Tad Talk
I recognized a name in the Church News on Saturday as I was reading about newly organized stake presidencies in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Stakes are an administrative unit between church headquarters and individual congregations. A stake president supervises multiple bishops and their congregations.
The name I found was Mark Woodruff, who is the executive secretary to the church’s leader, President Russell M. Nelson. It turns out that Woodruff was installed last month as the new president of the Oak Hills Stake in Provo, Utah.
Most church presidents have had personal or executive secretaries over the past 75 years. They have been called personal secretaries until 2018, when President Nelson became the faith’s latest leader and soon hired Woodruff with the new title.
So now Woodruff is employed at the side of the man church members consider a prophet — helping him with his calendar and other logistics — and serving simultaneously as a stake president overseeing a number of wards in Provo.
Woodruff is a direct descendant of the church’s fourth president, Wilford Woodruff, who led the faith from 1889-98. Woodruff’s son, Daniel, is a church spokesman. |
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Woodruff also accompanies President Nelson in his travels. As a young man, he served as a missionary in the Brazil Sao Paulo Mission. The two will travel to Sao Paulo in late August as part of President Nelson’s next ministry tour. I’m looking forward with special interest to covering that part of the tour myself because my own father served a church mission there in the early 1960s.
I was thinking about my father a lot last night as I sat in a theater near our home and watched the new movie “The Fighting Preacher” with my wife and one of our daughters. The movie is about my great-great uncle Willard Bean, a middleweight boxer who served a 25-year mission reopening the Joseph Smith Family Farm in Palmyra, New York, with his wife, Rebecca.
My late father’s name is Willard Bean Walch, after his mother’s uncle.
I recommend the movie. One line really stood out due to current events. When the Beans were sent from Utah to Palmyra by church President Joseph F. Smith in 1915, they were not welcomed. One character in the film shouts at them, “Go back to Utah where you belong!”
I won’t spoil what happened after that, but I will say that thinking of fathers and sons and church callings and mission calls reminded me of interviewing President Nelson about his late first wife, Dantzel Nelson, back in May. He related the story about how she had received inspiration that they were to have a son. So, they embarked on having a 10th child when she was 45 years old. She was 46 when Russell M. Nelson Jr. was born.
Russ Jr. is now 47. As we spoke in early May, President Nelson told me, “I ordained that boy a bishop last Sunday.” |
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What I’m Reading ... I love this story! The Oakland A’s signed to a contract an 8-year-old boy and baseball nut who has had multiple surgeries due to a gastrointestinal disorder. The team had a press conference for him and gave him a locker and he got to ... . Well, you read it. You’ll love it. Let’s just say, that would have been an absolute wish come true for me with the Boston Red Sox of 1975. So, the Make A Wish Foundation is doing amazing work.
It’s very disturbing that teenage girls are feeling pressure to compete for social media likes and follows. I thought this was a good piece to start a discussion about where real self-worth comes from, and our 12-year-old daughter agreed. We both read it and had a good conversation.
Utah is becoming quite a trendsetter: |
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