Six weeks ago I was on a hike in Zion canyon with my daughter Liesel and son-in-law Blake.  We were climbing a steep, sand covered ridge, into a box canyon.  I wanted to show them the incredible echo.  A shout there bounces off the red sandstone cliffs and echoes 11 or 12 times.  One shouted song becomes a choir of angels.
    My slightly over middle aged lungs were protesting fiercely as we climbed two steps forward, only to slide back one, in the sand.  But  I was determined to reach the top.  Liesel finally said:  "Dad, we're tired,   we'll wait here."
I pushed on, reveling in my superior strength.  I had just walked two 20 somethings into the ground!
    Two weeks later Blake was in the doctors office, having a cinder removed form his eye after a 4th of July fireworks show.  He and Liesel mentioned to the doctor that Blake was short of breath alot.  Everyone thought he had asthma.  The doctor thought maybe that was the problem too, but at their insistence , he listened carefully to Blake's heart for ten minutes and finally said, "I think I hear a murmur, we'd better get an EKG."
The EKG confirmed that there were indeed serious problems with Blake's heart.  Further tests confirmed that
Blake's had mitral valve stenosis, a blockage of the mitral valve, probably caused by an undiagnosed case of rheumatic fever, as well as an aortic valve that was regugitating 50 percent of the blood that should flow through it.  Blake and Liesel's lives changed abruptly that day.
    My smugness about our hike turned into deep concern at the news.  My wife left to go to them to help prepare for the surgery that needed to follow.  I was left home to care for a dying dog (see "Shakey was a dog")
and finish up some projects at work, and to worry.  Friends of many religious persuasions prayed for our kids.
    I left last wednesday, to go north.  Blake was to have surgery on thursday morning.  Upon arriving in Provo, Utah where the kids are attending school, at BYU, Luisa and I went to two softball games that Blake and Liesel participated in.  Blake played like there was no tomorrow.  He would come in from running the bases, white-faced and gasping like an octogenarian.  I hoped he wouldn't have a heart attack on the spot.  He left the game with abrasions on his shins from sliding into base, and the team ready to play in the finals the next day.
But Blake would have a final of his own the next morning.
    A worried dream-shattered sleep ended at 4:30 a.m. on Thursday morning.  We drove to the Hospital by 6:00 a.m. and met Liesel and Blake's mom and grandma.  Liesel had just bid goodbye to Blake as he was wheeled through the doors of the surgical section and out of her sight.  She looked pale and drawn.
    We were shown to a waiting room.  We went and found some breakfast and soon a kind nurse in scrubs came to take us to a private waiting room and to explain that she would be our information source.  She said that she would come hourly or as circumstances required to give us updates on the progress of the surgery.
With that she left and we began the long wait.
    Perhaps an hour later I left the waiting room to stretch my legs.  I walked through the revolving doors out into the bright sunshine of an August morning.  I stood by the sculpture of a father playing with his two sons.  Suddenly I was warmed by an inner sunshine.  I felt a profound sense of peace descend on my mind and my heart.  I knew as surely as I have known anything that we had nothing to fear.  The surgery was going to be successful.  I returned to the waiting room, now accompanied by the continued warmth of this knowledge.
    I hadn't been back more than a few minutes when the nurse, returned with an update:  "They have opened, and they have him on the Heart/Lung machine" she said, "and they have started to work on his heart."
Tears sprang to Liesel's eyes.  She told me later, that the whole absract concept of Blake's surgery had suddenly become horribly real.  In her mind's eye, she saw her husband, of  less than eight months, senseless, on the operating table, with his chest pried open and his heart stopped.  
    A quiet voice inside my heart said, "You have a gift to share with your daughter,  you have peace.  Give her some.  I laid my hands on her head and gave her a blessing.  I told her that God had told me that everything was going to be "wonderful"; that Blake would come through this trial and live and recover.
    Good friends provided company, empathy and food throughout the day.  The kind nurse came hour after hour with increasingly good news.  Then the Surgeon came and spoke with Liesel.  He was tired but very pleased.  Things had gone as well as they could have possibly gone.  They were able to repair, rather than replace the scarred mitral valve, and the aortic valve was replaced with a cadaver vlave, rather than a mechanical valve. This meant the Blake would not have to take Cumidin (sp), the blood thinner that would have limited his physical activities.  The Doctor said that the aortic valve was "a perfect fit--like it was custom made for Blake."
    A nineteen year old boy died in a car accident this week.  His parent's brave decision to allow their son to become an organ donor, gave Liesel and Blake a second chance at life.  There aren't words enough in my language and warm thoughts of thanks enough in my heart to tell those good people, who are grieving while we rejoice, what it means to us that they made such a courageous choice at a devastating time.
    Later in the afternoon Blake's family gathered around his bedside in the ICU.  He looked like he had been run over by a truck, and the nurse said he was probably in more pain than he had ever felt.  But the nurses said that in comparison to most of the patients they saw in ICU, Blake looked very good.  They said it was a pleasure to take care of someone so young and otherwise healthy.  Blake's Uncle Evan and I placed out hands on Blake's head and gave him a blessing.  God told Blake that he would only have the pain required for him to learn what he needed to know, that he would "run and not be weary and walk and not faint"  and that he would live to see his grandchildren and great=grandchildren.
    Twenty-four hours later he was out of ICU.  Today,  four days after open-heart surgery, that his doctors described as a "once in a career surgery", Blake was released form the hospital.  Yesterday, I watched with joy as he and Liesel looked adoringly in each other's eyes and kissed.  Their soft ball team won the intramural championship on the evening of Blake's surgery, and brought Championship Tee-shirts to the hospital.  The shirts were hard won, but represent a far greater victory.
    We had friends who spontaneously dropped everything, to give us a place to stay, food to eat, and words to comfort us.  they cried with us, laughed with us, prayed for us, and rejoice with us.  And they are just one wonderful part of the miracles, that point us to the greatest miracle of all:  Eternal life, the greatest of all the gifts of God.

     When my kids were small we got a dog named Rusty.  He was too rough for them and we gave him away.
    After this fiasco, every time the kids asked for a dog Mom said, "No".  This went on for about ten years.
One day I got a phone call at work.  It was Luisa, my wife.  there was tenderness in her voice,  "There are puppies here!  The principal of the school where she worked had a dog who had puppies.  
    That evening, just over fifteen years ago,  a small cream and yellow bundle of joy wormed his way into our hearts.  He was wiggly and had sharp little puppy teeth, and had that wonderful puppy smell.  He was part Golden Lab and part Cocker Spaniel.  He had Lab ears with a semi-pug spaniel nose and a docked tail.  the Movie, "Beethoven"  had been out for a few years.  We opted to go literary instead of musical, and he was named "Shakespeare".  This worked well because when we came home he would meet us at the door with great enthusiasm and his docked tail would go a ile a minute.  He shook all over with excitement,  so we called him "Shakey"  for short.
    When Shakey came to live with us we already had tow cats, Tigger and Tasha.  Tigger whipped the young pup into shape and they soon all became great friends.  They all slept together in a contented heap.
    We were living in California when Shakey came to be part of our family, but soon moved to Southern Utah.
We had no fence at the new house so Shakey lived in the Garage for a few weeks while I was at work and the family hadn't come to Utah yet.  I would walk Shakey everyday when I came home form work and this became a habit.
    There was a pasture near the house.  the first time Shakey smelled a horse he came to attention and looked at me as if th say, "What in the heck is that?"  We went down the street everyday to a wash. and Shakey would explore.  One day we met a skunk in the dark.  Shakey wanted to be friends.  the skunk was not sure.  We got Shakey out just in time.
    Shakey soon learned that he loved cheese.  His nickname became "cheesedog".  The slightest crackle of plastic wrap at the fridge would bring him running.  He learned to do tricks for cheese.  He would give paws, Sit, lay down, speak and dance.  Liesel was a great drill sargeant, putting Shakey, through his paces.
    Kal-Erik teased the dog unmercifully and they would chase each other around the room.  Shawn was our trumpet player and Shakey would "sing along" with him, or with the TV.  Especially if he heard the Tabernacle Organ.  When the door bell rang on TV he would run barking to the door.
    The kids grew up and left hime one at a time.  Karl-Erik went for two years to serve a mission for our Church in the Philippines, where he was fed dog.  Shakey must have known because he bit Karl-Erik when he came home.  Shawn went to Argentina on a mission and Shakey bit him when he came home to be an "equal opportunity" biter.  He never bit Liesel.
    The cats left us one at a time. Tasha first.  Then Tigger, got cancer, shrank to skin and bones, and jsut went away one day.  Shakey was devestated and confused.  He looked around the house for days.  He took to going in and out of the house every half hour or so.   When we moved to Nevada we bought a doggy door.
    Several years ago Shakey was run over.  He suffered a collapsed lung and a broken pelvis and went deaf.
We thought we were going to lose him, but he bouced back and became hale and hearty again.  He never recovered his hearing, however, and the singing stopped.  He only barked in his sleep now.
    Shakey loved our walks in Henderson.  We had one dog down the street who jumped as high as the block wall and we always tried to sneak past.  He loved to greet all the other dogs, tail doing a little dance as he got acquainted.
    A few months ago Shakey got a tumor.  He was operated on and began to recover.  Then he came down with pancreatitis, and wouldn't eat.  The vet treated him and he became our "1,500 dollar dog".  At first he seemed to be getting better, but then started refusing dog food, His weight dropped drastically and we started seeing his ribs underneath the fur.  We tried to give him chicken and pedialite.  He despise the pedialite, and tolerated the chicken, but then wouldn't eat that.  Luisa had to go north to look after Liesel and Blake,  (our daughter and son-in-law) as Blake gets ready for open heart surgery this Thursday.
    I fed Shakey beef and he ate it at first but started refusing it two days ago.  this morning he was wobbly on his feet.  He had been breathing shallow and rapidly for same weeks.  He was moaning today when I came home. 
     I took him out for a last walk.  He sniffed at the scents that the breeze gave him, but he walked so slowly with a limp, dragging his hind feet.  I put him in the car and drove to the vet's.  I picked him up and hugged him tightly, then handed him to the Vet, and he was gone.
    But he will live agian, and in the mean time, he is no longer old and tired.  I expect to see him again some day.
    Karl-Erik wrote a song about Shakey.  I called him tonight and asked him to sing it to his kids .
    
                                                                "Shakey was a dog
                                                                   a very good dog
                                                                   a very good dog
                                                                        Shakey".
    
    

These are three excellent rules for having a substantive and civilized dialogue about religion:

Truman Madsen, now retired as Richard L. Evans Professor of Christian Understanding at Brigham Young University, relates an instructive anecdote about a great New Testament scholar, Krister Stendahl. Stendahl, who taught at Harvard for many years and served as the dean of Harvard Divinity School, also spent a few years as the Lutheran bishop of Stockholm.
During Stendahl's tenure there, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built a temple nearby. As commonly happens when Mormons build a temple, there was complaining, puzzlement, and some opposition among the local people. Bishop Stendahl, who has Latter-day Saint friends and had visited Brigham Young University, reacted dramatically and quite unexpectedly.
He called a press conference, and held it in an LDS stake center. There, among other things, he outlined to the Swedish press three principles that he thought should govern our discussions of the religious beliefs of other people. Prof. Madsen, who was there, summarizes them as:

(1) If you want to know what others believe, ask them. Don't ask their critics or their enemies.
(2) When looking at the religious faith of others, compare your best with their best, not their worst with your best.
(3) Always leave room for "holy envy."

Some explanation and examples will make these three principles clearer.
The first should be fairly obvious. Enemies of a religious faith are unlikely to present it as its believers would. They are, in fact, quite likely to distort it and caricature it -- unwittingly if they are honest, deliberately if (as all too often happens) they are unscrupulous and seek only a cheap and easy victory. This does not necessarily mean that there is no place for critics, or for listening to them. But if we really want to understand another religion, they should not be our first resource.
The second principle is "When looking at the religious faith of others, compare your best with their best, not their worst with your best." We commonly hear people contrast the loving ethics taught by Jesus in the New Testament with the acts of self-proclaimed Islamic terrorists. But it is not at all fair to compare our seldom-achieved moral ideal with horrid crimes that are, despite their prominence in the newspapers and on television, still relatively rare among the world's hundreds of millions of Muslims. The butchery of the "Christian" crusades would be a more appropriate comparison to Islamic terrorism. And the death decree against Salman Rushdie should not be compared to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but to the Inquisition and the burnings of heretics that punctuated the history of the West and lack real parallel in the Islamic East.
Stendahl reminded his Swedish audience of the human element that unavoidably affects even the most pure beliefs. If a religion is revealed, it is nonetheless revealed through fallible mortals. Alluding to the explanation on the title page of the Book of Mormon that "if there are faults they are the mistakes of men," this eminent Lutheran theologian commented that such frankness increased his confidence in the book, rather than decreasing it [Italics added].
Finally, Stendahl counseled his audience to leave room for what he termed "holy envy." We can learn greatly from faithful practitioners and believers of other faiths. The loving, joyous reverence of Orthodox Jews for the Sabbath -- far from the cold, mechanical legalism of the stereotype -- challenges us whose observance of the Lord's day is often routine and perfunctory. Likewise, we can profit by reflecting upon the Jewish passion for religious learning, the simplicity and service of the Mennonites, the heroism of Protestant missionaries under terribly difficult conditions, and the social idealism of Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement.
Regarding Mormons and their temples, Stendahl suggested baptism for the dead as an object of "holy envy." We do nothing for our dead, he said. It is as if we have forgotten them. In contrast, he observed, the Latter-day Saints seek to bring the blessings of Christ's atonement even to the dead.
At a minimum, observing Krister Stendahl's three principles would eliminate much of the religious strife in a world that is growing ever smaller and more interdependent and that can no longer afford such conflict.

 I ran across an interesting article today in Townhall.com.

http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/JerryBowyer/2007/08/02/harry_potter_and_the_fire_breathing_fundamentalists?page=full&comments=true#4ae9f2aa-e131-467c-8bb5-3bd8c2b0fc49

I quote from the article:

"Seven years ago, Joanne Rowling was asked whether she is a Christian. Her answer:"

"'YES I AM. WHICH SEEMS TO OFFEND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT FAR WORSE THAN IF I SAID I THOUGHT THERE WAS NO GOD. Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.'"

We Mormons know exactly what JK Rowlings is talking about.   Sometimes we feel as if the term "Christian" has been hijacked by one minority group  (fundmentalists)  who espouse a particular brand of Western European creedal orthodox religion which they jealously regard as Christian.  They seem to not want to let anyone else into the "Club".