Accomplishing Goals (Part 6 of 9)

I had this idea that when I got back from my mission I would try-out to be the kicker for the BYU football team. I had never even played football. So I felt I had to practice now, before my mission, so I could pick up where I’d left off when I got home. I practiced kicking in my backyard and when that got too small, I’d run over to the football stadium at the high school and practice kicking the football through the goal posts. I guess the whole thing was the same as I thought when I was fifteen. If I can get on the football team, then girls will like me more. Whatever the reason, I became a pretty good kicker, but I never did anything with that skill.
Running was one of my goals. I was planning to run the Deseret News Marathon again that summer, so I wanted to be ready for that. I had a program called The Mile Sprint. I would start out by sprinting for 100 yards and each day increase that by ten yards until I was sprinting one mile. After my mission I could do it again to quickly become the fastest middle distance runner in the world. I’d get myself ready for the 1984 Olympics. That goal didn’t pan out either.
I knew that as a missionary anyone who could play the piano would be in high demand. I set a goal to play five hymns on the piano. I practiced faithfully every day and I did learn five hymns, but they were still a bit shaky. When I was on my mission there were times when I played the piano. In one branch I played their pump organ for Sacrament meeting. I had practiced all week and I thought I had done okay. A young man in the branch came up to me and said, “Don’t ever do that again!”
Another goal was in reading LDS Church books. When I was seventeen my Dad figured I wasn’t reading enough Church books, so he decided to bribe me with a penny for every page that I read. The only catch was that I was to show him a card with the main points I learned from reading the book. He stopped after I presented him with a bill for $32.00 which represented a year’s worth of reading. He paid me that money but said I’d probably do it anyway. He was right, by the time I went on my mission he would have had to pay me well over a hundred dollars. There were heavy and heady books like Daniel H. Lulow’s Doctrine & Covenants commentary and Bruce R. McConkie’s Mortal Messiah. Then there were books which were a lot lighter reading. I had a stack of eight books which I called “The Stack.” I’d read a chapter before going to bed from the book on the top of the stack. Then I’d put it on the bottom. The next night I’d read the top one again. Thus I rotated through all my books that way. When I finished reading a book, I would get another one and start it. If I had a lot of time in a particular day, I’d plan to read a chapter from each book, for all eight books. My parents couldn’t figure out how I kept them all straight, but I did.