LDS Podcast "Latter-Day Lights" - Inspirational LDS Stories

The Incredible Power of Love and How It Can Save Lives: Bob Rees' Story - Latter-Day Lights

• Scott Brandley and Alisha Coakley

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In this episode, Bob Rees shares his touching story of growing up in the great depression, being abandoned by his mother as a child, put in foster care, and then rescued by his father when he came back from the war.

As he grew up, he joined the church and became a faithful member, having compassion for those in need, and a desire to help and serve them. 

When he discovered that there were members of the church in 3rd world countries who's children were dying from malnutrition, he knew he needed to do something about it, and so he started the Bountiful Children's Foundation.

This is a story of hope and inspiration that needs to be shared!

*** Please SHARE Bob's story and help us spread hope and light to others. ***

To WATCH this episode on YouTube, visit: https://youtu.be/u37v-RbrHiw
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To LEARN more about the Bountiful Children's Foundation and how you can help, visit (direct link): https://bountifulchildren.org/

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Also, if you have a faith-promoting or inspiring story, or know someone who does, please let us know by going to https://www.latterdaylights.com and reaching out to us.


Scott Brandley:

Hi everyone, I'm Scott Brandley.

Alisha Coakley:

And I'm Alisha Coakley. Every member of the church has a story to share, one that can instill faith, invite growth and inspire others.

Scott Brandley:

On today's episode, we're going to hear how one man, born during the Great Depression and raised in poverty, has spent his life fighting injustice, by serving others and sharing God's love. Welcome to Latter-day Lights. Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Latter-day Lights. We're so glad that you're here with us and we're really excited to introduce our guest today, Bob Reese. Bob, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Scott. Thank you so much.

Alisha Coakley:

Awesome. Well, we are super, super honored to have you. We heard that you have a foundation called the Bountiful Children's Foundation, and today you're going to share a little bit of your story, your background and how that came to fruition and what that's about, and so we're super super excited. Scott and I love causes. We've had the Markovia Project come on here and stuff, and we've had some other guests who, like you, are just wanting to go and share light to the world, and so they've started these nonprofits and these organizations and foundations that really just do good in the world, and so we're so excited to hear about it. It just these are like my favorite episodes. I honestly love these so much. It's so inspiring to me. So, but before we get started with all of that, Bob, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Bob Reese:

Essentially, I'm a scholar and teacher. I've taught for 60 years at some of the world's great universities UCLA, UC, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, University of Wisconsin and I've fallen in love with literature and the arts and the humanities so that I feel guilty having been paid to do something that I love so much. And I've also, from the age of 10, when I first heard about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I have been a devoted Christian and lettered, they say, spend a good deal of my time working, teaching about the Gospel, writing publishing articles and books and essays and poetry relating to the broader world of religion and spirituality and the restoration, and so that's most of what I have spent my life doing.

Bob Reese:

Wow that's awesome.

Alisha Coakley:

Now married kids, grandkids. Where do you live?

Bob Reese:

Yes, I was married for 51 years to a woman, ruth Reese, who passed away 12 years ago, and we had four children. Five years ago I married Gloria Gardner, who had six children, so between us we have 10 children and 19 grandchildren, and then it's really a wonderful joint family. Our kids and grandkids love one another and that's just a great joy.

Alisha Coakley:

That is awesome, and you are over in California, correct?

Bob Reese:

We lived just north of San Francisco in Marin County and very involved in interfaith work here, and then some of the other causes relating to this. That has been convenient because I the past 10 years, 12 years, I've been teaching Mormonism at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I just retired from that. For the past 12 years I have been teaching at the nation's great theological universities.

Alisha Coakley:

That is awesome. So you do know that most people retire right, but you don't have any plans for that, do you?

Scott Brandley:

I got 65.

Alisha Coakley:

I know you're a little bit past your retirement age now and you just do. You have any plans to stop or are you just going to keep going until you're taken?

Bob Reese:

Yes, well, I figured my new retirement date is 95. So I can get everything done by then. I'll just sit back if I probably won't.

Scott Brandley:

That's so cool. Well, bob, we're really excited to hear your story. Like Alisha said, we love to hear stories about good causes and especially how they were started and why, and so we're going to turn the time over to you to share your story with us today.

Bob Reese:

Well, thank you. I suppose in a sense my story with Bountiful begins a number of years ago, when I was born during the Great Depression and grew up very poor. I was blessed to have a father who, when he was my family, was extremely disjointed. From the time I was a toddler, my parents divorced and married and remarried over the years. Almost everyone in my family was alcoholic and that created a very turbulent life. My father came home from Second World War when I was 10 and rescued me from a foster home where I'd been placed. When my mother abandoned my older brother and me, that began really kind of a change from a kind of godless violence and really I don't know a number of words that could describe that kind of childhood.

Bob Reese:

But when my father told me about the gospel, I had what in literature we call a shock recognition, which is that something very powerful said to me that this was true and it was such a contrast to the life that I had had for the first decade of my life that really changed me. I felt the beauty and the truth of Jesus very early in my life, even though my family's life continued to fall apart. As I said, they were alcoholics and just were not capable of keeping marriages or families very much together. But that faith I planted early in my life was very strong and I remembered age 15, getting up and riding the bus by myself to church, to the Long Beach First Ward, and just finding there the kind of stability and love that I often did not find in my home and that set me on a trajectory of devotion to the gospel and devotion to what I would call the higher life of a Christian, which is to bring Christ's life into real practice in the real world. I think that I look back at turning point. Now they say that they're turning points in everyone's life. One of the turning points in my life was not only when my father rescued me from the foster home that I was in, but when I received a patriarchal blessing when I was 15, at that time, as I said, I was the only one in my family going to church and things were falling apart. The patriarch, who knew nothing about me he lived 90 miles from my home to know nothing about my family many stands on my head and said a number of remarkable things, one of which was I was blessed with an understanding heart and admonished to give helping and understanding heart to others. So that's been part of my life from that time. It took some time in my mature years for me to fully understand it, but I I do remember in my childhood, stray people and stray dogs were brought home. We took them in and took care of them.

Bob Reese:

I remember once when I was teaching at UCLA, my wife's mother came to stay with us and she became ill and we were able to get a nurse, or a doctor actually, who had been trained in someplace in Central America to come and help take care of her. She said I've got some family who are just coming into the States. Can they stay here? We said sure, for a couple of days I think we had 14 illegal aliens sleeping in our bedrooms and our garages and offices. Anyway, you always have a home, you always have an extra meal, you always have time and love for people who need it.

Bob Reese:

So I was very involved in the civil rights movement and during the 60s and 70s I was very involved in the inner space of the racial issue with the Latter-day Saints church and was very involved in both writing and speaking about how we could find a more enlightened theology in terms of dealing with minority populations. I became very involved 50 years ago when I was editing Dialogue, a journal of Mormon thought. I published the first essay personal essay ever written by a gay Latter-day Saint. In reading it changed my life because I realized here were a group of people who were marginalized, who were treated as less than a fully human, many of them kicked out of their homes or disowned by their parents, sometimes not made space for in the hearts or the congregations of other Latter-day Saints. So I have been very involved in trying to bring understanding between Latter-day Saints and the LGBT community. I still am still working in that community, but about 16, 17 years ago I read an essay in Dialogue I think it was called Moving Zion Southward and it was written by a doctor, bradley Walker, who talked about an experience.

Bob Reese:

He had served a mission in South America. He was, I believe, in Ecuador and was at a church meeting. There was a doctor there and part of that congregation, and the doctor invited him to go to the hospital with him where there was a severely malnourished Latter-day Saint child. And Bradley went and saw that child and saw that child die and so changed him. He wrote this article about it, about how we can move Zion into the parts of the developing world where it is so sorely needed. And when I read the article I called him and said I want to be a part of whatever you do. I have a foundation that I would like to turn over to this cause and we can make it a foundation and we can raise money and we can start taking care of malnourished Latter-day Saint children. Initially it was called the Liahona Children's Foundation and later, about six or seven years ago, the church, because the church has a publication called Liahona. They wanted us to change it and so we changed it to the Bountiful Children's Foundation.

Bob Reese:

We started with that one congregation in Ecuador and we are now in 200 communities, congregations in 20 countries in the developed world, from Mongolia to Madagascar and from the Philippines to Peru, and we have one essential function and purpose is to raise money to feed Latter-day Saint and other children.

Bob Reese:

We screen children, we set up screenings through the stakes and missions and areas and we come to an award house on a particular day or another space. We intake the children, we get their names, their ages, their gender, we weigh them and measure them and we can tell within a few minutes the degree which they're malnourished and if they are moderately or severely malnourished, we begin providing supplements for them. We also provide supplements for pregnant women and for nursing mothers, because that also has a profound effect on the infants and the babies who are not getting sufficient food. And so we started doing that and we have grown, essentially by asking Latter-day Saints to donate money to Boundiful Children's Foundation, which you can do by just go to BoundifulChildrenorg and there you can find an opportunity to volunteer or to contribute to this work. One of the amazing things about this work is that we can provide the nutritional supplements for a child a malnourished child for an entire year for $100. Really.

Bob Reese:

In other words, you can change and save a child's life the reason we focus on the first 1000 days we would do a longer if we had the money, but the first 1000 days is a critical time when a child's body and brain develops. If you miss that 1000 days, you've missed it forever. A child who is malnourished, his or her brain will not develop so that he or she has the mental and cognitive capacity to truly function in the world. Really, we focus on those first 1000 days because if we miss it, we miss it. I must say that a number of years ago, when I was teaching a group of students in Utah about our program and I mentioned this, there was a doctor from the Philippines and her husband was with her. He said I just realized the power of what you said.

Bob Reese:

I work in the Seminary Institute programs and as I go around I'm sometimes astonished and surprised by the lack of mental acuity that some of the students have and even some of the leaders. He said I realized that when they were young people and they were starving and they didn't get nutrition, it affected them and it affects them for the rest of their lives During that critical period. We decided to focus our attention on that period, but malnutrition lasts longer than that. We hope that we can get to the point where we can address malnutrition among our children, even to at least to a point that go back to school.

Alisha Coakley:

Wow.

Bob Reese:

I must say it is among the most joyful and beautiful work my wife and I have ever done. It is something quite remarkable to go into a country that we were most recently in Guatemala and I did a number of screenings when we were there, some at a chapel, some in people's homes and to see these loving parents bring their children, the children that they have not had the means to provide, even though they're good and faithful and hardworking people. So much of the developed world lives in poverty. Malnutrition is one of the great misfortunes for the human family and we've made a lot of progress. Malnutrition has been reduced over the past few decades, but it's still an enormous problem. So to see these parents bring these sweet little babies, sometimes still in diapers or other toddlers and we measure them, we weigh them and we send them home with nutritional supplements a gladness of heart that you can see on the faces of their parents. I often, when we begin one of these screenings, I say this is a good news day. We're going to evaluate your children, see how malnourished they are. If they're not malnourished, that's really good news. But if they are malnourished, the good news is we have a solution that can help address that malnutrition and to see the look on these parents' faces, the hope, the joy to think that something is coming to help their child. Right behind me is a painting called the Comforting Angel by Franz Schwartz. It's a picture of an angel comforting Jesus. It's one of my favorite paintings because I believe that all of us who love and follow Jesus want to comfort him when the world is terrible, when things go bad, when people suffer and we can't do something to help. I think the kind of loving work that we do as Christians, as Latter-day Saints, if it's in our communities, in our families, if it's in a place like Guatemala or Ecuador or Malatná or Gascar, wherever it is, I think we comfort the Lord by comforting His children.

Bob Reese:

Gloria and I were. Five years ago we went to Madagascar. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. It's been ravaged over centuries by people who've taken its timber and its other resources. People live, I think, on something. The average they come with something like a couple of dollars a day.

Bob Reese:

So we screen children. We've been there for a couple of weeks and as we screen children from place to place, the lowest level of malnutrition we found was 55%. The highest was 95%. That means that for the majority of these children we're not getting the nutritional supplements necessary for them to survive. Many do not survive, I'm sorry to say, but I'm very pleased that as we've developed this program, as we've perfected it, we have really good records. We have a number of physicians and other specialists on our team that help us teach parents how to teach parents about nutrition so they learn how to do that, how to give their children the right foods. We teach them how to look for signs of sickness so they can address them. We go back in six months and re-screen the children so we can see what's been happening. It's just wonderful to see what six months of nutrition does to a child who might be sickly and then you see them running around six months later in a much better place. The whole idea.

Bob Reese:

My teacher at BYU, hugh Nibley, said if you have more than you need, you're wealthy, which means that all of us living in the developed world are wealthy. We all have more than we need. As I said in a recent presentation I gave, we have homes where many bedrooms go empty at night. We drive the cars and pass by the homeless. We do a number of things that give evidence of our wealth and our well-being and our security. We're asking people just to make small sacrifices. Gloria and I decided two years ago that if we made small sacrifices we could save $100 a month. Gloria now cuts my hair. I wash our cars, we're about to eat, we share an entree. We're doing a number of little things to save $100 a month. That means we can save the lives of 12 children in a year for just $1200. Most people, by just being a little bit careful, can save that money. You can put a jar on the middle of the table and when people come home they can put their extra change in it. There are so many ways in which we could make small sacrifices.

Bob Reese:

We started something. I speak at the Sunstone Symposium every year and talk about the work of Bountiful there. We started a year ago called King Benjamin's Challenge. King Benjamin said we couldn't let our children go hungry. Our challenge to people was to save $100 a month and you can save the lives of 12 children, even giving children to save their pennies or their dimes and dollars or whatever it is.

Bob Reese:

One of the things that's remarkable is that most of the people that we see in the developing world as we've traveled all over these countries Colombia and Peru and Haiti, the Philippines and elsewhere. These families who are bringing their children to us, most of them pay tithes and offerings. They're very faithful people. They love the Lord, they love the Church, they love their families, and when we can do something to help them, it just makes a marvelous difference in their lives.

Bob Reese:

One of the really beautiful things about this story is that last year the Church began partnering with us, and first in Guatemala. Last year, the Church said we'll pay for the supplements for the children in Guatemala, and that means you can use the money you're raising to open other places and to do more. This year, the Church is providing supplements in the Philippines, in Central America and in West Africa, where we have a growing program. Partnering with the Church has been a great blessing to us. It's allowing us to open more countries. Next year, we hope to open three or four new countries in the South Pacific and open more countries in Africa and elsewhere, because at present we're reaching less than 10% of the Malinore's children in the Church. We are trying very hard to expand our work and again, it is the small sacrifices, the generous donations of Latter-day Saints that make it possible for us to do this work.

Alisha Coakley:

So I have so many thoughts. I'm sorry I'm going to be kind of all over the place, but my first thought was you mentioned you literally were born into hardship. The world was going through a hardship with the Great Depression when you were born. During that time, the fact that you had that separated family, your dad going off to war you definitely you started out in a struggle, correct? And I love so much how you talked about when you were 15 and you had that patriarchal blessing that told you right away that you had that understanding heart.

Alisha Coakley:

Because I think a lot of the times when, especially as teenagers that have grown up in maybe less than ideal situations, I understand the feeling of having a parent that struggles with alcoholism. It's not something that just the parent struggles with. It definitely bleeds out onto the rest of the family. And I think about how my own patriarchal blessing I was a little older, I think I was about 17 when I got mine but it showed me things and it told me things that I didn't see in myself at the time.

Alisha Coakley:

I remember hearing certain things in my blessing and I was like he's got it wrong. I remember thinking like that is not me at all. But over the years. As I continue to go through and I look at it, I'm like, wow, I have become that very description that I was given all these years ago by someone who didn't know me, and I think sometimes the power of getting our patriarchal blessings at younger ages is that it allows us to see a little bit more of who our Heavenly Father sees in us, and so it's almost like I don't want to call it like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it's kind of like it shows us things that maybe nobody else was able to show us about it. It shows us a lot of things that we've got ourselves.

Alisha Coakley:

It tells us kind of a word Good, thank you. Well, I was just gonna say it kind of gives us a starting point, right, like to be like. Oh well, in your case you have an understanding heart. So how many times did that part of your blessing pop into your mind when you were faced with a decision to do something that was either selfish or kind, you know?

Bob Reese:

In a way, you know, I had a state president who said patriarchal blessing is given to you to make it come true. It isn't just something that's passive, you sit and wait for it to happen. And in my case, that same patriarch. You know I give you some idea of my family background. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. There was no focus on education in the home I grew up in. There was no art or music or literature. But the patriarch said to me words that I didn't understand at the time. He said you've been blessed with beautiful gifts, the beautiful music, the beautiful thought, the beautiful literature and the higher and finer things of life. And my whole life unfolded from that. As I have been a teacher of literature, a teacher of philosophy, as I have been involved in the fine arts most of my life I was assistant dean of fine arts at UCLA and I set up a program with the Royal College of Art in London, the Royal College of Music, and that whole world was so absolutely foreign to my childhood. There was nothing in my childhood that could have been characterized as that. But somehow the patriarch saw something in me that I didn't and couldn't have seen in myself. But I think the other beautiful thing about the gospel is that Jesus promises all of us an understanding heart and he calls us to have an understanding heart. That great teaching.

Bob Reese:

I just have written and spoken about Jesus' last two great teachings. One is the 25th chapter of Saint Matthew, where he talks about the least of these. Jesus is saying to us whoever you think is the least in the world, whether it's somebody who's a different color, or somebody who's not as smart as you, or somebody who is whatever, whoever you see them, if you see there is the least among you, you're seeing me, that's Jesus. That you're seeing, that's Jesus. You're not giving a meal to, that's Jesus. You're not taking into your home and into your heart.

Bob Reese:

And so Jesus calls us it is the great calling of a Christian is to have a Christian heart, to have an understanding heart, to have a giving heart, to have a serving heart, and so we are all born in that capacity. The light which has given us, the light of the gospel, is also love. There is, I think, some connection between light and love, and as we let light in us, it promises it can go brighter and brighter to the perfect day. The same thing with love. Love is necessary to grow and grow and grow so that we do love others as ourself and we do love our enemies and we love the people who other people consider loveless, because that is what Jesus did for us. And so that thing within us, whether it's the patriarchal blessing or simply the blessing of the gospel of Jesus Christ, has the power to empower us to love others, to give to them generous light, to help them, whatever our church understands.

Scott Brandley:

So I got one. So I don't know. I feel very fortunate. I've been able to go and do some philanthropy in Kenya and in Guatemala.

Scott Brandley:

I felt an orphanage in Guatemala and I've gone and seen a feeding program similar to what you guys do, where they go and they help provide new mothers, young mothers, with food and with different formula and things for their babies.

Scott Brandley:

It's just so humbling because, like you said earlier, we have so much here and I've been to Guatemala twice, kenya twice, but the second time I took my kids because I wanted them to see it because you just don't truly understand, you can't really appreciate just how much we have and how much we take for granted until you go and you see how little a lot of the rest of the world has. So I'm grateful that there's people like you that are willing to go out and just do what other people maybe not that they can't do, but they don't have that heart right. They just aren't willing to go out on a limb and just put everything out there and make it happen. So my other thought was so you said you had people that help you. Are they like doctors and nurses and things that go with you? Do they donate their time. How does that work?

Bob Reese:

We have a group of people on our staff, including BYU professors, who donate their time to help us with the work of the foundation. When we go to these places, we often will bring local doctors or nurses, or sometimes we work with a local clinic. But we have sometimes I've been in screenings where I've picked up a child and I said get the child through doctor. I could tell by seeing this child being so emaciated If it's a very serious problem. We do get immediate medical care. We also try to work with government clinics and other organizations that might have resources that we can use. As I mentioned, we have physicians and social workers, people who are trained in volunteer humanitarian work, who are on our staff. Almost everyone works for the foundation as a volunteer we have from the beginning we've said that 95% of people's donations will go to feeding children. We're very careful about how we manage those funds. We also have as questioned people. We have what we call nutrition tours, where you take people who are interested in going and seeing what's happening on the ground. When we went to Madagascar, when we went to Guatemala last year, when I've been to Colombia and to Haiti and to the Philippines and to other countries, we've had people go who want to go and participate in the work. That's always a wonderful thing to have people come and use their hands to pick up children, to weigh them, to measure them, to tickle them, to kiss them, to do all the things that you feel inclined to do. So, yes, it does make a difference when people can see the degree of poverty firsthand. When we were in Guatemala, we went to visit a couple of families and all they had for water was an open hole in the ground and a bucket to drop it down to bring up very brown water. That was their only. We visited another family, a family of six, a widow or she wasn't a divorced mother with six children. They had no source of income, so we were able to get a little chicken farm started for their family so the kids could take care of chickens and gather eggs and sell them so they could have some protein and a little means of doing this. It takes so little to do that I think we can build a chicken farm for something like six or $800, and almost all of us could come up with that much money to save a family of kids who are in difficult times. So, anyway, it is as I said, I've done lots of things, and I've done lots of things that are exciting and pleasurable and affirming, but there's nothing that I've done that has been more joyful, actually, I mean, it's just this wonderful work Just to be able to hug those kids and do something to help them survive, help them thrive. It's just an enormous blessing. It's waiting for everyone. As I said, we could use a lot more help. We could use lots and lots of donations, but I'm trying to say to people if you just have $100 a year that saves the life of one child, you can do more. You can do that, but just small sacrifices.

Bob Reese:

My wife and I have adopted as our motto Mother Teresa's motto we can do no great things, only small things with great love. It's again, it's what Jesus calls us to do. I've come at this age of my life to feel like, in any situation I'm in, with any person I'm in, within a place I'm in, I have to ask myself one question what is the most loving thing I can do? It's not always easy to answer that, but if we ask the question, what is the most loving thing I can do, we will find an answer, and very often it's an answer, which is found in the Gospels of Jesus Christ, to give of ourselves, to give of our substance, to give of our time. Gloria and I are also part of a prison ministry at San Quentin, where we've gone to spend time nurturing and ministering to people who have been incarcerated for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. There are so many places where, and in every congregation, every congregation, there are people who are lonely, there are people who are hungry, there are people who are estranged from other people. So the bread of life which Jesus gave, which he asked us to give, is a metaphor for life itself, as it was for him. So we're, as I said, we're, dedicated to this work, we love it, we love to share it, we love to have people go with us. We're going to go to Ecuador in January.

Bob Reese:

Ecuador, again, is one of those countries with high level of malnutrition and many times governments are not doing all that they could. Sometimes they are doing all they can but still don't have the resources. When I was in Peru four or five years ago, I was invited to address the Peruvian Congress, the NDA Congress, and I said to them you have tens of thousands of children who are needy out there, who are starving, some of them starving to death. You all could do something and you are in positions of power where you can do. You can help other people do something, and I'm pleased to see that Peru is one of the countries that has seriously addressed malnutrition, but it is. What can I say? If you want to feel good, you can help one of these children, or some of these children, or their mothers or their parents and their priesthood holders.

Bob Reese:

With the church now helping us, it means that we're going to be able to do more.

Bob Reese:

So, partnering with the church and when I served three and a half year mission with my wife in the Baltic states and there again it was right after the fall of the Soviet Union we were able to partner with Karytos, the Catholic charity, and I know our church partners with a lot of humanitarian organizations, but Bountiful is one.

Bob Reese:

It's the only organization I know that is dedicated specifically and entirely to reducing malnutrition among the Latter-day Saint children, by the way, we provide supplements and evaluate any child that comes. So, whether we probably 30 to 40% of the children that we serve are not members of the church, we let people bring their friends, we let people from the community come and bring their children because we want to be able to serve as many children as we can. It's, as I said, it is the gospel and in concrete manifestation, and I sometimes imagine when I'm measuring a child or weighing a child or providing supplements for a child, I like to imagine this child in 20 years or 18 years going on a mission, becoming a much better missionary because their audience is developed, being a much more effective relief society president. And the amazing thing is, for every dollar that you invest, I think the figures are that it returns something like $17 in the future.

Bob Reese:

If you invest a dollar in a child, that child will grow, be brighter, be able to go to school, be able to get secondary education, be able to get training, go on a mission, become, be employable, make a better father or a better mother as an adult. And beautiful thing, be employed and pay back into the church tithing and tithing offering. But they wouldn't be able to pay if they were disadvantaged or had cognitive impairment because they were malnourished. It's such a win-win. Love, love, love that's what it is. It's a beautiful thing.

Alisha Coakley:

I love that so much and one of the things that I was thinking of. Okay, don't judge me, scott. I feel like I've been going through a midlife crisis lately. I'm just like boohoo in my bedroom because I don't know what to do with myself, and I'm in this new place and I'm just like what do I? You know, I'm so used to being in the action and having a lot of things happen and I just feel like none of that has been happening since our move. But I love that and I'm trying to calculate it out. How long has this foundation been running now? About?

Bob Reese:

15, 16 years now.

Alisha Coakley:

Okay. So, and before we started recording, I had asked you your age and you said that you're 87. And so I'm like trying to do the math here and I'm like, okay, so if he started this about 15 years ago or so, you started later in life with this foundation and you're making these amazing changes and you know we joked about you don't know how to retire, so to me it just it kind of shows me how much more life I have to be able to do good. You know like, even though I feel like I'm going through this midlife crisis, it's inspiring to know that you started something. You know older than what I am now, and then look at the amazing things that you were able to do with that, and that's just one of your, one of your foundations. It's just one of the things that you have going on, and I know, when I talk to you on the phone, that you have other things going on as well and that you live by that motto that you said where it's just, how can you show the most love?

Alisha Coakley:

And I really appreciated you referencing the picture behind you, because I don't think I've ever put into his perspective that the savior, he is the savior and he is powerful and he is perfect in every way. But I do imagine that there's times when he, you know, would appreciate the comfort. Maybe he doesn't need it, but maybe you know, just I think as parents sometimes we feel that right, like we can just take care of everybody else's needs. We're like okay, we're good, but once in a while it would be really nice if someone had our back right. And I love thinking that the way I can comfort the savior, the way that I can alleviate a little stress off of his shoulders, is by reaching out and by finding a way that I can show love in the greatest way for somebody else.

Alisha Coakley:

It was just such a beautiful, just picture in my mind and I thought I love that. I love that so much. I don't know what I'm going to do with all of my midlife crisis free time, but knowing that I can do something because you've been doing it is so invigorating, almost Like I feel this little bubble of excitement in my chest, like I can do something. You know I can do something little with a great amount of love, and it could just be. It could be something that could give back in so many different ways, you know. So I just I don't. I don't have a question for you on that, I just love it and I just thought that it was beautiful. So thank you for sharing that Well, I can build on that.

Scott Brandley:

So when? So you must have started this in your seventies, Did you think, man, I'm too old for this? Or were you like, let's bring it on? Let's do this.

Bob Reese:

Yeah, I don't. I don't feel I'm too old. I'll ever be too old to do something that is exciting and giving and loving, because it also much comes back. I am so invigorated by this work. The reason Jesus needs comforting is the same reason we do. He has a heart that breaks. He has a heart and need that can help it feel empathy and pain and sorrow. He sent the disciples. He said I'll send you another comforter, but he also sent them to be comforters. He sent them to go into the world and comfort others. I remember one time doing a Zoom call and I said I'm not that angel that I want to be. I think we comfort Jesus by doing things which lift burdens from his children.

Bob Reese:

I'll take a second to talk about the new foundation that Gloria and I started. It's called Fast Forward for the Future of the Planet. We read something that said challenge are you being good ancestors? We hadn't really thought about the fact that we are going to be ancestors to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What can we do to make the world better for them?

Bob Reese:

One of the things we can do is to address climate issues. You're in Texas, california, wherever you tell us. I see it's going to be over 100 next month, the week when we're there. The world is suffering and we'll continue to suffer because of climate change. What we've done we started this foundation. What we're trying to convince people to do is fast two meals a month on the third weekend of the month and pay an offering of those two meals into some organization that's addressing climate change. We already have a group of Latter-day Saints who've been fasting and we have since the last summer and we're donating our fast offerings to organizations that are addressing climate issues. We figured if we could get 85% of the people believe in some religion, if we could get even 1% of those people to fast two meals a month Buddhists and Catholics and Jews and just pay those pennies into a fund, it could generate $100 million a year. You can really do something significant in terms of addressing climate issues because it will reduce poverty and will reduce starvation. The number of kids who are going to be suffering from malnutrition because of climate change will grow enormously. So it's tough as to do, but it's all good work and it's all fun and it's rewarding. I just can't say how invigorating it is for me to be able to share this with other people, to be able to teach other people how to do this, to be able to hopefully inspire them to do more. But Jesus is saying look around, somebody is in need and you don't have to look far. If you look far enough, like in Gascar or Guatemala or in Ghana or Nigeria you'll see a lot of people who need help and many of them are members of the church. So it's a good thing to do, it's a blessing.

Bob Reese:

Someone asked my friend and one of the great teachers at the Restoration why do you stay after acting in the church? Why do you go to church? He said to love and be loved, to serve and be served. Those are really good reasons. We have a number of people leaving the church these days or questioning their devotion. If you're going to church to serve, you're going to church to love and be loved, to be served. That's a good enough reason to go. If you go, do that enough, then you can have many small blessings. Just the beautiful blessing this morning is Gloria and I are teaching our primary Nine-year-olds in primary.

Bob Reese:

One of the kids left a group primary and came in wrote on the blackboard love, what is it? Lovingness is being loved. Happiness is giving love. Then she drew a little picture herself with wings and said I'm trying to be an angel. Oh, my goodness, what a beautiful thing that is for a child to see this. And I asked them a couple weeks ago can you ever do anything that would keep Jesus from loving you? And there was this pause and they said no, he always loves us. I said that's a good reason for being here. Is it you to go away with that conviction? So gospel is the transformative power in the world. Love is the most rational thing we can do.

Bob Reese:

I spend a lot of time talking to people about the faith crisis. I do a lot of writing about it. I have a lot of dialogue and speaking about how people can stay connected to the church or why they have this particular issue with it, all of which I know about and all of which are real. But I feel that the most rational thing we can do is not think although we need to do a lot of that but love. We do more thinking and more loving. I distrust two kinds of people those who never think, those who only think and those who never feel, those who only feel. God gave us a heart and a brain, and if we bring our heart into our brain and our brain into our heart and have a dialogue with them and have our heart and our minds talking to one another and our hearts talking to other people's hearts and minds talking to other people's minds, we have a better chance of making something work in this world.

Scott Brandley:

Yeah, for sure You're an inspiration, Bob. I know what I want to do when I get older. I want to be like you.

Alisha Coakley:

I know, I know, I totally agree. I think it's amazing.

Bob Reese:

All I can say, scott is watch me in the next five years. There you go.

Alisha Coakley:

I have a goal. My goal is to live, to be 101, because I like to get an A plus in everything I do. So that means I have, I could.

Scott Brandley:

You passed 100%.

Alisha Coakley:

Bob Ries yeah, exactly I just have to do a little better. But no, I really I love so much that you were able to come on here and share your passion, your purpose, your mission with us and your story with us today. Are there any last moment thoughts that you had, any testimony takeaways that you'd like to leave with our audience?

Bob Reese:

before we wrap up, I would say that we bear witness of loss of things, and bearing witness is one of the things that we do. Jesus sent us out in the world to do that to bear witness. I hope we can all bear witness to the goodness that we experience in our lives. I bear witness to having a loving wife. I bear witness to having loving ministers, elders and sisters who come to us. I bear witness of the enduring love of God and I bear witness of the great patience of God. I know it's a lie. When somebody leaves the church and they're sad about it, I think yes, but eternity is a long time. Jesus, love transcends all of these and many.

Bob Reese:

I started a new session of Sunstone last year called Returning People, telling the story of what it's like to come back to the church. There are a lot of beautiful stories about that. Whether you're in or out or in between or transitioning, we all have the power and the choice to live lives of love and service and goodness and the promises that come to that. I simply testify that there's so much goodness available for us in the world we can't exhaust God's love. We can't exhaust His generosity or their generosity. Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother wish so much to bless us and they do, and we can have them bless us more as we learn to serve them and others more. So the power is in us to be blessed.

Scott Brandley:

The power is in us to give blessings, so that's kind of the key to life I think I love that Well, I think we are all on our own faith journey and wherever we are, as long as we continue to take those steps forward, we'll get there eventually.

Alisha Coakley:

And just to keep loving along the way.

Alisha Coakley:

I think sometimes we get so, like you said, our brains just get so bombarded with intelligence and education and knowledge and wisdom and all of these things that we kind of lose the simplicity and the beauty of the gospel, which is that God has love and that we are supposed to give that love to others so that they can see Him and feel Him through us and through our actions. Like it really just. It is that simple. If you do nothing else well, the only thing you do well in this life is share the love of God with others.

Bob Reese:

You are way ahead of the game you know, we are all created so that we might become the things of love. That is our heritage, that is our promise, and this kind of love, both Jesus mourning for us and someone comforting Jesus and if we can grow into that kind of love, then we don't have to worry about eternity.

Alisha Coakley:

Yeah, exactly, wow, well, bob, thank you so much for joining us today. We're going to go ahead and just let our listeners know we are going to share the links to your organization and to any books, anything at all. I feel like you have so much good out there, so we will go ahead and put some of the good things that you're involved in in the description. So if anyone needs more information or they like to get involved with the Bountiful Children's Foundation, we'll definitely make it easy for you guys to be able to find that and, you know, to help out.

Bob Reese:

I must say in closing, it's the good you're doing. Through Latter-day Lights, you bring so much light into people's lives and into the world. So thank you for doing that. The light can grow brighter and brighter, and you're making it so. So thank you.

Scott Brandley:

We're doing it with your help and other amazing people like you, Bob.

Alisha Coakley:

Yep exactly.

Scott Brandley:

It's like group effort for sure. Great Well, we really appreciate everyone that's watched this episode and we would love for you to, you know, do some five-second missionary work and just go hit that share button. Let's get this story out there. Let's see how many kids we can help. And you know, like Bob said, you take a little child, you feed his brain, give him the right nutrients. Eventually he can lift his family out of poverty Like you just never know what a little amount can do.

Alisha Coakley:

So All right, guys. Well, if you guys have a story that you'd like to share, one that you think could give some light to the world, please be sure to head over to Latter-dayLightscom and fill out the form at the bottom of the page, or go ahead and comment on this video and let Scott and I know that you're interested, and we would be happy to reach out to you and to schedule a time to chit chat about that. Until then, let's see. Until next week, we have another story for you guys coming up. We hope that you guys have a wonderful week and that you do all the good that you can to all the people that you can do good to, and we will see you guys later on. Have a good one.

Scott Brandley:

Take care.

People on this episode

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Scott Brandley

Host
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Alisha Coakley

Co-host