by Glenn Heap | Nov 8, 2020 | Stories
When I was a toddler we lived in Connecticut not far from New York City. One of my cousins from Arizona was called to serve a Mormon mission in Europe. On his way overseas he had layover for in New York. He had asked my dad if he could drive him around to see a couple of sights in New York before his flight to Europe. (He didn’t have permission to do this from the church, but he figured that no one would ever know.)
After enjoying some sights and time together they headed to the airport. As they inched through the New York rush hour, bumper to bumper traffic, my dad realized that they were not going make it to the airport on time. My cousin worried and fretted that he was going to get in trouble. At first my dad thought about going to the house and scheduling another flight. His next thought was to just keep inching forward ever so slowly. “Just get there,” he thought. (This of course was years before we had smart phones that allow us to check on the status of our flights, etc.)
They arrived an hour late
As it turned out, my cousin’s flight had been delayed. He later boarded right on time, and no one was the wiser.
Sometimes it may seem that all is lost. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
Just keep going, especially when you feel something inside of you saying, “Press on.” It may just work out after all, maybe not exactly as you hoped it would, but right on time
by Glenn Heap | Nov 8, 2020 | Stories
When I was the fifth grade teacher periodically a student would come up to me while the kids were doing classwork and would say to me, “Juan’s not doing his math problems.”
I would whisper back, “Either are you. Why don’t you go sit down now and do your math problems and let me worry about the other students?”
Sometimes we’re so worried about other’s behavior that we lose focus on what we need to do.
by Glenn Heap | Oct 12, 2020 | Stories
When I was 18 years old my good friend Mark and I decided that we would like to run a 26 mile marathon. We signed up for the San Francisco Mayor’s Cup Marathon. It was the summer of 1979 and we had run cross country one year, our senior year in high school.
I read a book by Jim Fixx called the Joy of Running. In one of the chapters he talked about running a marathon. That interested me. He wrote about something called “hitting the wall.” Apparently lots of people, somewhere between miles 18 and 22 , get a feeling that they just can’t go on. He counseled that if you could just find the strength to get through those miles, that many people later on would feel a second wind which gives them the energy to finish the race.
That Sunday September morning at about mile 20 Mark told me that he just couldn’t go on. I told him that I felt the same way. I also shared with him what Jim Fixx had mentioned in his book. We decided to just continue on to see if we might get that second wind a couple of miles later. We did and ended up finishing the marathon strong! We were glad to have known that other runners felt the same way, and that they were able to get through it.
Having an awareness of future challenges in her life and how others have gotten through them can be very helpful.
For example, knowing in advance that many adolescents pull away from parents a little bit during middle and early high school years can help a parent be prepared and not feel so rejected and unappreciated. Knowing that lots of people go through adolescence finding their parents to be a nuisance, yet later on in adulthood, appreciate their parents efforts and even come to admire them, can help a parent get through their children adolescent years without losing hope.
