It was January 26, 1985, the night of the Junior Prom. The theme came from a song by Bob Seger, "We've Got Tonight" -- although, looking at the lyrics, I'm not sure how appropriate that was for a high school dance.
I know it's late, I know you're weary
I know your plans don't include me
Still here we are, both of us lonely
Longing for shelter from all that we see
Why should we worry, no one will care girl
Look at the stars so far away
We've got tonight, who needs tomorrow?
We've got tonight babe
Why don't you stay?
Deep in my soul, I've been so lonely
All of my hopes, fading away
I've longed for love, like everyone else does
I know I'll keep searching, even after today
So there it is girl, I've said it all now
And here we are babe, what do you say?
We've got tonight, who needs tomorrow?
We've got tonight babe
Why don't you stay?
The night before the dance, my priest quorum went on an overnight trip to a farm, where the next day we planned to ride snowmobiles in the fields. I had a really good time, and I came away with something to talk about on my date with Julie.
Having just turned 16 a few weeks earlier, I still did not have my driver's license, so I depended on my parents to do the driving. I do not suppose that it made a good impression when my mom and I picked Julie up at 7:30. On the other hand, I did not have to worry about parking, so there was that. My mom did all the talking on the drive in to Salt Lake City . . . thanks Mom. Actually, she probably did me a favor.
Mother dropped us off at the Hotel Utah, where we had dinner at the Hotel Utah Grill. This was a restaurant in the basement of the historic building that is now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. The big plus was that it was within easy walking distance of Symphony Hall, where the dance was being held. It may not have been the fanciest of places, but it wasn't Village Inn or Denny's either.
The Grill was a suggestion made by my father. A week before the dance we went into town to scout some places within walking distance of the venue for the Prom. It seemed like a nice place, and the food was good. I had the broiled burger while Julie ordered the club sandwich, though I am sure there were fancier entrees on the menu. Finally alone, I talked about how much fun I had on the snowmobile trip that day.
After dinner, we walked down South Temple, past Temple Square, to Symphony Hall, which was the building's original name, though it had since been renamed Abravanel Hall. As I had been taught, I walked on the street side, and did my best to be the perfect gentleman. We arrived at the dance after 8:30, went inside, and got our pictures taken.
We wandered around the multi-tiered lobby for a bit and then found our way to the dance floor. Julie looked wonderful that night. Since that stake dance a few years earlier I had always found her pretty, but that night she was radiant. Once again I had that special feeling, not just when we danced, but all night long. I was having a wonderful time, and I hoped that she was, as well.
As the night went on, we danced, we wandered around, we sat and talked with some of her friends, we danced some more. Alas, I had run out of topics for conversation fairly early in the evening, and I was a little self-conscious about not having much to say.
My father picked us up at 11:30 and we took her home. I walked Julie to the door and said that I had had wonderful time. She said that she had enjoyed the evening as well. Then we said good night.
I made a point of talking to Julie the next day at church, but I wish now that I had thought of doing what I would a few years later as a senior, and go by her house. But that came about from a happy accident, when the girl I took to the Homecoming dance that year forgot her ticket for the photos and I took it by her house the next day. That worked out so well I kept the photo ticket, or something else, on purpose in order to have an excuse to see the girl the day after the dance.
We did have that night, would we have any others?
She's an old-fashioned feelin'
She's an old-fashioned song
How do you know if you are falling in love? That might be a different question from "How do you know if you love someone?" which I think is easier to answer. Simply put, if you love someone, their happiness becomes more important to you than your own. Perhaps, then, falling in love means that the happiness of another person is becoming progressively more important to you.
In September of 1984, I started my sophomore year of high school, and there was one person who was becoming more and more important to me. On the first day of school, for reasons that I do not recall, Julie sat down in front of me in my math class, and she was as nice and friendly as she ever had been. Having her there in the desk in front of me for an hour or so every day was very different from sharing a few dances at the occasional stake dance.
At the end of the first week of school I was walking home when I spotted Julie walking ahead of me. She looked back, saw me and stopped to wait for me to catch up. I can still see her, with her blonde hair -- now shortened -- highlighted by the mid afternoon sun. I can see her smile and the light in her eyes as we talked about surviving high school and other things. I thought Julie was beautiful, and I enjoyed spending time with her.
Perhaps Julie was just being friendly, but I thought she might have liked me, too. She would later say that she was just trying to be neighborly. But no one else had ever been as nice and friendly to me as Julie had been. It is easy to see things that are not there, and it is certainly possible I saw more than friendship in her kindness. Falling in love is a natural thing, especially during those halcyon days of youth. I would have asked Julie to the Homecoming Dance, except that I wasn't yet sixteen, and still had a few months to wait.
A few weeks later my stake put on a street dance. I danced a few times with Julie, of course, but I also danced with other girls. I had a special feeling as I danced with Julie that I did not have with the others. I thought that I was in love, but was I?
These were magical days, when everything was wonderful, but they would not last. Later, when things had turned sour, when I told myself that I was still in love, I could not have been. Later, at least, I was not putting her happiness first. But in these early days could I have been in love with Julie? Perhaps I would just like to remember it that way.
It seems that the use of the word "fall" is a metaphor. To develop feelings of love for someone is risky, and a certain vulnerability is implied. Proximity, similarity, reciprocity, and physical attractiveness are factors that contribute to the notion of falling in love.
If one wants to get scientific about it, there are two chemical reactions in play when you fall in love, the increase in oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is human peptide hormone and neuropeptide that plays a role in social bonding while vasopressin is a neurohypophysial hormone that has a very short half-life between 16 and 24 minutes One person has suggested that "when we fall in love we are falling into a stream of naturally occurring amphetamines running through the emotional centers of our very own brains."
Timing matters, too. There might be a crystallization period of, perhaps, six weeks, involving obsessive brooding and idealization, followed by a period of doubt and then a final crystallization of love. Additionally, it may be that men fall in love earlier than women, but women are likely to fall out of love quicker.
In love or not, I did something stupid. In trying to impress her, I told her something that wasn't true, and when she found me out I was naturally filled with feelings of guilt. I thought that I had ruined everything. A couple of years later I talked to Julie about what I had done, but she said that she did not remember it. Even so, the guilt I felt may have had the effect of deepening whatever feelings I was having.
I figured at the time that I must have been nuts about Julie, but I loved it. I loved the feeling I had when I was around her. Still, I thought I had blown it with her. I began to feel worse and worse with each passing day. Alas, time passed and eventually I forgot about the incident, or I at least got to the point where I wasn’t constantly thinking about it.
Julie's in love now, but love has gone
It's a natural thing
One day I heard a rumor that Julie was going with another guy, someone she had met at a dance, and I was devastated. Whether it was true or not did not seem to matter. It seems that my feelings may have been less than healthy, but I was just a kid.
Oh, she was old-fashioned feelin'
She was old-fashioned song
Finally, in late December I turned sixteen, and in mid January I asked Julie to the Junior Prom. In retrospect, a prom might not have been the best idea for my first ever date with a girl. In any case, after three days, Julie said yes. Could we recapture those early days when all was magical?
Winter and moonlight
It's an old-fashioned song
Julie's in blue jeans
Now her love has gone
We met because of the alphabet. During my senior year in high school we had a class together in which she sat in front of me because her last name came before mine alphabetically. We were even assigned to do a project together for the class. We became friends, but I waited until the summer to ask her out on a date. I had just graduated and was preparing to serve my mission, but she had two more years of school left before she would graduate.
On our first date, I took her to play miniature golf. After finishing the course, we found a place to sit down and talk. Normally shy and quiet, I would typically run out of things to talk about pretty quickly, but on that night we talked for at least an hour, maybe longer. It was a good sign; I kind of figured that my future wife would be a girl I would have little trouble making conversation with.
I took this girl out on a few more dates over the summer and fall. On one date I took her on a picnic at Mirror Lake in the Uintah Mountains. While hiking around the lake after eating, we got caught in the rain, and by the time we got back to the car, we were soaking wet. She asked me to put my arm around her to help warm her up, and this was the first time I had put my arm around a girl, which, as you might guess, was quite exciting.
I was preparing to serve a mission, and I had made a decision to wait until after I came home to have a girlfriend, but I suddenly found myself falling for this girl. I even asked her to be my girlfriend, right there, by the lake! She said she would think about it, and a few days later, to my relief, she said that she wasn't ready for a boyfriend.
We went out a couple more times, and then I was off on the great adventure, my mission. She said she would write to me, but stressed that she was not waiting for me. One of the last times I saw her before I left, I asked her if I should go on a mission or not. I wanted to know what she would say. Fortunately, she gave the right answer, telling me that I should go.
Two years later, she would tell me that she had, in fact, been waiting for me. She would say that she knew I was the right one for her the moment I put my arm around her. But she didn't tell me any of this because she didn't want to distract me from the work. Ironically, I would find the ambiguity of our relationship to be, at times, distracting. Recently, when I typed up my missionary journals on my computer, I changed all the references to her to "the girl who is not waiting for me."
We wrote each other every month or so, then, with about four months to go, her letters just stopped. As it happened, she started dating this boy and soon found herself in an abusive relationship. After four months this guy proposed . . . and she said yes! But then her parents found out and put a stop to the whole thing. Three days later, I got off the plane at Salt Lake International. I was home, and ready for a relationship, but she wasn't.
Nonetheless, we started dating I suspected that something was wrong, however, when she kept telling me to slow things down. No matter how slow I tried to take things, it was still too fast for her. Finally, she suggested that we should see other people. And like an idiot, I believed her.
At the same time, I was having a tough time adjusting to post mission life. I hated coming home from my mission, and the first six months after I got home were horrible. No one came to my homecoming meeting, except the girl who didn't wait for me. I had to pick a college and get a job. I was one of the first guys to leave on a mission, and was thus one of the first to get back, and even then we all had gone our separate ways because, well, that's life.
I ended up enrolling at LDS Business College, which also happened to be the school the girl who didn't wait for me was attending. I didn't pick the school because she was a student there, but for other reasons. Still, I thought it would be nice to have someone there that I already knew. As I said, adjusting to post-mission life was difficult. I can remember going for a walk one night and thinking that things couldn't possibly get worse. Never say that, because things can always get worse.
On the first day of spring quarter -- LDSBC was then one of the few schools still on the quarter system as opposed to the semester system -- I ran into the girl who didn't wait in the halls, and she flat out ignored me. I called her up that night to ask her about what happened and she said that she was just too involved in conversation with the friend she was walking with. I said something about putting herself in my shoes and how I would have appreciated a friendly greeting of some sort. I tried not to sound as if I were chewing her out, but how else was she going to take it?
The next day, I again saw her in the halls at school, and I went up to her to apologize. Before I could, though, she cut me off and said that she felt like she was being suffocated. Then she said that if I loved her I would walk away. I asked how this affected our friendship, but she had no answer. As I sat in my next class, I was overcome by this feeling of emptiness, but I was also confused. "Did she really just ask me to walk away?"
That night I went by her house to talk it out and find a solution. But the girl who didn't wait was anything but receptive. She would not listen to me and just kept asking why I was prolonging it. Finally I said, "Okay, but when I walk out that door, does that mean we aren't friends anymore?" Again, she had no answer.
In just seven days, things had gone from bad to worse. My best and, as it appeared, only friend had just declared war. I was not about to give up, but what could I do? It seemed that no matter what I did, it just made things worse. For the next few days I really wondered if I would ever reach out to anyone again.
I wrote the girl a letter to try and explain my side of the story. I got an angry letter back as a response. She said that I would not leave her alone even though she kept telling me no. The problem was, she had never said no. During the first few months after I got home she had kept saying "Well, let's just see how things go." She then suggested that I back off a little, and so I did. Nothing about this made any sense.
The only thing I could do, at this point, was to give her space. I remembered then that I had been in this position before.
When I started high school there was one girl that I really liked, and I thought, perhaps, that she might also like me. I had become acquainted with her two years earlier at a stake dance; she was always nice and friendly to me, which was not something I experienced from other girls I knew. One day during that first week of my sophomore year, we met up and walked home together. I can still see her blond hair as it was highlighted by the mid-afternoon sun, and I can see her smile. Every time I was around her I had this wonderful feeling, and I think I may have started falling for her.
But there was a small problem, I had decided to wait until I turned 16 to start dating and that was still a few months off. Alas, the day finally came, and I asked this girl to the Junior Prom. On reflection, it was probably not the best idea to make such a big event like a prom my first ever date. But I asked her, she said yes and, for me at least, it was a magical evening. I waited a few weeks before asking her out again, but this time she said she was busy, and from the way she said it I did not feel encouraged to ask her again.
She had always been so nice and friendly, but that changed after the prom. Sometimes she was still friendly, but other times she was distant, even cold. When she was friendly, I might have felt a little encouraged, perhaps that she might still like me, only to then experience the cold. We went for a walk one day in the spring, and I thought we both had a good time so, again after a couple of weeks, I asked her out. Once again she said that she was busy. At that point I probably should have walked away, but I was experiencing some very strong emotions that I just didn't know how handle, and for the next two years I continued to bounce back and forth between hope and despair over this girl.
Even as I did, I tried to move forward. I met another girl, and this time I told myself that I would be more careful. I wanted to build a solid friendship before I asked her out, and I did, waiting until the following winter when I asked her to . . . the Junior Prom. She didn't answer right away, and I started to worry that she might not answer at all. Finally, however, she called me to say that she would love to go to the prom with me.
The following day I asked if she would help me with an assignment I had that week for my photography class, which was to take some outside portraits. I thought we might also talk about plans for the dance. While she agreed, she later told me that she did not like having her picture taken. That night she called me again, only this time it was to say that she only wanted friendship and that she could not go to the dance with me. I was stunned, and devastated.
The only good thing about this was that I knew where I stood with her. After a few months I called her up to ask if we could talk. As we did we learned something about friendship and became better friends because of it.
In the aftermath of this experience I finally decided to heed the counsel I had been given repeatedly to wait until after my mission to have a girlfriend. As noted, I was still experiencing some difficulty with the first girl, and sometimes we would have trouble just trying to be friends. I still had those strong feelings, and I kept telling myself that I couldn't just walk away. In the end, her family moved away, and only then could I begin to forget about her.
If I had it all to do over again, I would have heeded the counsel sooner of waiting until after my mission. I would have gone on as many dates as I could have with as many different girls as I could. No strings, no expectations, just a date.
While it has been heard of, very few actually marry their high school sweethearts and live happily ever after. As the motivational speaker Hyrum Smith once said, "Only one in a hundred wait."
Apparently the one out of a hundred was reserved for my last district leader. I made the mistake one day of pressuring him to read aloud the Christmas card she sent him. I was by then just a few weeks away from returning home, and I wanted a girl to say the kind of things to me that she wrote to him. On my birthday a member family made me a cake, complete with lighted candles, and before I blew them out I wished that I would soon have a girlfriend.
Now I was home, ready to have a girlfriend, but, as is often the case, there was something else on the agenda. The girl who didn't wait for me had pushed me away, and the only thing I could do was give her space. Sometimes you have to know when to "weary the unrighteous judge" and when to walk away.
Weeks went by where I tried to avoid her, but I would occasionally see her in the halls at school. When I could, I would turn and go another way. But sometimes we could not help but pass each other in the halls. When that happened, she would give me an angry look. She had said that she didn't want us to be enemies, but that is what I felt that I had become. So one day I stopped her to say that I felt like I had become her enemy and that I didn't deserve it. My voice got louder as she ran away, and everyone in that part of the school heard me. That night, her father called mine to threaten legal action if I did not leave her alone.
I had no choice but to back off, even though backing off made things worse, it was a very real Catch-22, a no-win situation. For a month I stayed as far away from her as I could. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. In fact, I didn't manage to make it an entire month. After two weeks, I went by her house and left an anonymous note on her doorstep which said "Haven't we both been hurt enough? Stop the war. Just stop the war!"
Two weeks later as the quarter came to a close, I lost my job, and I said, "I can't handle the war and losing my job at the same time, so its time to put a stop to the war." I went to see the girl who didn't wait, and said it was time we talked. As an ice breaker, I told her the story about the girl who first said yes to the Junior Prom, but then changed her mind.
The story seemed to do the trick. Suddenly, the barrier between us fell, and we were able to talk it out. We were still friends, and though we both said we were interested in other people, we could still hang out with each other. Now began a rather surreal period where we were spending a lot of time together but, technically, not dating each other.
One day we went hiking and by chance ran into some friends of hers from LDSBC. While we talked with them, the girl started giving her attention to another guy which, naturally, made me jealous. But, as we were technically not dating, I pretended to be unconcerned. That just made her upset, and when we were alone she chewed me out for not wanting to share her with other people. And for a moment it seemed that I had done it again.
This time, however, she called me to apologize, and she admitted that she was trying to make me jealous. The girl who waited also told me that the guy she gave her attention to turned out to be a bit of a jerk. A few more weeks went by, with a few more non-dates. Then, one night, we sat on her porch talking. I told her a few of my missionary stories, which all had something to do with overcoming fear. I was trying to persuade her to take a leap of faith.
Suddenly, the girl who waited for me, turned and leaned back on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her. It was an incredible moment. From that moment we were officially dating again. More importantly, we were boyfriend-girlfriend. The relationship I had waited four and a half years for had finally come about. The rest, as they say, is history.
I have never felt like "one of the guys." I did not know how to be "one of the guys" and I much preferred to be around girls. As noted, I had my first crush when I was in first grade, but I have found that I just feel more at ease around girls and women than I do around other guys. I read a book recently about George Washington in which the author said that the first president also felt more at ease around women, but that this did not mean, as it did with other like Jefferson or Hamilton, that the general had affairs. The fact of the matter was that Washington simply liked talking with women; he was more relaxed in their company than he was in the company of men.
One night during my ninth grade year, I was playing basketball at the stake center with "the guys", members of my ward's teachers quorum. We got to talking about girls and after awhile one of the guys asked me if there were any girls I particularly liked. I said that I really liked a girl named Susan (as usual, names have been changed). While I thought about Julie, my gut reaction was to not tell them about her.
I had met Susan two years earlier when we started our seventh grade year. I knew who she was before we actually met because she had won an election for class officer. One day a reporter from the school newspaper stopped me in the hall to ask me a “man on the street” type of question. Susan walked by as I was finishing my answer and the reporter turned to talk to her. When he asked her name I found myself suddenly blurting out her name and her title as a class officer before she could say anything. I walked off embarrassed and wondering why I had done that.
Later in the year, Susan sat behind me in my English class and I wondered if she remembered that little encounter in the halls. One day, when we were supposed to be doing class work, she started bugging me by poking me or tapping me on the shoulder – I don't remember exactly what. I would turn around and she would try to look all innocent. I would turn back around and she would tap me again. I couldn’t help but laugh as I turned around to tell her to stop. This went on for another minute or two until the teacher gave us look that said “Knock it off.”
Quite uncharacteristically for me, I didn’t take Susan’s teasing as anything more than friendship. Perhaps I thought that there was no way a popular girl like her could be interested in a guy like me. I didn’t have many friends throughout my elementary and junior high school years, and those guys who asked me about any girls I might have liked were certainly not my friends. When I told them I liked Sue, as her friends called her, they encouraged me to ask her to "go with me." They kept at it when I expressed a reluctance to do so.
I don’t know why I said I liked Sue; she was a friend but never anything more than that. Maybe I mentioned her because she was not in our ward. Beginning that year there were some girls, including Susan, who would say hi to me in the halls, but I was very shy and the best I could manage was to return a smile.
Anyway, the guys were very persistent in trying to persuade me to ask Sue to go with me. Finally I agreed to do it just to get them to shut up. I probably hoped that they would forget about it, but they kept asking me about it over the next couple of days. It soon looked as if I had no choice but to ask Susan to go with me. One day I saw her in the halls and stopped to ask her, but she was talking to someone else and I was too shy to interrupt. One of the guys saw me walk away and he asked why I didn’t ask her.
At the end of the school week, there was a dance after school. I asked Sue to dance twice; then after the dance was over I went up to her and asked if she would go with me. She said she was already going with someone. Maybe she was, or maybe she was just letting me down easy, either way I was actually glad she said no. I had no idea what I would have done if she had said yes because I didn’t think I was ready to start dating.
As it turned out, this was only the beginning of the story. For Christmas I received a new 35mm camera and when the new year started I took it with me to school because I wanted to take pictures at a basketball game. That year Susan was a cheerleader and she was on the far side of the court from where I was, leading cheers.
A few days later I was sitting at my desk in economics when Sue walked up. She said that she would appreciate it if I didn’t take pictures of her and then walked off. I sat there in shock because I honestly did not know what she was talking about. Okay, I admit to taking a crowd shot, which she would have been in as a cheerleader, but I really was taking pictures of the game. Now, I did not have a telephoto lens, so I could not have gotten any close-up shots – also, this was indoors and I wasn't using a flash, so these photos would not have been very good (even if I had not exposed the film trying to get it out of the camera).
The next week I brought my new camera to another after school basketball game. I had taken up a spot on the baseline near the stage and after awhile Susan walked up to me. “What are you taking pictures of,” she asked. After a moment of shy speechlessness on my part she asked, “The game?” I nodded and she walked off. The little photo crisis seemed to be over.
The story was still not over, but the next part would be completely my fault. Sometime that spring, my seminary class was assigned to relate personal experiences in turn during daily devotionals. Right away I had a problem; I did not have any personal experiences to talk about. At least, I did not think that I did.
I never had much to say, and I never thought I had any stories to tell. I can still remember back to fifth grade when I saw my former best friend listening as one of his new friends who was telling him a great personal story. I watched and realized why he had dumped me, I was boring.
In English class the year before we were given an assignment to write about a meaningful personal experience. I did not turn the assignment in because I thought that I had no meaningful personal experiences to write about.
As an adult, now I know I have stories to tell. I was recently teaching training classes at my job, and I shared many stories, from history as well as some personal stories, that I thought were relevant to the subjects being taught. I have this blog where I am always writing stories. But as a kid, I thought that I had no stories to tell, certainly none that would be of any interest to anyone.
As I tried to think of a personal story with a moral that I could tell when it was my turn for the devotional the only thing I could think of was how Susan thought that I had been taking pictures of her at the basketball game. The moral being something my brother always said about false accusations, “Get the facts first.”
But now I had another problem; Sue sat front row center in the class. How could I tell the story without everyone knowing I was talking about her? I tried to think of another story to tell but could not. So I told myself that maybe if I did not use her name and did not look at her while telling the story, then maybe no one would know Susan was the girl in the story. You may telling yourself that I was being naive, and you are probably right. Discretion, as they say, is the better part of valor, and I have learned how to be discreet, but discretion does not work when everyone else already knows the story.
The day came and I got up to tell my story. All seemed to be going well as I looked at everyone but Susan. It honestly did not occur to me that looking at everyone but Sue might tip people off that she was the girl who thought I was taking pictures of her. Near the end of my story I panned the classroom and caught a glimpse of Susan whose face was bright red in embarrassment. I knew right then that I had blown it.
As I suggested above, it also had not occurred to me that other people probably already knew about the camera incident and thus would already know who I was talking about. After my last class that day, the girl with the locker next to mine walked up as I was putting my books away. She said I had done a really mean thing to Susan that morning. Apparently the word had quickly got around the school because this girl was not in my seminary class. I tried to be coy and pretend Sue was not the girl I was talking about, but she wasn’t fooled for a minute.
This would not be the last time where I have felt that everyone knew the whole story when I knew little or nothing. Others had it together when I did not. Others knew the rules, the protocols, but I did not. I was lost in a wilderness of mirrors, but others had the maps. There are times even today that I still have that feeling.
Susan never talked to me about how much I must have embarrassed her that day; and I never went to her to apologize. On the last day of school Sue wrote in my yearbook that she was glad we could still be friends.
After the summer break, I would start high school. Julie would be in one of my classes, and I would find myself falling in love -- or would I?
It was late January in 1987, the night of the Junior Prom. I had a date with a girl I really liked, and we were both enthusiastic. But for me the night would turn into a nightmare -- for no fault of my date -- because the moment we walked into Abravanel Hall (formerly known as Symphony Hall), where the dance was held every year, I was flooded with thoughts and emotions regarding the girl I took to the Junior Prom two years earlier. From the three Junior Proms of my high school experience I would have three different, yet interrelated stories, involving three different girls.
I would like to tell those stories in a series of posts in this blog; I have often thought about putting these stories into a book. The stories you will read are true, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent, for though we are all imperfect, we retain a certain innocence. I suspect that some who will read these stories may know the real names, and I would ask them not to reveal them. Each of these three girls would be a symbol which I would discover in later years. There was Julie, the Unicorn; Mary, the Heart breaker; and Evelyn, the Paragon.
The story actually begins almost two years before the first Junior Prom. When I was 14, a group of girls tried to play a joke on me. One day at school, one of them handed me a note, supposedly written by another girl. This note said that this girl loved me "lots and lots" and that she wanted me to ask her to go with me. The note also said that she thought I was a "hunk." I didn't really buy what the note was trying to sell as I was rather confident that this girl did not actually like me. In my next class that day, I sat near the front and as I waited for the class to start, it felt as if every eye in the room was watching me.
Even though I didn't fall for the note, it still had a big impact on me. I had always liked girls -- I had my first crush on a girl in the first grade -- but before the note the crushes had been innocent, and they seemed less so after the note. Perhaps more significantly, the first time a girl ever told me she loved me, I knew it was a lie, and as she also said that I was a "hunk", I was pretty sure that wasn't true, either.
Because I didn't give these girls the satisfaction of falling for their joke, they tried on several more occasions, via more notes and a few phone calls, to persuade me that the girl whose name had been signed at the bottom of the note did in fact like me. I still didn't buy it, but that didn't mean that I just forgot about the notes, or any of the other things they tried.
After several months had passed, I was still upset, and I wanted some kind of revenge. I wrote a few notes of my own, some of which I passed on, and others that I did not. At one point I started following this group of girls as they walked home from school, and I did this every day for several more months, earning from them the nickname "shadow."
Eventually I forgot about the notes, or just moved on. It was not the first time someone played a joke on me or bullied me, and it would not be the last. Yet the notes had an impact far out of proportion for what they actually were. In the years that followed I had such a negative self image that I could not see myself as anything other than plain and quiet, even boring. I wanted so much for people to accept me, and I wanted very much for a girl to like me as more than a friend.
About a month after I received the first note from these girls, I went to my first stake dance. One of the girls I danced with that night was Julie. We danced one slow and two fast dances -- a slow dance meant I got to put my hands on her waist while we dance slowly in a circle to a ballad, and at age 14 that was a pretty big deal. I thought Julie was very pretty that night with her long blonde hair, and she was very nice to me.
Julie was a girl in my ward, but she was a year older than me -- and of the girls who wrote the notes. I think that was significant because Julie was not a part of that group. I will not go so far as saying that night at the dance was an enchanted evening, but I really took notice of Julie in a way I never had before. Unlike a lot of the other kids in my ward, most of the time, she was very nice to me that night. I felt like an outcast growing up because I did not seem to fit in anywhere, but Julie never made me feel like an outcast.
In the next week or so I had an appointment with my orthodontist. Naturally, the tin grin I was sporting in those years was another reason for thinking that I was anything but a "hunk". Still, as I was leaving, Julie was arriving in the waiting room. I can still recall how her face lit up, and how she smiled as she said "Hi Doug!"
A few months later, during the summer, my stake had a youth activity which involved cleaning up a home that had suffered damage from a mudslide during the floods of 1983. After the service project we went back to the stake center for refreshments. There, outside in the sun, I talked for a bit with Julie, who I thought looked great in her t-shirt, jeans and pig tails. I do not know about Julie, but I was experiencing feelings of attraction. Later that evening there was another stake dance, and this time I had two slow dances with Julie, along with three fast dances. I really liked dancing with Julie.
There was another stake dance a month later, but soon summer would end, and Julie would be in high school while I was back in junior high, dealing with feelings about that group of girls and the joke they tried to play on me. This was when I started following them home from school each day. Since the route they took was a little bit out of my way, it was quickly obvious to all what I was up to. Finally, after several months, I called one of the girls and said that I would stop following them if she would agree to be my friend. So I stopped, but the friendship part didn't really happen.
There were still occasional stake dances, with fast and slow dances with Julie, but they were brief interludes during a difficult final year of junior high school. There were other girls at school that I would like, hoping that they would like me, too. That would lead to another story, and while it doesn't really fit the narrative of the Junior Prom stories, I think I shall tell it anyway, next time, so stay tuned.
The night was coming on and it was getting cold, at least for northern California. I had less than a month to serve on my mission, and Christmas was just around the corner; we were working hard, but were not having much success. On this particular day, two teaching appointments stood us up -- "We got dogged," as we always said -- but on the positive side we did get in a door while tracting to teach a discussion. Now, as the shadows of the evening fell, we had a chance encounter with a teenage boy named Eric.
Eric had been tracted into recently by the Span Ams -- the Spanish speaking elders -- and expressed some interest in learning more about the church. My companion and I each bore our testimonies and encouraged him to read the Book of Mormon, but it seemed to have little effect. Eric said he was part of a youth group that did Bible study and that he would need to fast and pray to find out if he should read the Book of Mormon. Naturally, we encouraged him to both fast and pray. He then said that he was concerned that we are not Christians.
I answered by saying that we are Christians, that we believe in Jesus Christ and worship him. Then I opened my mini-quad to 2 Nephi 25 and read verse 29: "And now behold, I say unto you that the right way is to believe in Christ, and deny him not; and Christ is the Holy One of Israel; wherefore ye must bow down before him, and worship him with all your might, mind, and strength, and your whole soul; and if ye do this ye shall in nowise be cast out."
I could think of no better expression of the centrality of the Savior in the LDS faith, yet Eric seemed unimpressed. He again expressed reluctance to read the Book of Mormon. We had been talking in his driveway for an hour and the day was past and gone. It had been in the light of a streetlamp that I had read the scripture. It was cold, and we knew the ride back to our apartment on our bikes would be even colder. Again we bore our testimonies and encouraged him to read the Book of Mormon, and then we departed.
Perhaps a seed had been planted, and perhaps it grew, but soon I would be flying home and leaving the work I loved so much behind. Thanks to Eric, we completed that week with thirty-one hours of teaching and tracting, and it was our third week in a row of at least thirty hours. Most of the hours were spent tracting; that week we had scheduled eleven appointments only to get dogged by nine of them.
I felt a little like Nephi, "For we labor diligently . . . to persuade . . . our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do" (2 Nephi 25:23). "And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophecy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins" (verse 26).
The twenty-fifth chapter of 2 Nephi is a powerful chapter -- perhaps in part because it follows the twelve Isaiah chapters -- as Nephi prophecies with plainness of Jesus Christ.
"But, behold, they shall have wars, and rumors of wars; and when the day cometh that the Only Begotten of the Father, yea, even the Father of heaven and of earth, shall manifest himself unto them in the flesh, behold, they will reject him, because of their iniquities, and the hardness of their hearts, and the stiffness of their necks. Behold, they will crucify him; and after he is laid in a sepulchre for the space of three days he shall rise from the dead, with healing in his wings; and all those who shall believe on his name shall be saved in the kingdom of God. Wherefore, my soul delighteth to prophesy concerning him, for I have seen his day, and my heart doth magnify his holy name" (verses 12-13).
Then Nephi speaks of our day: "And the Lord will set his hand again the second time to restore his people from their lost and fallen state. Wherefore he will proceed to do a marvelous work and a wonder among the children of men. Wherefore, he shall bring forth his words unto them. . . ." (verses 17-18.)
"And now, my brethren, I have spoken plainly that ye cannot err. And as the Lord God liveth that brought Israel up out of the land of Egypt, and gave Moses power that he should heal the nations after they had been bitten by the poisonous serpents, if they would cast their eyes unto the serpent which he did raise up before them, and also gave him power that he should smite the rock and the water should come forth; yea, behold I say unto you, that as these things are true, and as the Lord God liveth, there is none other name given under heaven save it be this Jesus Christ, of which I have spoken, whereby men can be saved" (verse 20).
"And now behold, my people, ye are a stiffnecked people; wherefore, I have spoken plainly unto you, that ye cannot misunderstand. And the words which I have spoken shall stand as a testimony against you; for they are sufficient to teach any man the right way; for the right way is to believe in Christ and deny him not; for by denying him ye also deny the prophets and the law" (verse 28).
We have the opportunity to participate in the marvelous work and a wonder, not just as full time missionaries, but as member missionaries. Greater success in spreading the gospel is found when the members work with the missionaries to help them find people to teach. And our testimonies may be added to Nephi's that the right way is to believe in Jesus Christ and deny him not.
As Elder Dallin H. Oaks said in a talk during the April 1998 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Some Christians accuse Latter-day Saints . . . of denying the grace of God through claiming they can earn their own salvation. We answer this accusation with the words of two Book of Mormon prophets," Nephi and Moroni. After quoting verse 23 of 2 Nephi 25, Elder Oaks continued by asking "And what is 'all we can do'? It surely includes repentance and baptism, keeping commandments, and enduring to the end."
Elder Oaks then quoted Moroni: "Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourself of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfected in Christ" (Moroni 10:32).
"We are not saved in our sins, as by being unconditionally saved through confessing Christ and then, inevitably, committing sins in our remaining lives," argued Elder Oaks. "We are saved from our sins by a weekly renewal of our repentance and cleansing through the grace of God and His blessed plan of salvation."
As King Benjamin taught, "If ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another -- I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants" (Mosiah 2:21). We are weak, we will always fall short, despite our best efforts, and He does so much for us every day.
In the first place, He created us, granting us life; secondly he requires that we should do as he commands, and if we do we are blessed, and thus we remain in His debt. As long as this pattern of obedience and blessing continues we remain in His debt forever and ever; "therefore, of what have ye to boast? And now I ask, can ye say aught of yourselves? I answer you; Nay. Ye cannot say that ye are even as much as the dust of the earth; yet ye were created of the dust of the earth; but behold, it belongeth to him who created you" (Mosiah 2: 23-25).
Even if we could somehow manage not to fall short because of the weakness that remains in us, we would still be in His debt, and thus we need His grace to save us.
"Oh, how we all need the healing the Redeemer can provide," said Elder Richard G. Scott during the April 1994 General Conference. "Mine is a message of hope for you who yearn for relief from heavy burdens. . . . Whatever the cause, I testify that lasting relief is available on conditions established by the Lord."
And so we rejoice in Christ, because His grace is sufficient.
"My greatest thrill and the most joyful of all realizations, said Elder Jeffrey R. Holland in the October 1994 General Conference, "is that I have the the opportunity, as Nephi phrased it, to "talk of Christ, . . . rejoice in Christ, . . . preach of Christ, [and] prophesy of Christ' wherever I may be and with whomever I may find myself until the last breath of my life is gone. Surely there could be no higher purpose or greater privilege than that. . . ."
It has been reported that this morning that groundhog saw his shadow -- doesn't he see it every year? -- which means six more weeks of winter. For many it has already been a long winter and the prospect of six more weeks may seem daunting. Remember that this, too, shall pass.
In May 1943, the submarine USS Jack
(SS-259) was in transit from the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
when she encountered some bad weather. For several days the sub slowed
her pace as she rode out the storm. Jack was a new boat, on her
way to war in the Pacific, and many of her crew had not experienced
weather like this at sea, thus many became seasick.
Ensign James F. Calvert, fresh out of
the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and submarine school at New London,
Connecticut, was not troubled too badly by the storm, at least not
initially. On the first night of the big storm, Calvert was determined
to not miss a meal, but when he reached the wardroom, where the officers
ate, he was surprised to find only one other officer in the cramped
compartment.
Lieutenant Miles Refo* was an
experienced sailor, having served in the fleet for two years before
going to sub school, and his surprise at seeing Calvert was "more than
mild." Calvert stuck it out long enough to get through the main dish of
pork roast, but he skipped the apple pie desert. Even so, he won
respect from Refo.
"Day after day the storm went on," wrote
Calvert many years later. "Our speed of advance was well below plan;
we were going to be at least a day late getting to Pearl. Slowly but
surely, however, our seasick casualties were getting their sea legs and
returning to their watches, despite the continuing storm."
Clavert went on to say, "I have always
been blessed with a strong stomach, and seasickness has not been one of
my problems. But there is such a thing as sea-weariness. You're not
sick, but you are so tired of hanging on, so tired of being unable to
sleep without being tossed out, or nearly out, of your bunk that you
wonder if the storm will ever abate -- and if you will ever feel normal
and energetic again."
Calvert pulled out his Bible and read from Psalms 107:
"They that go down to the sea in ships,
that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord and
his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind,
which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they
go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their
wits end" (verses 23-28).
According to Calvert, the psalmist could have written that passage after a walk through Jack
during the storm. "It was strangely comforting for me," he would
write, "to read those words, for they reminded me that men of the sea
have been going through such storms for centuries -- and most of them
survived in ships not nearly as sturdy as ours."
As with the storms of the sea, so with
the storms of life. Men and women have been experiencing adversity for
centuries, and most of them survived as well.
"Finally, as will all storms," wrote
Calvert, "this one began to subside. The gray skies, which seemed to
have been there forever, began to break and show patches of blue; the
wind swung around to the east (a good sign in that part of the Pacific)
and eased to a pleasant ten or twelve knots."
Again, so it is with life. The moments
of adversity we experience end. Sometimes we are called upon to
experience an intense challenge of a relatively short duration, while at
other times the challenge may be less intense but may also last much longer. There will even be times when with little or no rest we will go from the short, intense challenge straight into lesser but unremitting challenge.
Whatever their nature, the storms of life will subside sooner or later,
though they may be succeeded by other storms.
"Life at sea," wrote Calvert, "is not
filled with diversions comparable to those ashore. Any break in the
daily routine is welcome -- even a storm. But there is nothing,
absolutely nothing, so wonderful as the feeling of having weathered a
truly bad storm and come out the other side with the ship in good
condition, all hands surviving without injury, and normal routine
reestablished. Things are made shipshape once again below. Wet clothes
are dried out and restowed. Best of all, the platform under your feet
once again is nearly stable. If that experience does not lift your
spirits, then they are not liftable -- at least not at sea."
There are other kinds of storms, not just of water, but of fire. During the early morning hours of March 10, 1945, B-29 bombers of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force, firebombed the Japanese capital city. Flying from air bases in the Mariana Islands, the Superfortresses were loaded with high explosive and incendiary bombs. In six hours nearly seventeen square miles of Tokyo were burned out, and more than 100,000 people were killed.
To put this into perspective one of the most severe bombing attacks on a German city was against Hamburg. Operation Gomorrah took place in the summer of 1943 over a period of ten days and nights. After the bombing finally ended just 12 square miles had been burned out.
"What the city of Hamburg suffered is unique unto itself," says historian Martin Caidin, who wrote books about both the Tokyo raid and Operation Gomorrah, "and it will never be known by any other people, no matter what their tribulations. Dresden lost many more people is a single night than died in Hamburg in ten flaming nights; yet survivors of Hamburg would gladly have chanced death in Dresden, if only to have been spared the continuing, unremitting savagery of Gomorrah."
There may be times when the only way to get to the other side is to go through the fire. As Sir Winston Churchill once said, "If you're going through hell, keep going." But how can we protect ourselves from the flames?
Recall, if you will, the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who were carried away as captives from Jerusalem to Babylon and later cast into a furnace of fire for refusing to worship a golden idol. Instead of being burned by the fire, or
harmed be the heat, the three young men were protected by their God
because of their faith in him.
Elder Neal A. Maxwell said: “We will [not] always be rescued from
proximate problems, but we will be rescued from everlasting death!
Meanwhile, ultimate hope makes it possible to say the same three words
used centuries ago by three valiant men. They knew God could rescue them
from the fiery furnace if He chose. ‘But if not,’ they said,
nevertheless, they would still serve Him!”
But as President Gordon B. Hinckley
said, “The Lord would want you to be successful. He would. You are His
sons and His daughters. He has the same kind of love and ambition for
you that your earthly parents have. They want you to do well and you can
do it.” (See: Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley (1997).
Additionally, as Nephi said when he was
commanded to return to Jerusalem to retrieve the Brass Plates, "I will
go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the
Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall
prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he
commandeth them" 1 Nephi 3:7).
"By pressing forward," said Elder Maxwell, "we can stand on what was yesterday’s horizon, thereby drawing hope from our own experiences. Hence Paul described how 'tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope' (Rom. 5:3–4). Therefore we sing, “We’ve proved him in days that are past” (Hymns, 1985, no. 19).
In facing the challenges of today, in
staying clean, keeping his commandments, preparing to serve a
mission and marry in the temple, and enduring to the end, he wants us to succeed and he will
prepare a way for us that we may accomplish that which he has commanded
us if we humble ourselves before him and exercise faith in him. His
grace is sufficient and he can make weak things become strong (see Ether
12:27). "Wherefore, let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of
the Lord" (1 Nephi 3:16).
Sources:
Caiden, M. (1960) A Torch to the Enemy. New York: Ballantine Books.
Calvert, J. F. (1995). Silent Running: My Years on a World War II Attack Submarine. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Maxwell, N. A. (1994) "A Brightness of Hope." https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1994/10/brightness-of-hope?lang=eng
*Calvert does not give Refo's rank, only
states that he was Annapolis class of 1938. I presume that Refo was at
least a Lieutenant (junior grade), particularly as he did not like the
idea of ensigns without prior sea duty serving in submarines.
