Line upon Line

Years ago, my husband and I were living in Southern California fully engaged in all the consuming details of raising our seven children, ages 14-27. All of them were single and either living with us, serving missions, or away from home attending school. On a February afternoon, we were completely, albeit gloriously, stopped in our busy tracks by what we experienced at a video conference followed a few weeks later by a telephone call from President Gordon B. Hinckley calling my husband to serve as a general authority seventy. Accepting that calling committed us to leaving our California home to serve in either Salt Lake City or in an area presidency in one of the international areas located around the world. The location of our service would almost certainly change several times over the course of our years of service.

Our first assignment was in Salt Lake City. The next year we were asked to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both assignments felt quite foreign to our longtime California children, and both were marvelous in heavenly, growth-promoting ways.

That second July, we flew all night from Salt Lake City to Argentina to be graciously greeted at the Buenos Aires airport by a team of Church employees who loaded our bags into a Church van and drove us across the seventeen-million person metropolis of B.A. to the urban apartment that would be our home for the next several years. Those kind greeters carried our bags upstairs to our new residence, showed us quickly around that lovely space, then whisked my husband off to the area office to begin his new assignment.

Our sons immediately took to the streets to become acquainted with our new foreign neighborhood. We had stopped at an ATM machine before we left the airport, but that machine had provided us only hundred-peso notes. Argentina was experiencing a severe economic crisis at that time. The peso had just depreciated relative to the dollar. Previously, one peso was approximately equivalent to one dollar. By the time we arrived in Argentina, one dollar was roughly equal to three pesos. As a result, with the financial crisis and paper currency hard to come by, that hundred-peso note was worth much more than the $33 dollars it had cost us. I was eager to provide those enthusiastic boys a bit of cash to enable them to more fully engage with the possibilities outside, but I was reluctant to send them off with such a large bill. Without another option, they took the hundred-peso note and took to the streets.

Almost immediately, they discovered what was to become one of our most oft visited neighborhood pleasures: Freddos, a local Argentine gelato store that served a famous, sticky, unforgettable ice cream that locals eat with a tiny shovel. It was delicious. When our sons returned, they were eager to share with me their marvelous discovery and their first interaction with charming Argentines. The boys explained that the store required them to order their gelato from one fellow, then proceed to the cash register to pay another. Not able to speak Spanish, they said they had successfully used hand gestures to communicate the size and flavors of gelato they wanted, but they met with a roadblock when they got to the cashier. They held up their hundred-peso note, expecting him to take it from them and send them on their way. He did not. Rather, he wagged his finger at them and said, “No se puede. No tenemos cambio.” In other words, “We can’t accept that large bill. We don’t have enough cash in our register to make change for that.” The economic struggles of the time made it improbable and unsafe for them to keep that much cash on hand.

I listened to their story and, perhaps partly from the fatigue and overwhelm I was feeling after the all-night flight and my concern about our mutual inability to speak Spanish, I began to express my sympathy. How sad it seemed to me that these boys were in a foreign country and couldn’t even buy an ice cream cone!

The boys listened to me only long enough to understand where I was going before they interrupted me to say, “Oh, Mom, we got our ice cream!” Puzzled, I replied, “How?” They proudly responded, “We simply managed to communicate to those guys that we would buy 100 pesos worth of ice cream so they wouldn’t need to make change.” At that point, they enthusiastically produced eight, almost gallon-sized Styrofoam containers of gelato, two in each of four plastic bags, one for each of their hands. Each container was filled with a different flavor of that delicious concoction – enough to fill our freezer and treat us for weeks.

I hadn’t thought big enough. My optimism and imagination were off duty – perhaps compromised by weariness, uncertainty, and lack of confidence. Those boys didn’t entertain any thoughts or feelings that might have resulted in empty-handed paralysis. They simply chose to see the opposition as opportunity. They saw the situation as an occasion to think differently. As a result, what seemed immediately to be hard became happy. They focused on the job to be done and committed their imaginations and energy to finding a way forward rather than resigning themselves to scarcity.

Had they given up and simply gone home, they would have been something like King Agrippa in the New Testament who, after hearing Paul preach of Christ, sheepishly responded, “Almost thou persuadeth me to be a Christian.” That tragic “almost” prefaced a lost opportunity to courageously go the distance – a noble race begun but not completed. For Agrippa, the real job to be done was personal conversion, not simply listening to Paul’s preaching and opting out.

Examples are everywhere of those who engage in the experiences of life with vision as they seek and embrace broad purpose. Some of those examples are simple. Recently I was playing chess with a young grandson. Without much thought or long-term vision, I promptly began knocking off his pawns. As the number of his playing pieces diminished, I felt pretty good about myself, until I realized he was playing the long game and committing his energy to a real victory. I appreciated his careful vision only when he aptly declared, “Checkmate.” He won.

Another young man shared the ultimate important victory he had found through patient, visionary persistence. At sacrament meeting, he told the inspiring story of what happened after his having been sent home early from his mission. After prayerful regrouping at home, he courageously determined to press on, trusting that heaven would show him the way forward and render him useful if he persisted. During his subsequent several months at home, his grandmother became very ill. That young man spent every day at her side holding her hand and reading to her until she passed away, at which time he was called to return to his mission field. He stayed the course and finished his race, accomplishing the whole job to be done.

I witnessed other young missionaries at the Provo MTC who found unconventional ways to embrace their purpose with imagination and vision. Unable to use their legs, they were seated in wheelchairs at the front of the spirit-filled hall listening to their weekly devotional. When the speaker asked all the missionaries to stand to sing, those courageous Elders promptly put their hands on the handrails of their chairs and pressed themselves up as high as they could to effectively “stand” with the others. They would not be stopped by limitations.

The concept of thinking differently aptly applies in all kinds of situations. I heard a young person say, “Marriage isn’t for me.” Without claiming to know the whole of that young person’s considerations as he made that pronouncement, I would nonetheless suggest that he was perhaps partly right. Marriage isn’t simply for him or any other single individual. Declaring categorically that marriage wasn’t for him neglected to note the myriad of other reasons for marriage: the beginning of generations to follow, the stability of society, the institutional, divinely-appointed opportunity to build and bless something larger than self, to name just a few.  A simple statement of “marriage isn’t for me” isn’t thinking big enough, deep enough, or long enough. Vision extends the potential reach of our achievement of worthy accomplishment.

Consider three workers all engaged in roughly similar tasks. One might say, “I lay bricks.” Another doing the same job might say, “I am constructing a building.” And the third, likewise engaged in the same basic work, might say, “I am building a house of God.” The first describes a job; the second describes a career; the third describes a calling. All three work with bricks and mortar, but the third works with vision and even heavenly purpose as well.

-Identify the larger, longer purpose of behaviors and choices.
-Keep the big picture in mind for vision and motivation.
-Do more than simply go through the motions.
-Don’t give up too soon. Go the whole distance.

Buying an ice cream cone (especially if it’s Argentine gelato!) will provide a tasty treat. But embracing and engaging in the quests and experiences of life with determined, persistent, even inspired, purpose without giving up is thinking bigger and better. That effort to thoughtfully accomplish the larger job to be done builds saints and is a mark of lasting discipleship.