When I compose a talk for a Church setting, I cast about in my mind for stories and experiences from my life that could illustrate the principle that I want to teach.  My experience is that the talk will be remembered for more than five minutes if a story accompanies it.  Listeners’ minds will replay a story, and then the principle it illustrates; but minds generally don’t replay dry talks unless made to do so.  Talks laced with stories also keep congregations awake.

When I’m writing just for the fun of creativity, my mind casts about for two or three related stories that can be linked together.  I then ask myself what principle these stories might illustrate, and I start writing.  I pray for inspiration, and for the Holy Ghost to teach me, and suddenly I find myself learning.  I think thoughts I’ve never thought before, and become excited about my topic.

This morning, for whatever reason, I’ve arisen thinking about the two airplane crashes that occurred in my neighborhood.  The first was witnessed by my mother.  She didn’t see it or hear it, but knew there had been one, and reported it as such.  She took a daily walk in the field above her house, up toward the mountain.  This particular day was very foggy.  Suddenly she became aware of a small plane just above her in the fog.  It was heading southeast, and was much too low, because a quarter-mile straight ahead was 8,000-foot-tall Hunt Mountain.  If the plane was 1000 feet above her head, it would have to lift another 3000 feet to clear the mountain.  My mother didn’t think it could do it.  The plane sounded like it was flying a straight line.  It wasn’t banking.  If it was in the fog, and if it didn’t turn, it was going to hit the mountain.

Mom listened as long as she could hear the plane.  It didn’t turn.  She heard no crash, but she turned around, went home, called her friend who was an airplane pilot, and said, “How do I report an airplane crash?”

Before a search and rescue party could be organized, two men knocked on the door of the neighbor’s house which was situated at the base of Hunt Mountain.  They’d just survived a plane crash, and had hiked down the mountain.  They’d been flying in the clouds when trees suddenly appeared ahead.  The pilot pulled up on the stick, the plane grazed the tree tops, the wings ripped off, and the fuselage dropped between the trees.  The bewildered men climbed out of the wreckage, set off downhill through the foggy forest, having no idea where they were, and were much relieved to shortly come upon a clearing with a house in it.

A day or two later I watched as a big helicopter lifted the plane’s wreckage off the mountain and set it down in my field where it could be loaded on a truck and hauled away.

It was 30 years later that I learned the rest of the story.  By chance I met the son of the pilot.  He said that his father had been flying by instruments, and thought that he was on course to land at the Pendleton airport.  The Pendleton airport was 80 miles behind him.  He had missed Twin Mountain on his right, barely passed over some 5000-foot mountains that he didn’t know were there, and slammed into Hunt Mountain in the fog.

What a surprise!  What a shock!  What an awful thing to have happen.  One moment the men were blindly flying through life warm and comfortable and conversing about inconsequential things when suddenly a tree appeared in front of them where a tree shouldn’t have been.

Life is like that.  We’re largely flying blind.  We think all is well.  A tree suddenly appears, we crash, and we enter a new phase of existence for which we may or may not be ready.

A few years after that plane crash a bank courier plane flying from Portland went missing in our area.  It was in February.  The plane was carrying cancelled checks.  One of the checks was found near the town of Rock Creek, a half-mile from my house.  The wind had carried it there, and was evidence that the plane had gone down in the mountains west of my house.  Many searches were conducted, but the plane wasn’t located until months later when the snow began to melt.  The pilot had been flying in the clouds at an altitude of 8000 feet, and had the misfortune of having the pointed peak of Red Mountain right in his path.  Had he been just 100 feet to the right or to the left he might have missed the mountain and not even known it was there.

When I stood on that mountain top a decade later, there were still airplane parts scattered about, and cancelled checks in the crevices of the rocks.  I found one written by a woman I knew.  I mailed it to her along with the story of how I came to be in possession of it.

How many of the people around us are flying blind?  How many of our acquaintances are unprepared to enter the next life?  What if we know that there’s a mountain ahead?  Is it our duty to warn them?  If we have in our possession something that would illumine the path ahead, shouldn’t we share it?  How badly do we feel when someone that we know crashes?  How good do we feel when we realize that we’ve been the means of preventing a crash?

I prevented a crash once.  While serving in the U.S. Navy in Japan, I attended a servicemen’s branch of the Church.  One day a sailor from a ship came into our meeting and asked me, “how do I go about joining this Church?’  I told him that he’d need to take the missionary discussions, that my friend and I would be happy to give them, and that then he could be baptized.

The man’s name was Bill.  There was an LDS girl back home in whom he was interested, and she was the source of his interest in the Church.  We began teaching him, but after the third discussion, his ship left port.

Months went by, and Bill passed from my mind.  One evening I had just settled into my bunk on my own ship when thoughts of Bill suddenly filled my head.  I tried to dismiss the thoughts so that I could go to sleep, but they wouldn’t go away.  I became so agitated that I got up, dressed, left my ship, and started walking up and down the piers of Yokosuka, Japan in the dark looking for Bill’s ship.  Sure enough, it was there.  I marched up the gangplank, saluted the sailors who were set there as watches, and requested permission to come aboard.  I then began searching for Bill.  No one had seen him.  I was shown his bunk.  He wasn’t there.  He wasn’t on duty in the engine room where he worked.  He wasn’t in the galley.

I began a literal stem to stern search of a big, unfamiliar ship.  I found Bill down in the hold, up in the bow of the ship, all alone in a dark and dirty nook.  He looked terrible.  He was covered with grease and grime, sitting there staring morosely into space.  I greeted him, explained how I’d gone to bed, got to thinking about him, and had become so agitated that I had to get up, get dressed, and go looking to see if he was in port.  I then asked him, “Why am I here?”

“Well,” he said, “I’m sitting here figuring out the best way to commit suicide.”

We had a long talk.  The fact that I was there was incontrovertible evidence that there is a God in heaven, that He loved Bill, that He knew Bill’s thoughts and situation, and that He didn’t want Bill to do what he was contemplating.

That was the last time I saw Bill; but when I left him, I was satisfied that there would be no fatal plane crashes.  I doubt that he ever joined the Church, but he should have lived a long and normal life.  I know by this experience that God loves all of His children regardless of their obedience or lovability.

I also know that there are few feelings that can equal the feelings one has when he has been the instrument used by the Father to prevent the crash of one of His children.  This is the same feeling experienced daily by missionaries and members around the world when they see their friends and investigators repent and enter the waters of baptism.

This feeling accumulated and multiplied in Ammon as he saw thousands of Lamanites repent and join the Church.  It became so intense that on at least two occasions he collapsed from joy.  (Alma 19:14; and 27:17).  In writing of Ammon’s experience, Mormon says, “Now was not this exceeding joy?  Behold, this is joy which none receiveth save it be the truly penitent and humble seeker of happiness.”  (Alma 27:18).

Ammon said, “Therefore, let us glory, yea we will glory in the Lord; yea, we will rejoice, for our joy is full…Behold, I say unto you, I cannot say the smallest part which I feel.”  (Alma 26:16).

He further said, “In his strength I can do all things.”  (Alma 26:12).

And then my favorite quote of all, “Behold, my joy is full, yea, my heart is brim with joy.”  (Alma 26:11).

I love that phraseology.  That will be the title of a book that I’ll someday write.  Maybe it will be a summary of my life

—My Heart is Brim with Joy.

—20 May 2012