Not all was lost

“It’s overwhelming when you wake up in the morning and you find out you don’t even own a toothbrush any more.” — Jim Phillips, Bear Creek Ward. 

Can I share a story with you today that, so far, hasn’t fit neatly into an article from my trip to cover the wildfire damage in Medford, Oregon?

It’s one I’ll be thinking about this weekend during general conference, because it is a story of faith lived.

Reporters regularly wind up with leftover information after a reporting trip. In this case, I met Jim Phillips too late, after I published the stories in the Deseret News and Church News that would have been the place to share his experience.

Jim turned 75 on Sept. 15, one week after the Almeda Fire destroyed his home in the Rogue Valley. After escaping the fire’s path with just the T-shirt and shorts he was wearing, leaving behind his scriptures and everything else he held dear, Jim went to bed hoping his home of nearly 17 years would be spared. In the morning, all was lost.

No, not all.

“I haven’t lost my faith,” he told me as I and four missionaries stood outside the motel room arranged for him by the Bear Creek Ward’s elders’ quorum president, Don Anway. “I’m preparing for my temple endowment. It’s scheduled for Oct. 16. I definitely want to go ahead with it.”

I had learned the missionaries would visit Jim to bring him new copies of the Book of Mormon and New Testament and asked if I could tag along. It turned out I was staying in a room across the narrow parking lot from his.

Jim is excited that his endowment is so close for two reasons. First, he has Parkinson’s disease, and he is grateful he will receive his endowment in advance of the possibility he will develop dementia.

Second, it means he soon will see again the friend who set a lifelong example that led him to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints three years ago.

Jim and Cliff Moses became friends in the third grade, right there in the Rogue Valley. They grew up together, playing tennis, running cross-country and going to a local college.

“He’s had a lifelong, good influence on me,” Jim said of Cliff.

Cliff now lives in Manti, Utah, but he drove the 850 miles for Jim’s baptism three years ago, and he’ll make the drive again in a couple of weeks for the temple ceremony.

“I hope he gets to participate,” Jim says, thinking about COVID-19 restrictions. “I hope he walks me through the veil into the Celestial Kingdom.”

COVID-19 forced the four missionaries, who also lost their apartment in the fire, to decline his invitation to sit with him in his motel room. They had just learned they had tested negative for the disease, but they didn’t want to take any chances.

Jim doesn’t know what much of his future holds. He told me he hasn’t been up to going to see the remains of his home, in part because he has seen images of the park where he lived.

“It was just like a war zone,” he said.

He does know he will move forward with his faith and the support of the Bear Creek Ward and Cliff’s enduring friendship.

The sun was setting when the four missionaries knocked on his door. It was dark by the time the conversation ended.

Jim asked one of the missionaries to say a prayer, right there with him standing in his motel room’s doorway and the missionaries on the sidewalk and spilling into the parking lot.

After the prayer, he thanked them for the Book of Mormon.

“I’ll use it tonight,” he said.

As usual, I will be tweeting throughout all five sessions of general conference this weekend. You can follow my tweets on Twitter at @Tad_Walch or follow my posts on my Facebook page. The conference sessions will stream live in English on Deseret.com and TheChurchNews.com and their apps. More details on how to watch or listen are available here.

The church released a new video with President Nelson’s message about finding peace in turbulent times.

My friend and former colleague Hal Boyd wrote about how “At 25, The Family proclamation looks prophetic in addressing a 2020 society.”

It’s now possible to search 8 billion names on FamilySearch.org.

A BYU professor talked about “How Joseph Smith’s differing accounts of the First Vision reveal the doctrine and dealings of God.”

The relationship between Hall of Fame basketball player Shaquille O’Neal and Mark Madsen, a Latter-day Saint and former teammate, remains priceless. This is how Shaq tried to find Madsen a wife.

One of the best modern examples of forgiveness was on display in a new podcast recently. A Latter-day Saint man who forgave a teenage boy the day after the boy, who had been drinking, struck the man’s vehicle with his own, killing the man’s wife and two of their children, appeared together in an episode called, “The Gift of Forgiveness.”

The great Joe Posnanski just declared the debut of Jackie Robinson as No. 1 on his series of stories on the 60 greatest moments in baseball history. The story is behind a paywall at The Athletic, so I’ll share a snippet here:

“What are we celebrating when we celebrate the debut of Jackie Robinson?

“Yes, of course, we are first and foremost celebrating Robinson, the singular American athlete, who rose to the moment. Yes, we are also celebrating (Branch) Rickey for stepping outside his time and, for any number of personal and business reasons, pushing the game forward.

“But really, in the end, what we are celebrating is the slow and unsteady end of baseball apartheid. The rest looks so obvious to us now, but as Buck O’Neil used to say, Robinson’s debut came before Brown vs. Board of Education, before Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, before Martin Luther King Jr. understood his destiny, before President Truman integrated the U.S. Army.”

I love a good oral history. This one is in the good hands of The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis, about “The Great NFL Heist: How Fox Paid for and Changed Football Forever.” Enjoy.

This oral history isn’t as strong, but it’s on a great subject: The making of “Remember the Titans.”