taft Benson — who served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and later led the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as Prophet and President of the Church. My professor once told us that his father, after decades working alongside leaders all over the world, had come away genuinely sobered by what he'd seen of human nature — much the same warning, really, that runs through the scripture I'd later come to love.

That professor assigned us the old classic that gave the world the phrase "What would Jesus do?" — Charles Sheldon's In His Steps. It follows a handful of ordinary people who make one radical commitment: never to make an important decision without first honestly asking what would Jesus do — and then to follow the answer, however hard it turned out to be. Watching those few quiet choices ripple outward and change an entire community stayed with me. It was a beautiful story of how one person's small, faithful decision is never as small as it looks.

Wheat for man

Years ago, when I was very sick, a spiritual leader gave me a blessing and told me — of all things — to study the Word of Wisdom, that little 1833 revelation on health. And I'll be honest: one line stumped me. "Wheat for man," it says. And there I was, a celiac, unable to touch the stuff. It didn't seem to fit a revelation meant for even "the weakest of saints."

What finally settled it for me was noticing that the revelation doesn't say only wheat. It names a whole pantry — corn, oats, rye, barley — a generous variety, with the grains for people and the grains "for the ox" gently sorted out. For those of us who can't do wheat, the naturally gluten-free grains are still very much part of that good abundance. (I wrote more about the whole Word of Wisdom, and what modern science now says about it, in another post.)

And here's a detail I've come to love. The wheat we grow here in the United States isn't genetically modified — there's no GM wheat grown commercially in this country. Why not? Because years ago, wheat farmers dug in their heels and kept it out, largely to protect the trust of the countries they sell to. (That may be starting to shift — a drought-tolerant GM wheat cleared a U.S. regulatory hurdle in 2024 — but it isn't in our fields yet.) Corn is a different story; most U.S. corn is genetically modified, and I've written separately, and carefully, about that whole tangled subject. But those wheat farmers stayed with me — for a reason I'll come back to in just a minute.

You, out there

These days I'm humbled to have readers scattered all over the world — dozens of countries, last I counted. When a new flag pops up on my little map, I sometimes joke to my husband that the poor soul landed here, thought "what on earth is this?," and clicked straight off. And yet, every single day, I watch readers come back, from every corner of the globe. I can't see who you are — only where you're from — but I see you, and I'm grateful.

Which brings me, oddly, to a Pixar movie

In A Bug's Life, a colony of ants is bullied every season by a gang of grasshoppers led by a brute named Hopper. The ants are forced to gather a harvest not only for themselves but for the grasshoppers too — season after season, far more than they can spare. Meanwhile a misfit inventor ant named Flik keeps trying, and failing, and setting off small catastrophes, until he's very nearly cast out of the colony altogether.

But in the end, it's Flik who finally says the thing no one else will: the ants outnumber the grasshoppers. They always have. They simply have to stop handing over their harvest and stand together. And the moment they do, the bullies don't stand a chance.

You can probably see where I'm going.

There are Hoppers in this world — the ones who count on you feeling far too small to say no. But there have always been more of us than there are of them. Those wheat farmers I mentioned? A whole lot of ordinary "ants" who stood shoulder to shoulder and simply refused. You may feel small, or outnumbered, or certain that your one choice couldn't possibly matter. It can. Honestly, it's the only thing that ever has. One ant said no. Others followed.

So keep making the small, right choices you already know in your heart to be right — the ones that nudge a little more good into your home, your community, your corner of the world. You may never once see where the ripples land. Make them anyway.

May your Higher Power give you the strength to do it. Seek knowledge, and wisdom, and truth — in my experience, they always turn out to agree with one another in the end.

And may the "Force" be with you. :)

With love,

Steffanie