I was looking for something in my e-mail archive and found this long forgotten e-mail from Grant who had written down the following conversation with five year old Sam…
October 9, 2006 (Monday Evening)
I began playing a song on the piano, improvising like I often do, and Sam walked into the room. When Sam entered, I began adding words to the song that I thought he might like:
“I remember when Sammy was born, a beautiful boy. I remember rocking him to sleep, and singing to him, and reading to him. I remember walking him in the stroller. I remember teaching him the commandments, and learning about Jesus with Sammy my boy…” (words to this effect; the music was a simple progression of chords repeated a few times).
To my surprise, Sam began to cry. He walked over and sat next to me on the piano bench. Embarrassed that he was crying, he buried his face in my shoulder and put his arms around my neck and kept crying. I kept playing. I thought maybe he was feeling guilty for something, or that maybe he didn’t want to go to bed. Then I stopped playing and asked him about it. I was stunned by his response: “It’s just that… I feeled the spirit so much.” He further explained that it made him “warm” and “that’s why I’m crying.”
But he was just getting started.
For the next hour-and-a-half, he spoke to me of the Gospel: Jesus, the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, Moses, sins, repentance, obedience, testimony… he even took out a piece of paper and began writing his testimony: “i love Gesus i fel the sperit” … all this with no prompting from me other than an occasional “really?” “that’s amazing” etc. Then he got on his knees and said a prayer. I sat entranced. I hoped that Candice might overhear and come in, but I didn’t dare move and I couldn’t call out to her for fear that I would interrupt this astounding vision. I could not help but think what it must have been like to have been one of the elderly and learned who sat in the temple every bit as stunned by words that seemed unearthly coming from the lips of a child.
I kept wishing that I had a video camera, a tape recorder… a piece of paper, a pencil… something… anything to record this – but I didn’t want to interrupt the spirit that had overcome him. So I sat motionless in his room. He had led me from the piano to his room so that “nobody else could hear.” Finally, after about 45 minutes of his ceaseless testimony… he began leaving the room for brief periods of time to report to Mom what he was feeling. At one point I followed him, and Candice (also very surprised by the depth and passion of the discourse) recommended that I please record some of this.
So I came into my room, sat on the bed, opened the laptop computer, and began to record what I remembered. Within minutes, Sam came in, sat on the bed next to us, and proceeded to repeat some of what he had said earlier. He needed no prompting. He was in the same interminable talking mode that we captured on video when he was a toddler preaching a spirited sermon of jibber-jabber. Just as then, he had something of urgent importance to say and it mattered very little who was listening at that point.
He talked – I typed:
“When Dad sang that song, you know, he kind of… see I’ll tell you how I feeled. I thinked back when I was little. And when I thinked back when I was little, I really felt where I was, who I was. You see, sometimes I know that there are sins coming. Let’s say that this is the forceshield and little sins come into this hole, and pretty soon the sins destroy the forceshield. Sins are like little people – they lock your repenting and goodness… and when the goodness goes away, the forceshield comes undone, and all these sins can get into your body.”
…
