THE PURE JOY OF GIVING

“I remember that when I became an Adventist, I understood the basic truths; I knew the doctrines, but I also remember in 1979, we bought our first piece of land that we owned, and I was sitting in church, bored to tears,” Ron Hetland, a hardworking farmer from Saskatchewan, confesses. “I got up, jumped in our truck, and drove to look at this land we just purchased. Then, I drove back to church. By this time, we had three children already. Patti was sitting with the children in church, so I went back to pick them up after church was over, and I recognized right there that if I didn’t take this relationship with God seriously, I would walk away. My brother gave me a Living Bible, which is a pretty loose paraphrase, but I wasn’t a very good reader then, so that was what I needed at that time. As I grew, I checked out other questions that I had avoided at the time because I didn’t want to look too fanatical. I read Desire of Ages, The Great Controversy, and all the Testimonies from cover to cover, and instead of finding a fanatic, I found someone who was incredibly wise and seriously balanced. From then, I became a student of the Bible and of the Spirit of Prophecy.”

“The reason we give back to God is because He has blessed us so much in so many ways!” both Ron and Patti Hetland confess.

“Even though my dad farmed, and I spent all the time that I could in the garden playing with my little farmer toys, my father was already an old man when I was born, retiring when I was 10, so I really didn’t know much about farming when the time came,” Ron reminisces. “That was the year we got married, and I did the two-year diploma at the University of Saskatchewan, and we had children, and Patti taught, and we had nothing. We almost went broke in 1979 because of a huge frost and a hailstorm, but we survived that somehow, and we carried on, and I guess this is going to be my 50th crop I’m going to be putting in this year.”

“My dad farmed too,” Patti reveals, “but he had to do a lot of carpentry as well to support the farming.”

“My brother, Ray, and his wife, Jane, and Patti and I have been doing some work in the Philippines since 2013,” Ron discloses. “In the areas we support, there are 2,600 children who have no access to education. These children have nothing. They are scrounging the bush for rats and gophers and whatever they can put in their mouths. At present there are schools in five villages where we are project funding to provide missionaries, and there are four more we are going to get into in the new school year.”

“This is very good work with indigenous, mountain people,” Patti affirms. “Most of the workers are all educated young people, doing an excellent work. One of them has a degree in education and agriculture and could be making more than we can afford to give him. Currently the local conference is sending more pastors in, so there have been many baptisms in the area. There’s no tax benefit, and there is no guarantee that what we attempt to do will succeed. Many times, it doesn’t work out the way we planned, but we just push on.”

“We also work with a group of other farmers in our area, the Naicam Spalding Growers Project, to support the Canada Foodgrains Bank, and in the past 25 years we have grown 25 crops, raising in excess of $900,000.” Ron asserts. “Last year alone we sent in $90,000 to the Canada Foodgrains Bank, and all that money multiplied by four, with matching federal money, takes it into the millions. The slogan of the Canada Foodgrains Bank is ‘A Christian Response to Hunger,’ so when you think about the three and a half years Jesus was in His public ministry, a lot of the work that He was doing was simply helping others, feeding the needy. So, I believe this is a continuation of the work that Jesus started. He not only fed them, but He bade them: ‘Follow Me!’ Through this work we are providing a necessary assistance to people who are in great need, and it’s because it’s a Christian response to hunger.”

To hear how Ron and Patti met, and how they had to hold on tightly to God’s almighty hand through their countless struggles, you can watch their compelling story on It Is Written Canada this month on the dozens of networks where It Is Written Canada is aired across Canada and around the world. Or simply go to iiw.ca or It Is Written Canada’s YouTube videos and click on the program entitled: “The Pure Joy of Giving.”

Thanks to your generous contributions, It Is Written Canada’s film crew was able to visit Ron and Patti’s farm in Saskatchewan to capture their story.

~ Mike Lemon