MH page 194

Attention should be given to the establishment of various industries so that poor families can find employment. Carpenters, blacksmiths, and indeed everyone who understands some line of useful labor, should feel a responsibility to teach and help the ignorant and the unemployed.

Communities should establish various industries and skilled laborers should teach the unemployed to provide jobs. The passage outlines a practical social strategy for alleviating poverty through industrial education.

In ministry to the poor there is a wide field of service for women as well as for men. The efficient cook, the housekeeper, the seamstress, the nurse—the help of all is needed. Let the members of poor households be taught how to cook, how to make and mend their own clothing, how to nurse the sick, how to care properly for the home. Let boys and girls be thoroughly taught some useful trade or occupation.

Women and men with diverse domestic, nursing, and trade skills should train members of poor households in practical life skills. This paragraph details practical domestic education tasks for community upliftment.

Missionary families are needed to settle in the waste places. Let farmers, financiers, builders, and those who are skilled in various arts and crafts, go to neglected fields, to improve the land, to establish industries, to prepare humble homes for themselves, and to help their neighbors.

Skilled professionals should settle in neglected fields to improve land, build industries, and assist neighbors. The text encourages community development and colonization initiatives by skilled workers.

The rough places of nature, the wild places, God has made attractive by placing beautiful things among the most unsightly. This is the work we are called to do. Even the desert places of the earth, where the outlook appears to be forbidding, may become as the garden of God. “In that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, And the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness. The meek also shall increase their joy in the Lord, And the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.” Isaiah 29:18, 19 .

God beautifies the rough places of nature, and spiritual and physical restoration is promised to the poor and afflicted. This paragraph combines descriptions of natural scenery with prophetic scriptural imagery about the poor and afflicted.

By instruction in practical lines we can often help the poor most effectively. As a rule, those who have not been trained to work do not have habits of industry, perseverance, economy, and self-denial. They do not know how to manage. Often through lack of carefulness and right judgment there is wasted that which would maintain their families in decency and comfort if it were carefully and economically used. “Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment.” Proverbs 13:23 .

Practical instruction in management, industry, and economy helps the poor more effectively than mere material support. It mixes practical advice on economic self-management and training with a scriptural proverb.