Sally was driving home from one of her business trips in Northern Arizona when she saw an elderly Navajo woman walking on the side of the road. As the trip was a long and quiet one, she stopped the car and asked the Navajo woman if she would like a ride.
With a silent nod of thanks, the woman got into the car. Resuming the journey, Sally tried in vain to make a bit of small talk with the Navajo woman. The old woman just sat silently, looking intently at everything she saw, studying every little detail, until she noticed a white bag on the seat next to Sally.
"What in bag?" asked the old woman.
Sally looked down at the white bag and said, "It's a box of chocolates. I got it for my husband".
The Navajo woman was silent for another moment or two. Then speaking with the quiet wisdom of an elder, she said: "Good trade."
I’m not sure if I would put that temptation to my wife, she may only get a small bite size Snickers Bar for me. I would have to get a whole truck load of chocolates for her and it still wouldn’t be a fair trade. She’s amazing and I am so glad to be able to share her with you in her current calling, so you can see just how blessed I have been for the last 28 years.
The Bishop did not give me a topic for me to cover so I guess it’s wide open for me, so I would like to talk about sports. Because of the World Series just getting over, I decided to talk about baseball and one of my least favorite teams the New York Yankees (sorry Tom and Clark and all others who live and die with that team). I don’t have a favorite baseball team just anyone who beats the Yankees kind of the same way I feel about the Denver Broncos and the Dallas Cowboy football teams when they play each other I wish they would both loose. But I have done a little research about the Yankees and have found out that this team has had some truly amazing players at times.
One I would like to tell you about was born on June 19. 1903 in the
Yorkville section of
Manhattan, weighing almost 14 pounds at birth, the son of
German immigrants His father was a
sheet metal worker by trade, but frequently unemployed due to ill health, so his mother was the breadwinner and disciplinarian. Both parents considered baseball a schoolyard game; his mother steered her young man toward a career in business. He attended Commerce High School, graduating in 1921. He then studied at
Columbia University for two years, although he did not graduate. Initially, he could not play intercollegiate sports for the
Columbia Lions because he had played baseball for a summer professional league during his freshman year. At the time, he was unaware that doing so jeopardized his eligibility to play any collegiate sport. Finally he was ruled eligible to play on the
Lions' football team and was a standout fullback. He later gained baseball eligibility and joined the Lions on that squad as well.
On April 18,
1923, this Columbia pitcher struck out seventeen
Williams College batters to set a team record; however, Columbia lost the game. Only a handful of fans were at South Field that day, but one of the more significant was the presence of Yankee scout Paul Krichell. It was not his pitching that particularly impressed him; rather, it was this players powerful left-handed hitting. During the time Krichell had been observing the young Columbia ballplayer, He had hit some of the longest home runs ever seen on Eastern campuses, including a 450-foot home run on April 28 at Columbia's South Field which landed at 116th Street and Broadway.Within two months, he had signed a NY Yankee contract with a 1500 dollar bonus attached.
On June 1,
1925, he entered the game as a
pinch hitter, The next day, June 2, Yankee manager
Miller Huggins started him in place of the aging first baseman
Wally Pipp.. Fourteen years later and at the midpoint of the
1938 season, his performance began to diminish. At the end of that season, he said, "I tired so hard at mid season. I don't know why, but I just couldn't get going again. I will rededicate myself to be better in the following year" Although his final 1938 statistics were above average they were significantly down from his 1937 season. In the 1938 World Series, he had only four hits in fourteen at-bats, all singles.When the Yankees began their
1939 spring training in
St. Petersburg, Florida, it was obvious that he no longer possessed his once-formidable power.Throughout his career, he was considered an excellent base runner, but as the 1939 season got under way, his coordination and speed had deteriorated significantly and at one point he collapsed at
Al Lang Field, then the Yankees' spring training park in St. Petersburg. By the end of spring training, he had not hit a single home run. By the end of April, his statistics were the worst of his career, with one RBI and a .143 batting average. Fans and the press openly speculated on his abrupt decline. James Kahn, a reporter who wrote often about Yankees, said in one article about this man
“I think there is something wrong with him. Physically wrong, I mean. I don't know what it is, but I am satisfied that it goes far beyond his ball-playing. I have seen ballplayers 'go' overnight, as he seems to have done. But they were simply washed up as ballplayers. It's something deeper than that in this case, though. I have watched him very closely and this is what I have seen: I have seen him time a ball perfectly, swing on it as hard as he can, meet it squarely — and drive a soft, looping fly over the infield. In other words, for some reason that I do not know, his old power isn't there... He is meeting the ball, time after time, and it isn't going anywhere.”
Things came to a head when he had to struggle to make a routine put-out at first base. The pitcher, Johnny Murphy, had to wait for him to drag himself over to the bag so he could throw him the ball.
May 2, 1939 being the team captain, he took himself out of the line up ending his 14 year streak of 2130 consecutive games played. As his debilitation became steadily worse his wife Eleanor called the famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Her call was transferred to Dr. Charles William Mayo, who had been a Yankee fan and watch his amassing career and his mysterious loss of strength. Dr. Mayo told Eleanor to bring him in as soon as possible.
He and Eleanor flew to Rochester from Chicago, where the Yankees were playing at the time, arriving at the Mayo Clinic on June 13, 1939. After six days of extensive testing at Mayo Clinic, the diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) was confirmed on June 19, 1936 on his 36th birthday, wow! what a great present.
I guess you have probably figured out by now the ball player I am speaking about was Lou Gehrig and he died June 2, 1941 at 37 years old. So the team I grew up disliking so much I am eternally linked to because this is the same disease that I have been diagnosed with. Now we have not really make public announcement of my condition and some of you know about it. But it’s kind of like being pregnant after a while it’s kind of hard to hide the symptoms.
Let me part with you a little bit of my medical knowledge to you about ALS, (which is very limited) and then Dave Hafen and Bishop Greenwood and refute what I say later. ALS is a form of a motor neuron disease also called Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It is a progressive, fatal, disease caused by the degeneration of motor neurons, these are the nerve cells in the central nervous system that control voluntary muscle movement. The disorder causes muscle weakness and atrophy of the muscles, (atrophy is the partial or complete wasting away of a part of the body). As the neurons degenerate the nerves cease to send messages to muscles. Unable to function, the muscles gradually weaken, develop fasciculation's (twitches) because of the interruption of the nerve connection to the muscle, and eventually to atrophy.
I read a bunch of letters between Lou to Dr, Mayo detailing the struggles of Lou and the treatments that they tried with him to no avail. I can emphasize with him. Now I am not trying to compare myself with a world class athlete but I can sympathize with those struggles. Right now I am mostly affected in my legs. I know I’m going to regret saying this but I use to have a pretty good looking set of legs, they were strong, powerful and would do whatever I asked of them. These legs have taken me to 2 second place finishes at the BYU Invitational when I was in high school running the 440 yard dash. I would have taken first place if the jackrabbit from Heber would have never been born. He always beat me by at least a second. These are the same legs that skied from Bull Frog Marina to the mouth of Rainbow Bridge Canyon at Lake Powell. Those of you that have not had the privilege of being on Lake Powell, that is about 50 miles as the lake winds and follows the path of the Colorado river. I must add a disclaimer, I was 17 the lake was filling and there were very few people on the lake. It was early in the morning. I was on two skis and it was a perfectly flat surface. Nevertheless still a pretty major accomplishment in my book. Now they are wasting away and I struggle to walk with the aid of braces on both legs. But you know what, that’s okay. The reason it’s okay is that I asked for it. I don’t mean someone gave me a list of ways to die and because of being lazy I just picked the first one on the list since it started with an A.
I mean I chose, we chose to come to this earth. In Abraham 3: 22-23 we learn,
22 Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the aintelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the bnoble and great ones;
23 And God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them,
Brother and Sisters we were there, we stood there in that midst with God the Father. We heard the plan that a place would be prepared for us to go to and to learn and to progress that we might become like unto our Father in Heaven. We were there when Jesus presented his plan to be our Savior and through his atonement we could be saved. We were there when Lucifer presented his plan that he would make sure we all made it back.
In Moses 4 we read: verse 1-3, And I, the aLord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That bSatan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the cbeginning, and he came before me, saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will dredeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely eI will do it; wherefore fgive me thine honor. 2 But, behold, my Beloved aSon, which was my Beloved and bChosen from the beginning, said unto me—cFather, thy dwill be done, and the eglory be thine forever. 3 Wherefore, because that aSatan brebelled against me, and sought to destroy the cagency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be dcast down;
As we know 1/3 of the hosts of heaven followed Lucifer and was driven out of the pre-earth life. In Rev. 12: 7-9 it says, And there was awar in heaven: bMichael and his cangels fought against the dragon; and the ddragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in a
heaven. And the great dragon was acast out, that old serpent, called the bDevil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. I don’t know if I was part of Michael’s army of angels that fought against Satan, being the shy, reserved, introverted person that I am. I probably sat back and supported from a distance but the important part of this is not whether or not we fought but that we were there and it goes back to my saying that I asked for this trial. Because we are here and we have a body, we voted to come down here. There was a division in the pre-existence. 1/3 was kicked out and we read that we had free agency there, sooo we voted to come down to this earth. My vision in this is that we raised our arm to the square and voted and said yes I want to go to earth. We had intelligences we were able to reason, we knew this was not going to be a cake walk. We knew there were going to be challenges and we knew that, to learn to love we had to experience hate. To know what joy was we had to experience sorrow. To know how pleasure feels we had to have pain and to be happy we had to be sad. To have a perfected body as our Father in heaven has, we had to receive a body. It’s too bad we can’t remember these things, it would be so much easier to get through those hard times that we have. It would be great to remember jumping for joy when we were told it was our turn to get our body and come to earth to experience these things, but we can’t but. I testify that we did and we are here because we voted for it.
One of the special gifts that we received from Sharon Greenwood was a box full of plates. Each plate had a saying written on it. There was a promise that when Mary needed to vent some frustration she had their permission to take one or all of those plates over to their driveway and throw it as hard as she can on the concrete and she and Dale would clean it up. Don’t know if Dale agreed to this or not. I can’t remember any of the cute sayings except one and it changed my outlook on life. It read, can’t stand to see a loved one suffer. It was then I realized that the symptoms of this disease were going to run it’s course and there was nothing I was going to be able to do about it. That it was up to me to decide how I was going to handle them. I could either suffer through them and blame everyone for my misfortune or to take them in stride, learn something from them and endure them to the end.
Some of you have read the address given at a Women's Conference at BYU by Carlfred Broderick, The Uses of Adversity. It was later compiled into a book by Emily Watts. In there he tells the story when he was a Stake President in California attending a meeting to induct the 11 year old girls from the Primary into the Young Women's Organization. He says that it was a beautifully done rendition of the Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy representing the young girls, traveling to the Kingdom of Oz which was very closely resembled the Los Angeles temple. She was gliding happily down the pathway of the yellow brick road. In his words an “antiseptic brick road. There were no weeds, no Munchkins, no misplaced tiles, and not even a wicked witch of the west. The Young Women leaders taught all the girls had to do was to stay on that brick road and all would be fine. At the end of the presentation they brought out a family he said could be right out of a fashion magazine. A beautiful wife with her handsome returned missionary husband and their photogenic children all dressed to perfection. They promised the girls that if they stuck onto the yellow brick road and entered into the Kingdom of Oz, they too would have this perfect life that they have showed them. At the end of the event the Stake Primary President said, “President Broderick is there anything you would like to add to this lovely evening?” He said yes there is a few things I would like to say. He also notes that he doesn’t think the stake primary president has ever forgiven him for what he was about to say. He said, “Girls I do not want you to believe for one minute that if you do everything right, keep the commandments and live as close to the Lord as you can and fight off the priests quorum one by one and wait chastely for your missionary to return and pay you tithing and attend all you meetings, accept calls from your Bishop and have a temple marriage that bad things aren’t going to happen to you. I do not want you to say that God was not true or to say that you were promised in Primary that if you were very, very good you would be blessed…The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not insurance against pain. It is a resource in event of pain, and when that pain comes (and it will)..rejoice that you have a resource to deal with your pain.”
We are here to learn and to grow, some of you can learn by watching or learning of others that make mistakes and grow out of their experiences. Some of us have to touch the fire before we understand that it is hot. There is danger in having to experience some of the things for ourselves and not learning from what others have experienced. Sometimes that road is longer for us to come back into the arms of the loving Father in Heaven but that road is not impassable. It doesn’t mean that someone is better than another it’s just that we have to experience things in a different way. Possibly along the way as we work to that magical Land of Oz we may pull someone who has gone farther from the path than us, back to the path with us. Is this life worth it or is what I going through now still worth it, emphatically yes. We are children of our Father in Heaven with all the rights and privileges that are his. We have made the first step in voting to come to the earth to gain these experiences. Some day in the eternities I will look back upon my life here and the struggles in which seem so insurmountable now and realize that it is just a brief memory like taking 2nd at BYU to some jackrabbit or skiing for 50 miles. I don’t remember the burn from my legs or how I wobbled to get back into the boat. All I remember now is the accomplishment that I worked hard to accomplish. I won’t remember the hurt and the sadness that we came to this earth to experience but we will remember the accomplishments of this life in the eternity to come.
The scriptures tell us in Romans 8: 16-18
16 The Spirit itself beareth awitness with our bspirit, that we are the cchildren of God:
17 And if children, then heirs; aheirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we bsuffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.
18 For I reckon that the asufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the bglory which shall be revealed cin us. I testify to you that this is true.
In closing I would like to touch on one more subject. In a talk by David S. Baxter he mentioned that Selfless service is a wonderful antidote to the ills that flow from the worldwide epidemic of self-indulgence. Some grow bitter or anxious when it seems that not enough attention is being paid to them, when their lives would be so enriched if only they paid more attention to the needs of others.
Stretching our souls in service helps us to rise above our cares, concerns, and challenges. As we focus our energies on lifting the burdens of others, something miraculous happens. Our own burdens diminish and we become a happier people. If that is the case you guys must be the happiest people on earth, you are incredible with all the selfless service that you have given to me and my family. The dinners, deserts, treats and breads it’s amasing that I am losing weight but they have all been delicious and very appreciated. There have been cards, letters, books, healing water and disks, people searching for others who may know how to help me with this disease. A walker, my cane that has been such a fun topic of discussion, to help me get around easier, trips with the Beatty's and Greenwoods that we had so much fun to be together. There have been hugs, kisses, smiles, winks and tears okay about the tears. Us big burley type guys don’t like to talk about tears but somehow my emotions are effected with this disease. Even though my emotions have been close to the surface for the quite a while now. These tears that we share are not tears of sadness but tears of gratitude and love for you. I even notice some of you that don’t know what to say and kind of shy away. I understand because I don’t know how to answer the question that you don’t know how to ask. It’s like “how ya doing Steve?” Do I answer, “Oh just great” or “I’ve been better” or “dying a little more everyday”, and you poor people never knowing what I’m going to come up with but yet that still tells me that you care. There have been decks built by my family but many, many offers from you to help get it built. There is a coupon book stuck to the fridge from Jason Nelson offering free lawn mowing and Tom Beatty edging my lawn that’s twice the size of his own to do. Mike Wagner dropping whatever he was doing to come fix my toilet and putting up a handrail in the garage, which we still have not seen a bill for yet Mike. There have been some special spiritual experiences with the Bishopric and Priesthood Blessings and some fathers blessings with them present. I know that there are probably still some that I have not failed to mentioned but we are so appreciative of your service and your love. I know that I and my family are often in your prayers and put on the prayer rolls of the temple. We certainly feel of your strength and you need to know that those prayers are working and buoying us up. We ask that you continue to remember us because we need your strength and honestly the part we are going through now, is probably the easy part. We try not to worry about what is going to happen in the future because we just don’t know the course the disease is going to take. I am just thankful for the next day that I have to be here. Mary is concerned when I leave the house because my strength and balance is getting a little suspect but as long as I am able to be with you guys she doesn’t have to worry. The guys carry my golf clubs back and forth from the parking lot at the golf course. I promised Tom I wouldn’t tell the story about him pushing me into the lake at Fox Hollow, so I won’t. Well the truth be told he was there watching over me as I tried to hit one off the edge of the pond. I lost my balance and if he wouldn’t have been there to grab my shirt and pull me back, I would have been swimming. He just didn’t have to throw me down into the wet grass I got almost as wet as if I would have fallen into the pond but I was glad he was there. So I know that I’m in good hands with you guys, as scary as that could be at times.
I am so blessed to be a member of the church of Jesus Christ. That I have the knowledge of the Plan of Salvation. It would really be scary not to know what is going to happen after this life and to not know that this is just part of the master plan that we can return back to our Father in Heaven. To understand the importance of repentance and how the Atonement works in my life. To have the blessing of the Priesthood restored once again to the earth and the keys restored to seal us together as a family through our eternal marriage in the Temple. Remember that we voted to come to this earth and we accepted the challenge to work through this short earth life. That the yellow brick road is full of weeds, thorns, Munchkins and even a wicked witch of the west but as we work together, serve and worry about each other that load is lifted because many hands make light the load.
