Accept with a willing heart

I received my patriarchal blessing on Thursday evening, September 2, 1965, six and a half weeks after I turned sixteen. For the most part I did not remember the details of what the patriarch said until the typed copy came in the mail a few weeks later.

I did recall, however, that I was told never to decline callings that would come to me to serve in the Church. That is what I remembered, and it would shortly become important counsel to me. What the patriarch actually said to me, I learned a few weeks later, was slightly different, although the intent I suppose was essentially the same:

"Accept with a willing heart the responsibilities of service and God will magnify you until you will be capable of con­founding the wise and the learned and will melt the defense of the unrighteous, and even though they accept not the message of truth which you bear, yet they will testify of the power which is within you."

The following Sunday a member of the bishopric met with me and called me to serve as our ward's Sunday School organist. In those days Sunday School was a separate meeting and had an opening exercise with its own opening and closing hymns, a period of song practice, and the administration of the sacrament with an accompanying sacrament hymn. That was at least four hymns every Sunday, sometimes more depending on what we did during the hymn practice.

I said yes, I would do it. With only two and a half years of piano study be­hind me, hav­ing never had an organ lesson, and being able to play only four of the simplest hymns, I accepted the position solely be­cause of the patri­arch’s admonition and promise from just a few days earlier.

"You said what?" my incredulous piano teacher said to me when I told her I had accepted the call. Sister Ruby Hurren, an organist in our ward, had been my early-morning seminary teacher the year I was a freshman. Her husband was a counselor in our stake presidency. She was my piano teacher. I thought a lot of her and greatly valued her opinion. She agreed I needed a lot of help and we began a crash course in learning how to play hymns on the organ.

The Sunday School chorister was also understanding and cooperative. She agreed to list all the hymns I would have to play during the coming month, including the various practice hymns, and promised not to stick any additional ones in that I was not prepared to play. She also got me a key to the building and to the organ and arranged for me to spend time after school and on weekends to come into the chapel and practice on the organ itself. Early on I spent hours and hours practicing the organ. It was a grand old instrument, an actual pipe organ, not like the little electronic instruments I played in other places in other years.

The Lord kept His word and mag­nified my talent all out of normal proportion. I had accepted the calling with a willing heart, and God had magnified my meager talent. Within months I had mastered the organ even better than the piano and soon I was also serving as Mutual organist, priesthood pianist, stake priesthood pianist, and unofficially as an assistant ward organist. It would serve me well in later years when I went off to college and after that served my mission in Brazil.

Outside my own family and my piano teacher and the Sunday School chorister, I doubt anyone else knew or appreciated that I really had not known how to play. That clearly was a bless­ing from the Lord and not a stroke of my musi­cal genius because, with hymns excepted, I did not progress a great deal in other areas of musical study. To this day hymns are about the only thing I know how to play.