An invitation to attend and to pray

I would like to call your attention to an event — a special showing of the film Witnesses, accompanied by questions and answers and discussion — that will be held on the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo this coming Friday evening.  Admission is free, and there is abundant public parking that is reasonably close to the venue.  But tickets are required and seating is relatively limited:

https://calendar.byu.edu/student-life/film-witnesses-2022-09-16

I would love to see you there.

As to parking on campus for the event:  In this image, the Joseph F. Smith Building (JFSB) is located to the left of the Harold B. Lee Library (HBLL), which is roughly at the center of the map.  That is, the JFSB is located to the west of the HBLL.  Notice all of the blue “A” parking areas that are within reasonable walking distance of the JFSB.  There is even parking directly underneath the JFSB.  And, after 5 PM, most of that parking should be open to the general public.

On rather a different note:  We have a highly valued commenter here at Sic et Non who goes by the moniker of dCyl.  Having heard some troubling news about him roughly three weeks ago, I wrote to him privately back on 21 August, as follows:

I’m told that you were involved in a serious auto accident and that you’re in a hospital in Utah Valley.

I’m so sorry to hear it.

I don’t know whether this note will reach you or not. If I were in town, I would definitely drop by to see you. Unfortunately, I’m out of the country, and I’ll be out of the country for the next couple of weeks or thereabouts. I hope that you’ll be home by the time I get back.

If, though, there’s anything that I can do for you, please let me know.

With his kind permission, I share most of his response to me, which arrived just this morning:

Great to hear from you, Dan. Yes, I got T-boned trying to make a left turn on the Highway of Death in Spanish Fork. Don’t know how it happened; I remember absolutely nothing of the accident itself. I fear I may have misread a signal, but it’s also possible I got hit by someone running a red light. I’m told the first responders did not think I would survive. I was taken to Utah Valley Hospital and the superb ER staff pulled me through, and now I’m recuperating at home in New Mexico. Injuries: a collapsed lung, the other hemorrhaging, two broken vertebra (fortunately not endangering my spinal cord — a tender mercy) and three busted ribs, along with quite a lot of internal injuries. Got four pints of blood == please encourage your readers to donate blood next time they have a chance.

Also a blow to the head that caused a small amount of intracranial bleeding. I was given the cognitive test that Presidents Trump and Biden were so proud of passing and the therapist concluded that I normally operate on a high enough cognitive level that the test was unlikely to detect any small decline — but I seem to be okay. I mentally went through the equations central to my work, and was slightly alarmed that I couldn’t remember the name of Boltzmann’s Equation. It came to me later — perhaps I was just a little juiced on painkillers.

I guess I’ve had my own near-death experience. I don’t remember anything as dramatic as you read about, just that when I came to in my wrecked car, with paramedics in the process of tearing out the left side of my car to get me out, it was like coming out of a pleasant conversation I had been having with Someone. I think I can say now that, while I don’t look forward to the process of getting there, death itself holds no further terrors for me. I know now that the exit interview will be loving, and that God is not looking for reasons to condemn us; on the contrary, He is looking for excuses to forgive us and bless us.

I’m interested in his sense that, when he regained consciousness he had been having “a pleasant conversation” with “Someone.”  My working hypothesis, for a long time, has been that probably everybody in the appropriate situation undergoes a near-death experience, but that, although a quite significant proportion do return with more or less detailed accounts of what happened, the majority simply have no memory of what they, too, saw and heard and felt.

But I especially want to highlight dCyl’s request that I encourage my readers to donate blood the next time they have a chance to do it.  I strongly support such donations.  Unfortunately, having contracted hepatitis during my residency in Egypt many years ago, I’m no longer permitted to donate blood myself.  While I was serving as a singles-ward bishop of a ward located adjacent to Utah Valley University, though, I made our participation in the regular Red Cross blood drives a high priority, with as much humor as I could.  (Blood donations offer a rich and wide field for jokes, and I exploited it with enthusiasm.)  We turned the annual blood drives into a competition with the other wards in our stake and, I’m happy to report, we always dominated the competition despite their best efforts.  But, as I had hoped, the competition seems to have increased the stake’s overall contribution.  And that, of course, was my real, principal, goal.

Please, by the way, feel free to include dCyl in your prayers (I don’t know that I have his permission to share his actual name but, pending receipt of such permission, the Lord can presumably figure it out), and to wish him well in the comments that might be appended to this blog entry.