Because We Love

I know I've heard it before because it's something that sounds so familiar. Truth can do that. I may have heard stories before and maybe my brain picked up what my short term memory was overlooking, but now I really hear it. This happens all the time. This story hit me differently today.

Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles tells of a time when he was a boy and his mother came very close to death due to cancer surgery. It was painful for his mother to use her right arm because much of her neck and shoulder tissue was removed.

“One morning about a year after the surgery, my father took Mother to an appliance store and asked the manager to show her how to use a machine he had for ironing clothes,” Elder Christofferson says.

The machine operated by pressing pedals with one’s knees to lower a roller against a heated metal surface while feeding in articles of clothing. The machine made ironing easier for the mother of five boys.

“Mother was shocked when Dad told the manager they would buy the machine and then paid cash for it. Despite my father’s good income as a veterinarian, Mother’s surgery and medications had left them in a difficult financial situation, Elder Christofferson says.

“On the way home, my mother was upset: ‘How can we afford it? Where did the money come from? How will we get along now?’ Finally Dad told her that he had gone without lunches for nearly a year to save enough money. ‘Now when you iron,’ he said, ‘you won’t have to stop and go into the bedroom and cry until the pain in your arm stops.’ She didn’t know he knew about that. I was not aware of my father’s sacrifice and act of love for my mother at the time, but now that I know, I say to myself, ‘There is a man.’”