Looking Forward with Faith

Nearly ten years ago I came to a realization about the purpose of my life. After the first two decades of my life trying to define myself and my worth by my achievements, I realized that such a way of life was no longer possible, or at least no longer gratifying, as a wife and mother. In my (then) new roles, the accomplishments are harder to see, clouded by entropy, agency of others, and the ethereal. After much thought, study and prayer, I realized that charity needed to be my goal until the end of my days.

I'll probably end up spending the rest of my days trying to figure out exactly what living with charity means, but today I found in this beautiful talk by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, Remember Lot's Wife, some more inklings of what my purpose ought to be. In his classic, frank style, he calls us on the carpet on our New Year's Resolutions (we made five and have already broken four, he says!), but defines our correct path for this year and every year as forward facing, not backward facing:

So, as a new year starts and we try to benefit from a proper view of what has gone before, I plead with you not to dwell on days now gone, nor to yearn vainly for yesterdays, however good those yesterdays may have been. The past is to be learned from but not lived in. We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced, then we look ahead, we remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. Faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives. So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say that she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she already had. Apparently she thought—fatally, as it turned out—that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as those moments she was leaving behind.

Here's what he says about faith, hope and charity:

Let people repent. Let people grow. Believe that people can change and improve. Is that faith? Yes! Is that hope? Yes! Is it charity? Yes! Above all, it is charity, the pure love of Christ. If something is buried in the past, leave it buried. Don’t keep going back with your little sand pail and beach shovel to dig it up...

...when honest effort is being made to progress, we are guilty of the greater sin if we keep remembering and recalling and rebashing someone with their earlier mistakes—and that “someone” might be ourselves. We can be so hard on ourselves, often much more so than with others!

...

You can remember just enough to avoid repeating the mistake, but then put the rest of it all on the dung heap Paul spoke of to those Philippians. Dismiss the destructive and keep dismissing it until the beauty of the Atonement of Christ has revealed to you your bright future and the bright future of your family and your friends and your neighbors. God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go. That is the thing Lot’s wife didn’t get—and neither did Laman and Lemuel and a host of others in the scriptures.

Faith is for the future. Faith builds on the past but never longs to stay there. Faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ truly is the “high priest of good things to come” (Hebrews 8:6; 9:11).

And there, my friends, are the quotes of the day for me. I'm going to go clean out my guest room closets now!

"It's Just All Played Out Like a Song"

Rich's Grandma Jane is the embodiment of wisdom and order. When I first spoke to her on the phone after Rich and I got engaged, I could barely understand her thick Texas accent. She can shoot a .22 better than anyone, lived in a tent for a while as a child, and has lived on the farm her husband loves for years and years despite her preference for city life. She read every single book in her high school library, got a college degree, and still devours books on any subject.

She has cared for her dying husband for several months almost entirely on her own. She's the one that came to my rescue after I gave birth to Isaac once my mom left and Rich went back to work. I was an emotional wreck and not recovering very well physically, and she swept in and matter-of-factly met my temporal needs and basically ignored my emotional drama, so I got over it. She did the same thing in the dark days surrounding the loss of our baby Samuel. She can diagnose an illness over the phone better than a doctor in person. She tells you how it is, then gets to work to do something about it.

Two weeks ago her husband Dick passed away in their farmhouse in May, TX at 84 years old. Rich got there about 40 minutes before he passed on, finding Grandma alone with Grandpa, needing him. I sent food for them to eat--leftover soup and lunch meat I had in the fridge. Turns out it was just what she was craving (Amy had tipped me off on that one, but I rarely have lunch meat in the fridge and happened to have bought some the week before). When she told me so on the phone yesterday, she said, "It's just all played out like a song," referring to the people and blessings sent her way at the just the right time by the Lord. I quickly scribbled her poetic words on an envelope, wanting to remember the moment. Later in the conversation when I wondered aloud how my kids end up escaping so many sicknesses, she said blunty, "Well, maybe you're just too stupid to notice, Mindy!" She's not delusional or euphoric, she knows what's what and isn't afraid to say it—one of the many things I love about her. So that's why "It's just all played out like a song" sounded so lovely in my ears. Poetic. Inspiring. The expression of a woman who has been touched by—no, embraced by—the love of the Savior.

Will l be singing that song two weeks after Rich dies many years from now? Earlier, about a week before Grandpa's death, she told me on the phone that the Lord had been filling her every need every step of the way in the past few months. She's all alone now on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and she's happy and peaceful and grateful. How does she do it? How did she get to that point or was she always that way? Is it possible for me to develop such faith, stamina, gratitude and pragmatism in the next fifty years of my life? Or am I missing the amazing genetic material she has and can only hope that my kids have some of it?

Addiction

It's a good thing I bought into all those standards I learned in Young Women, because I have a pretty addictive personality. I'm pretty sure I'd be addicted to coffee and alcohol if I ever had had the chance to develop a taste for them.

Constant addictions for me include chocolate and more chocolate. Doing "useful" things on the computer before much more useful things like housework. Nail-biting.

Then there's the sporadic addictions that come in waves, like Facebook, which I'm currently not all that interested in. That one was displaced by my latest addiction to the new FamilySearch. And right now I'm trying to supplant my chocolate addiction with clementine oranges, but my mouth is starting to hurt from that one, so I'll probably go back to chocolate soon. Sometimes I'm addicted to gardening, then I move on to reading, sometimes it's my calling, sometimes it's cooking.

Will I ever get to a point where I can let go of an addiction, instead of just replacing it with another? Will I ever find moderation and consistency with all the good things in life?

Correlating

Yesterday I taught a lesson at church about Continuing Revelation and Correlation. It was one of those clumsy lessons that really started to crystallize in my mind after I gave the lesson. Which reminds me again that, like most callings, I'm the one who learns and gains the most from my "service."

How do the pieces of my life correlate? Does what I do every day match what I believe?

In military intelligence usage, correlation is "the process which associates and combines data on a single entity or subject from independent observations, in order to improve the reliability or credibility of the information." In statistics it means something having to do with that graph above.

In the Church Correlation Committee, the focus is on:

purity of doctrine

family and the home

priesthood direction (Jesus Christ)

unity and order

simplicity

proper relationships

Is the stuff I spend my time and resources on the most reliable stuff? Do I get my strength and sustenance from the most credible sources?

Not all the time. But I hope the sum of all I do ends up looking sort of like that graph above, with the steadily upward-climbing line being clear amidst all the noise.

Correlation means stepping back and thinking about these sorts of things every once in a while. It means connecting with my husband to make sure we're on the same page. It means turning to the scriptures to see if I'm still aligned with the truths in those pages. It means hanging out with my kids to see if I still "get" what their ever-changing minds are thinking and worrying about. It means looking back on my life and seeing some paths and dreams I'd like to retrace and revitalize. It means connecting with the older people in my life and realizing that they know a lot more than I thought they did about pretty much everything.

My grandma was on the original Correlation Committee of the Church for 10 years. I called her up to ask about her experience before I gave my lesson. I found I couldn't ask the right questions to get to the heart of what I thought it was all about—I couldn't get my mind to correlate with Grandma's. I quoted her in my lesson, but it ended up being awkward, probably because I didn't say that she was my grandmother, afraid that people might judge me based on her prominence.

My mom, who is older and wiser, is teaching the same lesson in her ward next week. She has invited Grandma (her mother) to come to the lesson and talk in person about Correlation. This surprised me and made me feel sheepish that I tried to distance myself from her in my lesson, not wanting to own up to the correlation between my life and hers.

Correlation could also mean looking back on and reconnecting with my roots, and owning all of them. It's realizing that I am the sum of all of the people in my life, especially the ones I grew up with and formed my reality with. Grandma was the one in my formative years who told me I was the smartest and the greatest, and I know she believed it (and still does). Though I no longer believe her all the time, I realize that who I am is in part because of her, and in some ways I am her. Denying that doesn't change anything. Owning it might. Every experience and every person in my life doesn't need to be completely aligned with perfect or right, as long as I return to perfect and right (God) often enough to make sure my graph lines up in the long run.

Correlation is coming back "home" after exploring the world. It's realizing that everything you ever dreamed of was there all along.