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+---
+title: Dem Bones
+---
+
+Life Lessons: We become the sum of our choices.
+
+Thankfully, I've never suffered a broken bone in my life, but Lori and
+several of our children have. The most recent occurrence was Lori's
+wobbly-rock incident at Girl's Camp that resulted in a shiny new
+stainless-steel plate in her left wrist. She now has a small collection
+of metal objects in her body, but I'm not the least bit jealous. I think
+perhaps the artificial lenses in my eyes trump the metal she has in her
+wrist and hip.\
+\
+Lori's broken wrist got me to pondering over the children's broken
+bones. I've decided to write about the time Emily broke her arm. I think
+there is a life lesson in there somewhere, but only where you would
+least expect it.\
+\
+We were living in our first house in American Fork, Utah. It was a
+starter house neighborhood with mostly young families and tons of young
+children roaming the neighborhood. Emily was probably about 5 years old
+at the time. As young kids will do, Emily had climbed a fence and was
+demonstrating her balancing skills by walking like a tight rope walker
+along the top of the fence. I don't remember who the culprit was, but
+some other neighborhood child thought it would be funny to chuck his
+shoe at Emily in an attempt to make her fall off the fence. I don't even
+know if he was successful in hitting his target, but he was successful
+at making Emily fall off the fence. She came home with her forearm bent
+at an impossible angle. It was quite apparent that some bones had been
+broken and we needed to get her to the emergency room in a hurry.\
+\
+Not having a sitter for the other kids, Lori and I loaded up the other
+two children and Emily in the car and headed to the hospital. The
+treatment for the broken arm seemed rather bizarre to me. They put
+Emily's fingers in metal springs that worked like Chinese handcuffs to
+suspend her hand in the air. They then hung a bucket from her elbow and
+started adding water to it to use the weight to stretch her forearm as
+they tried to re-align the broken bones prior to adding the cast. I
+believe they gave Emily some laughing gas to calm her down, but it
+didn't work and she was making a pretty big fuss the whole time. It was
+all very stressful to watch my own child suffer so much and the
+procedure was taking a very long time. Lori suggested that she could
+stay with Emily at the hospital and I could take the other children back
+home. My nerves were a little bit frazzled by the harrowing experience
+so I was glad to comply with the suggestion.\
+\
+I took Ryan and Megan back to the car and loaded them into the back
+seat. Now this was before the days when seat belts and child car seats
+were required and my children were quite used to roaming free whenever
+they were in the car with us. It was also before we were affluent enough
+to afford a car with air-conditioning, so the windows were down as we
+left the hospital parking lot. Not long after leaving the parking lot, I
+could see Megan in my rear-view mirror. She was standing on the seat and
+quite happy with herself for her accomplishment. Recognizing that this
+was a dangerous thing for a three-year-old to do and not wanting to have
+to pay for two broken bones on the same day, I told her fairly firmly to
+sit down on the seat. Well Megan wasn't about to comply while she was
+quite enjoying her newly discovered ability to see the world go by from
+a much better vantage point. I told her again with even more volume and
+probably a good deal of anger in my voice to sit down. Again, no
+result.\
+\
+Because I was driving and Megan was in the back seat, I realized I
+couldn't do much under these circumstances to enforce my command to my
+non-compliant child. So, with a bit of steam coming out of my ears, I
+pulled over to the curb and braked hard to bring the car to a stop. I
+turned around and yelled, "Megan, sit down!" as I rather roughly pushed
+her into a sitting position in the back seat. Megan wasn't any too
+thrilled about this kind of treatment and immediately started to holler
+over the affront to her 3-year-old dignity.\
+\
+Satisfied I had reaffirmed that my authority was not to be trifled with,
+I looked up and discovered I had stopped right in front of a house where
+some kind of barbeque event was going on in the front yard. Everyone in
+the party was looking at me with a look of shock and horror on their
+faces. I was totally mortified to realize that they all had witnessed my
+little tirade in front of their house. Fortunately, this was before the
+days when everyone had cell phones and took videos of such spectacles so
+they could go viral on the internet. However, my shame at being caught
+in the act by so many witnesses was such that I determined to high-tail
+it out of there as fast as I could. I put the car in gear and put the
+pedal to the metal to make my get-away.\
+\
+Thinking about this memory more than 30 years later, I can recognize the
+life lesson I didn't really learn at the time of its occurrence. I
+wasn't really mortified by my lack of gentleness and patience with
+Megan. I was mostly mortified that my little outburst had been seen by
+others. I wonder how I would have behaved if I had remembered that
+everything we do here in mortality is being observed by someone. It all
+goes into the Book of Life and becomes a part of the permanent record.
+Our choices become a part of our soul and the cumulative effect
+determines who we become. I think this is one reason why marriage is
+such a vital part of this mortal experience. We have a built-in witness
+to our lives and a greater motivation to try to behave well in front of
+our companion on the covenant path.