Because of others

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Sunday Afternoon Session of the April 1981 Conference.

A while ago when we were shopping for and thinking of buying a grand piano, I was feeling so blessed and grateful about it. It just seemed so AMAZING that I would ever be the owner of such a big and beautiful instrument! And I started thinking about all the people that had contributed to that possibility. My parents, of course. Giving me piano lessons and encouraging me and buying my music and paying for competitions and putting up with my practicing at 5 a.m. for years and years. Sam, obviously, too, for putting in time and work and being willing to go without other things we certainly could spend our money on—and for thinking that this was even important! My piano teachers. The assistant principal at Provo High who let me get a class credit for practicing on the school's Fazioli during my free period every day of Junior Year. Music professors at BYU. People I served with in church callings that taught me about sharing talents generously. Ward members that loved me and encouraged me and came to my recitals all through my growing-up years.

As I thought about this, the circle kept widening. I thought about the composers who wrote the music I had learned to play and love. Performers I had watched and been inspired by. I thought about the people who make pianos! (We watched a documentary once about the making of a Steinway Piano. So much time and craftsmanship goes into it!) The people who own piano stores! The people who take pianos apart and wrap them in padded blankets and deliver them to your house without breaking them! It started to feel like everyone in the world had had a hand in my being able to have a grand piano! And it might sound silly, but I felt a real and profound gratitude toward ALL those people as I thought of them. I felt like I was the beneficiary of some great coordinated effort toward my happiness—an inadvertent effort by some of the people, of course, who didn't even KNOW me—but a vast and important effort nonetheless. I felt like Heavenly Father was so amazingly kind, to put me in the middle of that great web of prosperity and opportunity and goodness!

I returned to these thoughts again when I read Elder F. Burton Howard's talk, "In Saving Others We Save Ourselves." He says:

None of us could have arrived at the point where we listen to and enjoy this great conference without others. Our testimonies, our greatest blessings, our membership and activity in Christ’s church—all of these we owe to the often unremembered and always unnumbered hundreds who gave of their time and their patience and their love to us when we were trying to find our way in the desert. They brought living water to us, or to our parents, or to our parents’ parents. Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we are grateful or not, we are where we are because of others. We cannot say, indeed we must never say, “It was a difficult journey, but I have arrived. Let others get here as best they can. I don’t have time now to take water to those who are lost. I have no obligation to those in the desert.”

It's such a good reminder to me that no matter how hard I think I've worked, most of what I have and am is because of other people. It's because of the blessings of God, ultimately, of course—but those blessings have largely come through those around me. And that makes it so important that I share my own blessings now! Not only have I made covenants to do so, but it's also just the best way to show Heavenly Father that I notice and appreciate all the things that other people, under His influence, have done for ME!

Other posts in this series: