IF YE ARE NOT PREPARED YE SHALL FEAR

IF YE ARE [NOT] PREPARED YE SHALL … FEAR

… if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.
D&C 38:30 (emphasis added)

The table. The table at the student union. Our table, where Chuck, Ed, Rick, and I would meet before, between, and after classes. It was not long before a girl was joining us. Chuck’s friend, Carolyn. Then her two room-mates. We dated, but not each other. Except for Chuck and Carolyn, but not for long. Rather, we told each other about our dates. We became good friends. Real good. But friends only. Our table at the union is where those friendships were formed and shared.

Carolyn was the leader. Bubbly, happy, center of every conversation Carolyn. She was also the most perceptive. It was late Spring semester; finals were just beginning to intrude upon our consciousness. All the seats around our table were full.

“Bob, we’re probably not going to see each other ever again after this semester.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I’m transferring to State. You’re not coming back either.”

She proved prophetic. None of us have ever seen each other again in person. She ended with, “Let’s do something, you and I.”

“How about all of us?”

“We can do that too …”

As with most people, I think, I had a “Secret Garden,” a retreat from the world that I imagined that only I knew about. Mine was a remote section of seashore, a stretch of beach and sand dunes, rocks, tide pools and miniature bayous, next to a riptide so powerful that swimming there was automatic suicide. Hence its isolation and primeval beauty.

I took Carolyn there. It was cold. And overcast. And windy – a coat plus sweater day. We romped along the shoreline at first, skirting the tide as it rushed ashore and retreated, hurling mounds of seaweed up onto the beach. We came at low tide – we explored tide pools teeming with life, admiring the flower-like anemone, watching one successfully lure lunch into its clutches. We soon retreated to the dunes, found some protection from the wind, and perched ourselves on a pair of low-lying rocks. The ivy was in full bloom, the wildflowers, grasses, and cat-tails at their spring-time finest. Red-winged blackbirds, hummingbirds, gulls, and cormorants were flitting and gliding everywhere. The aura of beauty and tranquility succeeded in over-riding the bone-chilling weather that day.

“Bob, you’re different. I like that difference, and I think I’ve finally figured out what makes you that way. It’s your religion, isn’t it. Tell me about your religion.”

I was not the perceptive one. I was blind-sided. “Well,” I hesitatingly began, not at all certain of what was going to come next. “Well, we believe that God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are separate Beings, not three in one like others believe …”

“Makes sense. Tell me more.”

With all the wisdom of an 18 year old going on 13, I made a wisecrack. I don’t now remember what it was, but it broke the mood, exposing my nervousness. Carolyn, sensitive and compassionate as well, began praising the beauty of the surroundings.

It has been fifty years. Try as I might, I cannot recall her last name. Tears of remorse still form as I contemplate the experience. I pray quite often, and it is up into the hundreds of times by now, that she be given another chance.