The Real World

When we go to our Sunday meetings, when we go to the temple, when we attend stake or regional conferences, we often feel that we are in another place, a place removed from the cares and problems of daily life: A place of temporary respite from the pressures and demands of earning a living, commuting to work, from overbearing and sometimes unreasonable managers and rude co-workers, from impossible deadlines, discourtesy, crudity, immorality, and depravity.

Thirty-Five Cents

Some years ago, our family went to California to see "Phantom of the Opera" in San Francisco. We stayed with my brother, Harold, in Antioch and rode the Bay area Rapid Transit (BART) train to San Francisco. It stopped just a couple of blocks from our destination. The production was sublime, and we were all in a happy mood walking back to the BART stop when an obviously homeless man said to me: “I need thirty-five cents to have enough for a hamburger at Burger King.” I brushed him off, to my eternal regret, because he made the same request of my daughter, Marie, who was right behind me. She gave him what he asked, and he walked straight across the street and into Burger King.