Eric Jarvis: My Father Had a Formative Influence on My Growth

For Father's Day
June 21, 2020

Lower Left: George and Kathryn Jarvis
also in the picture, 
Michael Todd, Thomas Jarvis, Catherine R Jarvis, Kim Morrow, 
Jodi Bennett Jarvis, Jonathan Jarvis, George Eric Jarvis, 
Rebecca Jarvis Payne and Jas Payne.

My father has had a formative influence on my growth and development throughout all the days of my life.

As a boy of about 6 years of age, my father was the branch president in London, Ontario.

He must have been doing tithing settlement at the time because he was meeting with some other people in our home.

As he was leaving the house, he saw me playing with some toys on the floor.

He stooped down to me, and in a kindly way asked me if I knew what tithing was. I must not have known, because he lay down beside me on the carpet and took out ten pennies and showed me how we can give one of them to the Lord. He explained that this was tithing. I only felt love and privilege in this interaction, and it left a deep impression upon me, and from that time I have always willingly paid a full tithe. I have always been greatly blessed financially all the days of my life through little effort of my own and have never felt tithing or fast offerings or other donations to be a burden. I attribute my attitude to that first loving discussion about tithing with my branch president so long ago.

As a boy from 10 to 17 years of age, our family drove to Michigan each year and then to Utah in the summer months to visit family. The trips formed a huge triangle across North America that required many hours of driving. My father could stay up late while the rest of the family slept and would drive late into the night. I would accompany him in the front seat during these long trips, and he would talk to me about many things; but the talks that I remember most vividly are the stories about his mission in Germany. I could tell from those discussions how much he loved the German people. I could tell how much his faith grew by the experiences that he shared. I could tell that for all the wonderful things he did for the people in the mission field, the person that gained the most from those experiences was my father. And he passed on those amazing lessons to me, the next generation. From those conversations, I learned what it meant to learn by faith.

Once, as a youth, I attended a stake priesthood meeting with my father. During one of the talks, I noticed that my father had tears in his eyes (he almost never cried about anything). I discerned that the talk, which must have been about looking after the fatherless or similar topic, had made him think about one of my friends (who did not have a father) who often came to our home and had been meeting with the missionaries. I asked him if he had been thinking about that friend, and he said, “Sure I am.” My father taught me to feel deeply about the most important things in life.

When I was almost 16 years old, I suffered a painful injury in a trampoline accident. Weeks later, my injured knee had improved little. I could barely hobble around on crutches, and I was deeply discouraged. The physiotherapist insisted on painful treatments that sometimes prevented me from attending school due to the pain. One night, my father came to me as I sat in the living room of our home listening to music. He told me that on the way home from a meeting that evening, he had felt a strong assurance that my knee would soon improve. He wanted to let me know. That was it. A few days later, in a physiotherapy session, some tissue gave way in the knee, and I could walk again. After that my progress was rapid and soon I was able to walk normally again. My father’s inspiration came to me in a deep moment of discouragement.

As a young man in my teen age years, I lost interest in spiritual things. It became difficult for me to attend Seminary every morning. My father offered to drive me to the Whyte Avenue chapel every morning for a period of time, while I was in this spiritually difficult time. He would often bear his testimony to me in an informal way during the time we would be in the car together. I tried my best to ignore or to discount his words, but there was one thing I could never ignore – the fact that he took the time to drive me to those early morning meetings. He showed me that he loved me and cared enough to sacrifice his early morning time for me.

After missionary service, the time came for me to make some difficult decisions about my career path. My patriarchal blessing impressed me to choose psychiatry, but many in my entourage did not agree with such a decision. My father’s influence was key at this crucial time. He was a social scientist and had always presented me with an open vision toward these and related fields. He had told me that as a young man he had thought about becoming a psychiatrist and had worked for a summer at the psychiatric hospital in Evanston, Wyoming, where he had learned many things about people and suffering. This openness and enthusiasm for learning in the social sciences and related fields greatly encouraged me and gave me the faith to change my career path to apply to medical school with the intent of becoming a psychiatrist as outlined in my patriarchal blessing.

My father has taught me too many things to record in this brief account, but in the long years since I have left home and started my own family far away from my parents, he has been a steady guide to me – not so much in what he has said, but in how he has lived his life. He has shown me to approach ageing with courage. He has taught me to love my wife with my whole heart. He has shown me how to stay busily occupied with worthy projects. He has instilled in me a reverence for the sacred, and a lifelong love of opera and history. He has shown me what matters most to him – staying close to the Lord and serving in the various ways that he is capable. He has shown me that it is possible to engage in difficult ideas and problems and maintain an active faith in God. He has shown me that one can acknowledge the faults of religion, religious leaders, and the problems of the historical record, while remaining an active participant in the Latter-day Saint faith. He has shown me that adhering in the long term to the faith of our fathers brings sacred blessings that can only be understood over time. He has taught me that living with doubt and uncertainty is the human condition and should not be eschewed but cheerfully embraced.

G.E. Jarvis