Robert writes home #89 17 March 1997 essay on Great Questions

17 March 1997

Dear Mother,

                We went to Turlock Sunday to spend the day with Megan and Travis. I didn’t have a High Council assignment so it worked out well.

                Charlie and Sam got to meet some new girls. We also stayed for a musical presentation put on by the Turlock stake called "The Garden." We had a good time.

                Janet has been having trouble with a kidney stone that is stuck in the ureter for the past two weeks. She’ll probably have it removed surgically on Thursday. She’s been going through quite abit of discomfort with it.

                The stake “name extraction” program that I’m in charge of has really slowed down. Salt Lake hasn’t been sending us any new material. I understand that they are having some change over problems in some of the copy equipment. I’m disappointed because we were just getting things rolling along well.

                I hope your mission is going well. We pray for you regularly.

Love,

Robert, Janet, Charlie and Sam

PS Here’s another essay:

                                                Great Questions

                Why do I get bored listening to talks in church while I can, on the other hand, talk to and listen to friends or listen to TV for hours?

                Yesterday, in church, I heard a fine talk about the Sacrament. The speaker had good deportment. He had a lot of expression and voice inflection and his speech flowed easily. His continuity and logic were good. But after about fifteen minutes I found myself getting that old feeling of wanting him to be done…the feeling of helpless dread that he would go on and on after I was tired of listening. It was like I had no reason to believe that the remaining things that he was going to say would be of interest to me. And, I was helpless to control how long he would talk…I could find nothing interesting to anticipate coming from the next few minutes, and thus, I was bored. I needed to be able to anticipate exciting or interesting things coming in the immediate future. Humans find it hard to endure a situation without changing stimuli.

                I could have been just this side of some of the most exciting info of my life, but I wouldn’t have had a clue because he wasn’t giving me any clues…or previews or any reason to believe that there was something coming that I would want to hear.

                I think that if this guy would have posed some stimulating questions at the start of his talk like: “Should you take the sacrament if you were coerced by your associates into drinking some beer at a party last Friday night?” Or, “What if you can’t forgive someone who’s interaction with you in your childhood did you did you psycho-emotional damage?” Or, “What should you do if a friend whom you just brought to church for the first time, but whom you forgot to talk about the sacrament to, just took the sacrament as a matter of pattern following?” Then I think he would have had my attention until he had answered every question to my satisfaction.

                I need to be able to anticipate interesting stuff. That’s the way TV works. Talk show host never fail to give you previews of who’s coming next time and what we’re going to talk about after the commercial.

                And when you’re talking to friends, doesn’t the conversation always begin with a question?...”Did you hear what happened to “So and so” after the game last night? The answers produce more questions and it go from there.

                It reminds me of the old story about the Southern preacher who, when asked what his secret was for giving such interesting sermons, responded, “Fust, I tells’em what I’se gonna tell’em. Then I tells’em. Then, I tells’em what I told ‘em.” His secret to success was to give them a preview so they could anticipate what was to come, then repeat it acouple of times more, so they’d remember.

                One of the most memorable talks I ever heard on RADIO was by a guy who had great questions but never answered them. He just closed by saying, “If you want to know these answers send for my book.” His whole talk was stimulating exciting questions that piqued my interest until I was so excited to hear the answers that I was “glued to the set”, so to speak. It frustrated me. I was so interested that it would have taken something real important to get me to leave the radio set before I got answers to those questions. It made me mad that he didn’t give them to me, but the point is, great questions at the start can keep the audience on the edge of their chairs waiting to hear what you have to say. If you have good answers they’ll think it is a great talk.