Send some Love

Today's Run:

Distance: 4.3 miles
Time: 41:47
Pace: 9:43
Calories: 621
Power Song: Dream On by Aerosmith

Sunrise on today's run

On my run today I listened to the same devotion I read earlier which I commented about in my previous blog post. The speaker, Jeffery Holland is an inspiration and a role model for me. He was the president of a university when he gave this speech. It spoke of love and human kindness. If you're not into that stuff, that's okay but I wanted to share some parts of it with you. 

Two weeks ago I met for the first time a man I would like to meet again and know more of. His name is Henry D. Stagg—Don Stagg to his friends. He went to bed in August of 1965 about the way everybody else goes to bed and about the way he had all of his life. The difference came the next morning, when his body awoke and his eyes didn’t. He was blind, frightened, and he was more than that—terrified. He went to the doctor, who said with guarded optimism, “Well, this thing sometimes doesn’t last very long, and it might just be an hour or two.” Well, the hours stretched into days and the days stretched into weeks and the weeks finally became a month. Don Stagg could think only of one thing, and that was suicide. He wanted out. (He hadn’t asked for this kind of body, and he didn’t suppose that he had to go on with it, so he wanted out.)
Well, to make a long story short, Don Stagg found, in the midst of his experience, what one of the prisoners found; that is, it takes some love to get from where we are to where we need to be. One evening Mrs. Stagg arranged to slip the children past the hospital security. They shuffled into the room, and Don did not know who was there. He was surly and arrogant almost all of the time, by his own admission, and he didn’t want to talk, but then he felt those little hands on his legs and on his arms. The children said, “Daddy, we love you, and we want you to come home. We don’t want any other daddy.”Don had seen a little light in a dark place, so he went home and started that night to pace off the house. He first paced off the steps from the bedroom to the refrigerator. He says, “It’s one thing to be blind; it’s another thing to starve to death.” When he had the house mastered, he went out into the neighborhood and then up and down the streets for miles away. He decided that he could do quite a little bit, and about two years after the effects of this disease had taken his sight, he enrolled in law school at the University of Utah. In four years he had passed all his courses and the state bar. For one year he worked for the attorney general’s office and now is in private practice.Don Stagg is blind and has some limitations and some bonds put upon him by his own body, but he is doing a great deal. He water-skis and he snow-skis and, just a short time ago, he shot a two-under-par game at the Bonneville Golf Course in Salt Lake City. Now, there are some things he can’t do. He cannot see the daughter who has been born to him since he lost his sight. But he believes he will and he believes that that will not be a limitation upon him and that he will not be bound down by that blindness or by anything else. There’s something in that kind of spirit which seems to break every kind of bond that might ever come in this life or the next.

Have you helped someone in need today?