 It's probably breaking a rule of public speaking to start by saying that I'm honored to speak to you today, but it is to me truly an honor because of how I've come to feel about you. Volunteer members of the Armed Forces who've taken upon yourselves to go, or few would volunteer to go into places where your safety can't always be assured and sometimes more difficultly into places of pain and despair, where there are many more tears than smiles. Most people avoid such places. You see the need and rush in and for that you have my most sincere admiration. My topic by assignment today is ministering in extremis. This can be a ponderous subject, but different people respond in different ways to issues of life and death. I once attended a funeral of a friend's mother. It was held in a funeral home rather than a chapel, partly because she had left instructions that the music to be played was to be all patsy-cline. Her husband had predeceased her by several decades, and at the funeral somebody wondered how things are going in the great beyond, now that mom and dad were reunited. Because it seems that sometime after dad died, the kids had approached her about putting the paperwork together and getting them sealed together. And she said, no, I'm not sealing to that man until I know that he's had counseling. My relationship with the chaplain, the chaplaincy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been a personal and rewarding one. I returned from a mission in the Netherlands in 1975. And as I prepared to return to college, I had a powerful impression that I should delay school and join the military. I was bewildered by this impression and frankly resisted it. It wasn't that I was adverse to being in the military. I just couldn't understand why that would be. I didn't know much about the military. I couldn't imagine how delaying school for three more years could be a good idea. But eventually, after my personal wrestle with the Lord, I couldn't avoid recognizing where those impressions had come from. And so soon, soon enough, I found myself at the Oakland Induction Center in California and then at Ford Ord for basic training in AIT. As a newly returned missionary, the discipline of basic training was really not much of a problem. I'd seen worse. But while the vocabulary I was immersed in was as bad as it was in my high school locker room, it extended from dusk to dawn and with a lot more enthusiasm. My first encounter with Army chaplains was during services that they held at the Fort's one tiny island of civil society that was the post-chapel. Imagine my surprise once there to look up during my two-hour escape from my Made for Reality TV platoon to see one of the more colorfully spoken drill sergeants from my training company speaking in sacrament meeting. He was the Sunday School President. I was surprised to see that he was impressively bilingual. He had the vocabulary to give pretty clear directions to heaven or I'd learned during the week to wherever else he thought you should be going in a given moment. My first duty station was to a combat engineer battalion in Fort Stewart, Georgia, followed by orders to Frankfurt, Germany, where I was assigned to be the company clerk of the 165th Military Intelligence Battalion. I worked in the old Abrams building that many of you will know. And I lived in with other soldiers in a former military intelligence safe house, which had been converted to enlisted housing. I attended church in the Frankfurt Ward House. Many of you will know that too next to the church office building on Eckenheimer-Lonstrasse. The young single adult group that met there was comprised of military and civilian expatriates and often intermingled with singles from the German stake. We became something of a family. Soon I was serving as the stake young adult, the stake young single adult representative where I worked with a group of wonderful military leaders, including then Colonel soon general John Lasseter, on planning the young single adult conferences that were held at the military retreat at Berchtesgarten, high in the German Alps. These were days for me never to be forgotten when we would get to leave the profane world behind and gather as fellow strangers in strange lands to feel the cumulative faith and strength of others who were fighting the good fight, but usually alone or nearly alone, but not there. During these few days each year we relished being together. The power of the priesthood was so evident and surging that it could have been measured perhaps only by Richter scale. Military chaplains took a high profile there at the Berchtesgarten conferences. I didn't arrive at these retreats physically or spiritually in extremis, but my predicament seemed to me to be extreme. I simply needed faith that there was purpose behind this extracurricular mission to which I'd been called. And I tell you all this simply to say thank you to them and to you because in word indeed, there at those annual retreats and elsewhere those chaplains helped our little band find center. Some of you have known Lieutenant Colonel Claude Newby who was a strapping combat decorated soldier convert to the church in Chaplin. He looked something like a recruitment poster, but happier. He spoke at one of these conferences of being a young soldier on a long bus ride to San Francisco. He took a seat on the bus and happened to be sitting next to an attractive young girl who struck up a conversation with him. They laughed and told stories for the entire trip until they approached the bus station in San Francisco. She asked where he was staying. He said he didn't know. He was planning to just find a hotel for the night before moving on, you know, but once they arrived. Well, she didn't have reservations either and wasn't sure how to figure that out. So he agreed to help her find a place to stay. So they arrived, gathered up their luggage and she walked around the corner to sort something out with her ticket while he waited by the bus when he felt a prompting. Suddenly, like a flash of light, he realized where this was headed. And then he said something which has stayed with me for these 40 plus years. He said I immediately picked up my suitcases, one in each hand and ran out of the bus station onto the street. I ran and I kept running for blocks, suitcases dangling behind me in the wind. And then he said I have never felt so manly as I felt that day running away like a child from a little girl. Well, I wasn't necessarily one of them, but I was surrounded by friends who were morally very much in extremists who heard and were inspired by that story and by the cumulative power of many other stories. It's fascinating to me that there were well over a half a dozen young elders in my servicemen's ward who had chosen to join the military rather than serve missions for one reason or another. But as their enlistments ended, I think that every one of them went on to serve missions for the church after having served their country and each other. In the end of my enlistment, I returned to BYU and served another year in the active Army Reserve. And then I got out of the Army as they say, but thankfully it's lessons and blessings never really got out of me. One of the blessings of my military service was that a couple years later I was able to marry an ex-patriot who I'd met back in Frankfurt. We were married in Salt Lake about a week before I started law school. And finally, I had an answer to my question. Why the Army? I'm convinced that I had met her for the first time, that had I met her for the first time at BYU, where she had so many better choices and where she would have had her wits about her rather than in the relative isolation of the Frankfurt Servicemen's Ward, I never would have gotten a date. Fying her was an unmistakable reason for my service, but there were so many more. Mr. Tona, my high school Latin teacher, might be shocked that I even know what an extremist means. It is a Latin term defined variously as in extreme circumstances, at the point of death, a very difficult situation. We live in a fallen world where some of life's most heart-rending moments come when we are thrust into the intersection between life and death. Chaplains, I don't have to tell you, are among those whose ministrations will often draw them into these extreme fallen world scenarios. Back at BYU, I have a question that I have been reminded in philosophy simply by taking every class taught by Truman G. Madsen. He would say to his philosophy classes that there is one question to which every person can always provide a meaningful response. That question is, where does it hurt? With all of its wonder and beauties and joys, this life can sometimes be a veil of tears for all of us. But beyond there are times when the measure of hurt pins the needle and reason fails us and we truly have our backs against the wall. Colleen and I finished law school and we had four great children and our extraordinary lives went on extraordinarily. Then one day our nine-year-old son came home from playing football in a park complaining of pain in his hip. Now, this was an interesting boy. He lived his life with his foot mashing the gas pedal to the floor. He was fun and funny and creative and insightful beyond his years. He was also wildly willful and impulsive. We used to think that he would grow up either to be the prophet or a bank robber. We really didn't know which. But we learned that that pain he was complaining about turned out to be cancer and that his cancer turned out to be a very virulent one. He went through three years of treatments including two bone marrow transplants and at one point ten weeks in a medically induced coma on a ventilator in a minute-to-minute struggle for life. He was in extremis. His mom and dad were with him. Taken to the wall. Unable to imagine life without him. You know, don't feel sorry for us. We're fine. It's all going to be fine. Tanner's fine. We're a little scarred up. But he's in great shape. But a couple of things happened during this period that speak to us that might help as you think about how to help folks who are teetering on the precipice. Just after his diagnosis, a child life counselor at Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City pulled us aside. She was, I suppose, our proxy chaplain. Not an ecclesiastical leader, but someone tasked with helping families get through when they found themselves in free fall. Her job was to help people find a toehold. She was, she told us this very helpful thing. She said, well, you go through whatever is ahead of you. You're going to be worried about Tanner, but you're also going to be worried about your other children. They need to know that Tanner's okay. Help them to understand that his body is sick, but that he's fine. Whatever happens here, Tanner's going to be fine. Someone else said it this way. You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. Souls persist. Two of our close friends came to visit us at the hospital, a married couple. It turns out that they had gone through something like this a decade earlier. In fact, their son at a much younger age had suffered the same disease and had gone through years of treatment and had survived. They told us their story and of their faith, and then the husband said something like this. He said, you know, Steve, sometimes in life, you get pushed through a door that you would never choose to go through into a place you would never choose to go. It's a dark and a fearsome place filled with shadows and hurt, a place you can't wait to escape. But while you're there, you might as well look around. There's a lot to learn in that place. If you pay attention, you'll see that you're not alone there. We did look around, and we found other people suffering as we were. We found people who loved us. We found people who could help us and who we could help in helping helped us. We came to believe that while Heavenly Father didn't necessarily cause all the suffering in the world, he does not waste any of it. He uses it to draw us closer to him and to make us more like him. The Savior forever at Gethsemane proved his compassion for us as he suffered with us. Our suffering causes us to see the world more the way he sees the world, the way he sees us. C.S. Lewis observed that pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures. He speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. The day that Tanner had his first surgery to remove tumors, Colleen and I were with him in the recovery room, waiting for his anesthesia to wear off. When the big double doors flew open and in walked my mission president and his twin brother, Max and Rex Pinnaker. Elder Pinnaker was, I think, one of the seven presidents of the 70 at the time. We were very surprised to see them, but they chatted cheerfully with us and that brought us some relief. Our minds were in pretty somber places. Then Elder Pinnaker said softly, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it was very close to this. He said, you know, President Kimball taught us that suffering is the Lord's purifier. So when someone suffers who is already pure, and he pointed at Tanner, like when a child suffers, then something special is going on, something remarkable, because that is what the Savior did. He was pure, and still he suffered. And then he said, Tanner is learning something about the atonement that you and I may never understand. What's happening here is personal. It's between him and the Savior. And you too, you're just innocent bystanders. I can't find the reference, but I once recorded in a college paper I wrote the words of Henry Emerson-Fosdick that may, that has stirred my soul in many of life's circumstances. He taught that what men have need of, most of all in suffering, is not to know the answer, but to know that there is an answer. Elder Pinnaker's testimony that there was divine purpose behind our time in extremis provided us another toe hold against the slipstream of bewilderance that enveloped us. Today, down in Provo, Utah, we have people who we love, who are struggling on the ragged edge of life and death. A sitting counselor in our home wards Bishopric is a remarkable medical doctor who discovered and joined the church mid-career. He now has been sealed in the temple and with his wife is living something very much of a consecrated life. Recently, he contracted ALS as a relatively young man and began the all-too-predictable downward spiral of his physical capacities accompanied by a corresponding spiritual ascendance. He is a mensch and he's always been a little bigger than life. It's a blessing to see him demonstrate how to purposely continue to conduct a life well-lived, even well-living in extremis. The other night, my wife and I spent a socially distanced evening with this couple talking across a small backyard fire as they introduced us to roasting wolfums, a campfire treat that you should discover too. Toward the end of the evening, I told him of this impending talk that I was going to have with you today. I said, what can you tell me about being ministered to in extremis? He said some unsurprising things but with surprising urgency. He said, be a friend, listen, come around, be there, look for opportunities and conversation to share your faith. We can lift each other if we just show up. He said, you know many youth have told me through the years that their faith was weak. When their faith was weak, they would be strengthened when they heard me speak of mine. Now I find that I need that strength from them and from others. Then he said something that I'm going to have to work to fully understand. He said, practice humility. Don't just say you understand, just try to understand. He might have been paraphrasing the Harvard philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich who explained that, quote, love listens. It is its first task to listen, end quote. So my friend's wife softly added, you know, he is a friend to everyone but he needs friends too. A while ago a close family member called us and said what we all often say, if there's anything I can do, she said, but in contrast one of our neighbors, another medical doctor in our ward, sent him a long text that read something like, I remember the times that we'd been together, usually serving. I remember that hike we went on to explain the place, when, and he explained some details. I remember conversations we've had, conversations about and then he provided detail after detail. And then he closed saying, we have lived and loved and served together. You are my brother and I love you. Well, that expression of particularized love and support has moved and motivated him more, she said, than all of the offers of nondescript help that he's received. In a 1987 Ensign article about my chaplain friend Claude Newby, there is a poignant vision painted of this kind of ministering. The story reports simply that, quote, there was the recently married soldier, suspended face down from a hospital rack in Vietnam, dying. Brother Newby lay on the floor and looked up into his eyes and offered what comfort he could, end quote. I commented earlier that different people approach death and dying in different ways. My physician friend with ALS is not going to go quietly into the night. He has a close and dear friend who is a professed atheist. Somewhere along the line, this man was deeply disappointed by a member of clergy and became alienated from his belief. Not mentioning him by name, my friend's wife told us that he is now angry about the injustice of her husband's ALS. He's been calling everyone, searching and researching, non-traditional therapies, traditional therapies, grasping for potential treatments. He's been in a rage searching for answers. Finally, our sick friend told him, you know, you've got to stop being so angry. There is no cure for ALS. I'm at peace. I'm at peace with God. I'm fine. I will be fine after a little pause. The friend emailed later saying, essentially, okay, then when we talk on our weekly calls, bring your scriptures and tell me about your relationship with God. My friend isn't just coping. He's bringing meaning to his suffering. Even in extremis, he is about the work of salvation. I have a college friend in the Pacific Northwest whose son lives in Arizona and is an extreme athlete who suddenly inexplicably collapsed a few weeks ago. This young man is one who is known to run rim to rim to rim back and forth through the Grand Canyon several times a week. Still, it's cancer and he is in desperate circumstances even today. This athlete's father is my very close friend who has, I guess, chaplained me through many of my life's challenges. As we were talking the other day about his son on a ventilator and about his young daughter-in-law and grandchildren tumbling through the chaos, I heard myself say something pathetically like, well, if there's anything I can do. Later in the conversation he spoke of the relative peace that they received from love extended by others. He mentioned a text that he received from one of our mutual college friends. The text simply read, I have blood, bone marrow and money. Take what you need. Well, so what to do? What do you do when your number is called? And you find yourself being the one standing nearby to those whose hands hang down and whose souls are in disorder. I was at Primary Children's Hospital in the middle of one night at our sixth son's bedside when I heard an announcement over the loudspeaker in the hallway asking if there was an available LDS elder. If so, please proceed to room 512 or whatever it was. Well, Tanner was sleeping sadly and I was not. And so I wound through the silent hallways to that room, not really knowing what I would find. Inside was a young father in an expensive cardigan, sweater, slumped in his chair as I entered the room. I heard someone here needed help. He leaned forward. Yes, our daughter. I saw the child laying there and I assumed that he knew about the request for a blessing but I couldn't tell whether he was a member or not. I thought maybe not. And so I said, well, I can help. Would you like to help? And then he shocked me by how quickly he came to his feet and said with such urgency, anything, anything. Hell, he wasn't a member and he didn't know what I was proposing to do but I was there to help and his response was absolutely authentic. Like my friend's friend, he said in that word, anything. Essentially, I have blood, bone marrow and money, take what you need and I think he was emoting even more for my life. I once home taught a family who lost a child under horrific circumstances to which we were witness. During the following days I felt a need to be there with them as their home teacher and I spent a lot of time in their home mostly wondering what I could do to help beyond talk. But there was nothing to do just be there. But down the street lived the Esplan family. Cheryl Esplan would eventually be a general officer in the church but then she was just Cheryl. One day while I was in the family's living room trying to offer a little comfort and talking, Cheryl came in without a word, found the vacuum cleaner and went to work. I thought, oh my, why didn't I think of that? I could have done that. The next time I saw her she was walking out the door with a large cardboard box full of all of the shoes from all of the closets in the house. She carried them home and then a few hours later brought them back each highly shined and I thought, well what a great idea. Why didn't I think of that? I've been in the Army. I was the soldier of the year. I'm a great shoe shiner and while I was thinking about still this other missed opportunity to serve and express love, I heard the lawnmower start. Of course it was Cheryl who never asked once if there was anything she could do. She just did and did and did. The Apostle Paul knew something of living and ultimately dying in extremis. He would wake up in the morning in relative comfort and before breakfast he would typically find himself variously crushed by violent waves, shipwrecked, arrested, persecuted, stoned, robbed, betrayed, whipped or caned. But in his letter to the Philippians he describes how he coped in a world seemingly set upon his annihilation. The NIV translates his counsel as, do not be anxious about anything. In the King James version it says, be careful for nothing. I think a modern translator might have him saying, don't worry be happy, which is all easy enough to say if one is safe and secure in the arms of family and out of danger. But this was the Apostle Paul speaking and nothing was easy for him. He was none of those things, rarely safe, never out of danger. And so it is helpful to see where an Apostle goes, what an Apostle does when he's staring into the abyss. Paul explains how he was able to find peace even in the face of the unknown. He taught, be careful for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ. Prayer and thanksgiving. If we can find focus to turn each other's thoughts to the Savior we will see in his face the outlines of hope. He knows the causes of all of our pains and has experienced in his own, very own nerve endings their outer extremities. His knowing everything includes both the rotations of galaxies and the perfect firsthand awareness of your personal pain and concern. If anyone could ever be dismissive of what's bothering you it could never be him. That second piece of Paul's advice to be thankful has also proven helpful to us as we've struggled with our son's mortality. At some point we were able to truthfully answer a clarifying question. If you've been given the choice to have 12 years with this son even at this cost would you have said yes. We've come to see it as one of the greatest blessings of our lives to have been trusted to walk to the edge with him. I've been inspired by seeing what another apostle, where another apostle went when in extremists Elder Russell M. Russell Ballard spoke in general conference about the sorrow suffered by his great grandfather Joseph F. Smith at the loss of so many during his lifetime. That year was particularly painful for him. He grieved over the death toll of the great world war that continued to climb to over 20 million people killed. Additionally a flu pandemic was spreading around the world taking the lives of as many as a hundred million people. During the year President Smith also lost three more precious family members. Elder Hiram Max Smith of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, his firstborn and my grandfather, this is Elder Ballard speaking, died suddenly of a ruptured appendix. President Smith wrote quote, I am speechless, numb with grief, my heart is broken and flutters for life. Oh, I loved him. I will love him forevermore. End quote. Those struggles and devastating personal losses took President Smith to his knees. Interestingly it was about six months into the Spanish flu pandemic when section 138 was received. Today we are about six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. So again, where does a profit go when his back is against the wall? President Smith answers that question in Doctrine and Covenants section 138 because this passage of scripture is for him autobiographical. He explains that he went to ponder the great atoning sacrifice that was made by the Son of God for the redemption of the world. End quote. He goes on to describe several truths that he learned in that revelation that spoke to him during the dark and troubling life events he was suffering. One, he saw as a first-hand witness that there is life after death. Life is not merely a flickering candle followed by darkness. His recorded witness has strong evidentiary value. In the law, if I can be a lawyer for a minute, there is an exception to the hearsay rule called present recollection recorded. A written account is deemed to have enhanced probative value and evidentiary value if it was written contemporaneously to the witnessed event. So this section 138 is that. He was a personal witness to eternal life and immediately recorded the details that he observed. His recall had not been attenuated by time. Two, he saw that the Savior is and will be about his salvific work. Three, that there is purpose for us there. As we gain faith, we will be about strengthening others. We will be shoulder to shoulder with the Savior doing his work. And four, we will be shoulder to shoulder with others, great and small, who will be joined in common effort with the great ones, Adam, the ancient of days, mother Eve with many of her faithful daughters, Abel, Seth, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Elias, Malachi, Elijah, and with the weakened simple who in this life leaned into the service of God. And five, he learned that we can bless the lives of our dead from here. And he noted that, quote, they missed their bodies, end quote. As we perform temple ordinances for them and their family members, we connect ourselves to their highest concerns. Joseph F. Smith's uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., had to endure a life on the edge. Even so, section 128 of the Doctrine and Covenants is part epistle, part sermon, and part poetry. Joseph Smith, who lived his life in extremis, is exalting in the hope and the promise of the plan of salvation. He rehearses the great events of the Restoration of the Gospel, locking into place and putting into our reach all of the blessings of the Atonement for us and for our dying and dead. In verse 20 of section 128, he says, and again, what do we hear? Glad tidings from Camorra. Maroni, an angel from heaven, declaring the fulfillment of the prophets, the book to be revealed, the voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, declaring the three witnesses to bear witness of the book, the voice of Michael on the banks of the sesquihanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light, the voice of Peter, James and John in the wilderness between Harmony and Colesville, declaring themselves as possessing the keys to the resurrection of the fullness of times. And again, the voice of God in the chamber of Old Father Whitmer in Fayette and at sundry times and in divers places through all the travels and tribulations of this church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exclamation point. And the voice of Michael, the archangel, the voice of Gabriel and of Raphael and the divers angels from Michael or Adam down to the present time, all declaring their rights, their keys, their honors, their majesty and glory and the power of their priesthood, given line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, giving us consolation by holding forth that which is to come, confirming our hope. It's my prayer that we'll be faithful ministers to those who suffer by being goodly teachers and comforters and doers and testifiers, bearers of hope and disciples of light. To those who stand at the edge of mortality, perhaps the most comforting promise in all of scripture, affirmed at least five times in the Book of Mormon alone is the phrase, to go out no more. Alma chapter 7 offers this comfort and this covenant. It says, may the Lord bless you and keep your garments spotless, that you may at last be brought to sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the holy prophets who have been ever since the world began. Having your garments spotless, even as their garments are spotless in the kingdom of heaven, to go no more out. It is my testimony that however dark the night an eternal morning together in covenant and promise awaits in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.