A Valedictory Testimony
Wiser than I
Richard B. “Andy” Anderson
March 1, 2003
A few weeks ago, just before Valerie and I mounted Amtrak and ended 44 years of Anderson presence in the Cambridge-area Kingdom, President Bowen kindly asked me to write a few parting words. He said something about wisdom, too. You’ll have to judge whether any of that comes through; I’ll try. Sorry this has been a while in coming: it’s been a particularly tough assignment.

To make it possible at all, let’s agree not to linger on what and whom we’re going to miss. After all this time, I hope it’s obvious how we treasure you and the associations we’ve enjoyed. Memory, however sweet, is an inadequate compensation for what we’re losing. This keyboard doesn’t like salt water; to spare it, I’ve got to take refuge in abstractions. And after several false starts, I keep coming back to the general content of my last two Sacrament meeting talks, in the Lynn Spanish Branch and the One True Arlington Ward. In each, I tried to share this message: please, dear friends, for your own joy, be wiser than I’ve been.

As I’ve learned only recently, you really don’t have to wait until you’re sixty to know some basic things about the love of God and the practice of prayer. When smooth, young hands with chalk-free knuckles reach up to pluck the whitest fruit of the Tree of Life, the Lord doesn’t begrudge them their head start. I know kids in their teen years and even younger who already know and practice what I’m just learning. More Power to them. I’m grateful that He still lets my wrinkled, chalky hands take the Fruit, even though I’ve been so slow about grasping both it and the concept.

I testify of a much broader principle than my witness of it. As you doubtless already know, in which case please rejoice with me, and buttress my testimony with yours. I’ve learned (ready for this?) that the Lord answers prayers. Oh, you knew that already? I thought I knew it, too. But it’s only in the past year or so that I’ve been startled to experience the Lord’s immediate, unmistakable response to my prayers.

We like to prepare each other for the worst by citing all sorts of escape clauses for the Lord, as if He needed ways to weasel out of His promises. We say,
  • “Sometimes He says ‘no’.”
  • “Blessings come in disguise.”
  • “All in His good time.”
  • “The Lord is sorta like an unrighteous judge…”
…Whom we have to nag and importune and Who finally gives us what we ask, or something of the sort, just to get us off His back. There’s wisdom and truth in each of these formulas, of course. At times, and under some circumstances that we don’t necessarily know how to discern, our intercourse with our Father does seem to fit these descriptions. But in them lies also the danger that we’ll come to believe that it’s always so: that we get what we want from Him, if at all, only obscurely, tardily, and in ways that can make it hard to discern fundamental Love.
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