Persist in Doing

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

When I was seventeen and a senior in high school, my dad was transferred to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There weren’t many Latter-Day Saint members in the community then, but there was a small group of teenagers whose parents carpooled us every day to early morning seminary. It was the 60s, and one of our drivers was an eccentric dad who was a serious health food advocate at a time when Spam, Chex party mixes, and Jello salads were staples in every household. When we climbed into the car, he greeted us most mornings with fresh carrot juice that he had blended himself sometime around five AM before he came to pick us up. He claimed it would keep us awake and alert in class—regardless of whatever poor choice we had made the night before in the going-to-bed-at-a-reasonable-hour category. Unlike my fellow riders, I always drank a small cup–mostly because as a military brat, I had a serious respect for adult authority.

Brother Millet was also a believer in self-improvement. His late-50s car had a fancy radio, but we never had a chance to listen to it. Instead, he came prepared with a “quote for the day” which he expected us to memorize on the ½ hour trip to the church. Even now, after almost sixty years, when I am faced with a challenge for which I have no experience, I can still hear his voice leading us in a repetition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous words: “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our power to do has increased.”

I thought of Brother Millet last week when I went to church with my son’s family during a visit to St. George, Utah. It was one of those Sunday’s which comes around every five years or so when one bishopric was being released and a new bishop with two counselors were being sustained. A couple of wives of the former bishopric leaders were asked to say a few words. One young woman, (by young–I mean probably mid-thirties) whom I had never seen before and am unlikely to ever actually meet, said something that has stuck with me all week. The day her husband had been called as a Bishop’s counselor, they had three small children, one of whom was only three months old. He’d been serving in their ward for six years. Her husband is an ICU (Intensive Care Unit) doc. Having been in the hospital twice during the last two years of COVID, I’ve had a glimpse of how stressful and time consuming his professional life must surely be. When he finished his day job, I’m guessing he often headed straight to the church instead of coming home. And yet she said, “I feel as if I have had a front row seat on the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.” She didn’t elaborate, but for a few moments I wondered if she had read the same story I had loved all my life?

I thought back to that year I was seventeen. My bishop then was a theoretical nuclear physicist. As a kid, I had no idea what that meant. Still don’t, now that I think about it. Once I had gone to his work office to pick up something for my dad, who was a ward clerk at the time. The door was slightly ajar. I could see the bishop sitting with his feet propped up on the desk, his eyes closed. Behind him was a chalk board partially covered with what I assumed were complex mathematical equations.

“Sleeping on the job,” I teased him.

“Thinking,” he replied gesturing to the rows of numbers and symbols behind him.

What? I thought he was the guy who played basketball with my brothers and the other high school kids in the cultural hall on Saturday mornings and sat behind me at the ward choir rehearsals. How could he possibly have had time for “thinking,” too?

As the young mother walked away from the pulpit and back to her seat, inexplicably, I heard Brother Millet reciting, “That which we persist in doing . . . .” I had taught Emerson, a noted theologian, to my American Lit students for almost 25 years. Until that moment, I had never considered the possibility that like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes–which fed the hungry and the weary, people all around me were quietly “persisting” in doing difficult, sometimes miraculous things, “not that the nature of the things had changed, but that their power to do had increased.” Thanks, Brother Millet. It took me awhile, but I promise I won’t forget.