Infusions of Faith

As a part of Alzheimer's research, I have spent many hours at the Oregon Health Science University Infusion Center observing my wife and many other research participants and cancer patients receiving assorted infusions in an attempt to eliminate various maladies and improve their health.  I think I have some concept of the infusion process from a medical perspective, but this anecdote is about the spiritual transfusions which my mother gave to me.

The prelude to this story is embarrassing because it shows how clueless I was at age 22.  It begins while I was at home from BYU during Thanksgiving vacation in 1969.  I was dating a remarkable young woman from Ontario, Oregon and Bert Reynolds (my good friend from Parma, Idaho, and not the famous actor) was dating her friend.  We decided to drive up to Dry Soda Lookout on the Malheur National Forest where I had worked the summer before to get Christmas trees.

Dry Soda Lookout

 All went well driving to the lookout and getting a couple of trees that we put in the trunk, but as we were driving down the gravel road below the lookout I drove over a boulder that seemed to tear out the bottom of the car.  When we checked,  we found gas leaking from a hole in the gas tank that was about a half inch in diameter.  Bert asked if I had any rags.  We found one in the trunk and he stuffed it in the hole.  This slowed the leak down, but the gas starting dripping again.  Bert then preformed a miracle, or at least it was to me considering we were about 20 miles from the nearest town on a Forest Service gravel road.  He asked if I had a bar of soap in the car; and amazingly - I did.  He ran down to the stream by the road two or three times and kept rubbing the soap over the rag to create a seal.  With the problem at least temporarily fixed (thanks to Bert's ingenuity), we drove on home and delivered the Christmas trees.

Here is the embarrassing part (not to mention proof that it is a miracle young men just 18 or 19 are sent throughout the world to preach the gospel without more mishaps or complete chaos), I drove the 440 miles back to BYU and around Provo for three weeks in slushy weather and returned to Parma with Bert's soap seal.  But that is not the story.  The real story was about my mother, that she was waiting for me to arrive, and what she did that night - just as she had done so many times before, and would afterwards.  

I pulled into Parma about 10:30 p.m. with a couple of students from Ontario.  Dad had gone to bed and mom said she would ride over with me.  As we were coming back from Ontario, mother began telling story after story about how things will work out when we are obedient or faithful.  It was like she could not help herself, and she had to convey how different things look when you view them through the lens of faith - it is almost like having night vision goggles in a darkening world.  As I was going to bed that night I reflected back on that experience and it seemed to me that mother was giving me a transfusion of faith and it could not have been more real than if we had been on two hospital gurneys and she had taken a needle and put it in her vein that was attached to a tube with a needle which she put in my vein.  As she had done so often in my life, Lucile Goates infused me with faith.  

When we arrived home from Ontario, mother did say that she smelled gas, but then quickly attributed this to the fact that father had recently put gas in their car.  The next morning it was evident that after driving more than a thousand miles Bert's soap seal had finally failed, and it would take a week to repair the hole in the gas tank; but I was home and my faith restored.

I realize that I have a proclivity for putting a positive spin on challenges, plus my patriarchal blessing  mentions having the gift of faith; but there is no question where all this originates.  I really don't know where my mother's faith ends and mine begins because of all the spiritual transfusions she gave me.