Choir Notes

Our Greatest Treasures
From Music and The Spoken Word
Delivered By: Lloyd D. Newell

In 1955, Richard L. Evans, the announcer and writer of The Spoken Word for more than four decades, dedicated a book of messages with these words: To Alice and Our Four Sons, who have helped to make life sweetly cherished. Always, and forever.1 Richard L. Evans was known throughout the world, not only as a broadcaster and writer, but also as a church leader and president of the exceptional community-service organization, Rotary International. He truly spent his life going about doing good.

Throughout it all, he always remembered something that too many people never come to realize, that his most valued contribution, his most important commitment, was to his family. Over 50 years ago on this broadcast he said:

Much of life is made up of things we think we will one day do, of things we postpone, of things we set aside, of things we leave too late. And, one of the things we could best determine to do this day would be for fathers and sons (and daughters) to draw a little nearer, to come a little closer, to take a little more time for a closer kind of companionship with those who mean the most.

Too many of us wait too long for the cherished times together, for the intimate outings, for the quiet hours of an evening, for the fuller talking out of personal problems with the close confidence of an understanding heart. It's not so much the sending, it's not so much the preaching of the precepts, it's not altogether even the providing, but the going with, the doing with. the being with that brings a closer kind of kinship. 2

Time marches on for each of us, especially, it seems, for parents, the children whom we love with all our hearts are too soon grown and gone. But, it's not too late. We can begin today to build a closer relationship with those who are our greatest treasures.

1 From the Crossroads (1955). 5.
2 From the Crossroads. 121. ©1955. Used by permission of the Richard L. Evans family.