Gratitude and Boondoggles

Every few weeks I catch up on listening to the devotional talks from Brigham Young University-Idaho, my alma mater. Today I am listening to this wonderful talk. The following portion made me swell with tears for the love and sacrifice of both my mother and my Father in Heaven. And I remember the good old day of boondoggles. I hope you like it too.

Do you remember sitting at an arts and crafts table somewhere, sometime in your life, braiding some long strips of plastic into what some people call a boondoggle or a lanyard? One of my favorite American poets writes of one he made as a 9-year-old boy and gave to his mother:

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and [nourishment from her own body],
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.¹⁶

These words hit a little close to home for me.

The realization of the magnitude of my debt to my mother came to me in phases: haltingly as a teenager; in great heart-wrenching waves as a missionary and then later as a young parent. Even now, as a middle-aged fat man, it settles on me from time to time and makes me weepy.

But, as the poet says, confronting my debt to my mother is not the most disturbing part of this. Rather, it’s the realization that I have actually felt (at least sometimes) that my pitiful expressions of gratitude to her were enough to make us even.

And even more disturbing, I find that I sometimes think the same way about what I owe to God. I go on as if my sporadic temple attendance and my pretty-good personal prayers and my hit-and-miss family nights are enough to make us even; that these “lanyards” I offer to God are a sufficient trade for Eternal Life and Glory and “all that [the] Father hath.”

It makes me wonder, "what lack I yet?"