Service

In church today our Priesthood lesson was on service and charity.  The first thing that came to my mind was Ray Sadlier.  I was married to his Daughter and worked with him doing Heating and Air-conditioning.  He was by far the smartest man I ever met at HVAC.  I will always be thankful to this man for the things he taught me.

You might think I am talking about HVAC and I am grateful for him teaching me about that.  The things I am most grateful for are the time we spent talking, I did not fully realize the impact our talks had on me.  We talked about many things, Heavenly Father, the Gospel, Family, Stories, and Poems.

It did not matter what we talked about ray had a way of relating it to a scripture or a poem or a story.  He never seemed to be short on words but I knew he also listened to me and cared about what I had to say.  I learned so much from our discussions.  Sometimes he would just tell stories and jokes.  He was quite the prankster he loved playing pranks.  I could go on for hours about Ray Sadlier.

Ray truly loved every one I never knew of him hating anyone.  There were times he really disliked some things people done.  I am sure I even done some things he did not approve of.  I saw times when people would take advantage of his good nature but he would just say something like (well I am sure they did not mean to) or he might say (they are good people they just don’t really know.)  I asked him on many occasions how he could still like that person after what they have done or how they were.  He always had a good answer then I usually felt bad for thinking the way I did.

Service was just an everyday thing for Ray before work most of the time he would need to stop by someone’s place to do something.  We would go on a service call to look at their furnace and end up fixing there washer or dryer or stove or even a leaky faucets sometimes all of the above and never charging what it was worth or most of the time he did it for free.  We would go on a bid and quite a few times he would bid the job cheaper than we could even buy the materials.  He would tell me he just figured they needed the help.

We sometimes ended up with things we could never use in a trade.  I know he knew that some people would not let him do it for free so he would see something they had stuffed in a corner.  He would act like that was something we had been looking for and get really excited and see if they would like to do some trading.  He was extremely good at this it took at least a year for me to catch on to why he wanted all this junk.

I learned a lot about helping people being around Ray.  Ray told me that we all had talents and specific skills and it was great that we could use them to make a living for our families but if we don’t use them to help others we were wasting them talents and skills.

I am sure there is much more service he had done in his life that no one knows about.  Thank you Ray for being such a great example in my life I don’t think there is a day that goes by without me thinking of you.