The topic I was given today to speak on comes from the title of a chapter of a book, “Infinite in Suffering,” from the book The Infinite Atonement, by Tad R. Callister. As I sat down to type up my talk, I wanted to put my own title across the top of the page. I wanted something more evocative than just “Infinite in Suffering.” So, I started typing:
The other day, while my daughter was off at the stables, my four-year-old son and I had sat down to lunch. Between bites of pbj, and gabbing about everything form legos to his bike, he very suddenly and very earnestly asked, “Mamma, why was Joseph in jail?”
His question caught me off guard, and so, just to be sure, I asked him, “Which Joseph?”
“Jospeh Smith”
The consternation was clearly visible on his face. In his developing sense of the how the world works, only bad guys go to jail, and I could see he was having a very hard time with the thought that the Prophet had been where bad guys go. I want my children to feel secure in the world, to trust that the justice system ‘works,’ that it will keep them safe, and so I hate to have to explain that the unfortunate characteristics of human nature, such as fallibility and the capability for dishonesty sometimes get in the way.
If you look at the timestamp for this entry, you will see that I am typing it at just about 2:30 in the morning. One would think that I ought to be in bed at such an hour, and I am. I have been for hours. Here I am, though, in the middle of the night reeling and rejoicing in my blessed and unexpected random bit of insomnia that just saved our lives and home…
I came up to bed fairly early tonight, as my kind and sweet husband offered to put the kids down without me so that I could get a little extra project time. I set to and wrote up this week’s book review on A Prayer of Faith, had a great long chat on the phone with Michelle as we edited it together, took care of a few other sundries, had some sweet quiet time with my husband, and before I knew it it was midnight. Mind you, I’m quite the retire-to-thy-bed-early kind of girl, as I get up hours before my children in the morning so that I can have time for study, prayer, pondering, writing, [editing middle of the night blog entries like this, rife with typos,] and other tasks that require more headspace than can be found from kid-up to kid-down.
Regardless of my usual habits, there I was still wide awake. Midnight passed. One o’clock passed. One thirty. Finally my darling husband gave up waiting for my batteries to run out and quit hacking on his project. We turned out the lights, snuggled in, and while he was shortly asleep, I found myself remaining oddly alert. After 20 or 30 minutes, it became clear to me that my mind was moving no closer to sleep. I grabbed my next review book to dig in, thinking that reading would bring on the sandman. No luck. I finished the entire first section of the book, and just as I began the second section, I caught a whiff of something acrid on the air. I sniffed a couple of times thinking to clear it from my nose, but there it was again–and stronger.
I closed my book and slid out of bed to have a good bloodhound-style sniff around the room and see if I coudln’t figure out what it was. It was something burning, no doubt, but what? I sniffed over the vent in the floor that’s open to the downstairs, nothing. Sniffing along I moved over to the bathroom and ZINGO there it was. Only, as I passed into the bathroom, it faded away.
I came back out of the bathroom and caught the trail again, moving along the plane where it had been strongest following it to the other end of the room. Then, I saw it. A cardboard box, the one that our new blender had come in, had somehow been pushed up right against the electric heater in our bedroom wall. The shiny white background was just beginning to turn brown where it had been in contact with it. The flaps of the box reached right over to the bookshelf where the old sci-fi paperbacks are kept.
Holding the box, sniffing it, seeing it, feeling the sheer heat in it, an absolute wave of gratitude cascaded right over and through me. Usually, by two-something in the morning, I am deeply, soundly asleep, and my adorable husband, well, usually about all of thirty seconds after hitting his pillow is deeply asleep as well. We never would have known. As it is, though, I was mysteriously kept awake and alert until I needed to be. Upon discovering the box, I turned on the lights, and roused my ever-so-very unconscious husband to have a prayer with me. He offered it, in sweet, sincere, and humble thanks.
As an added blessing (as if this were not enough!), just as he ended the prayer, I was struck through with the knowledge that some months ago, the battery in our smoke detector had died and I did not recall having seen my husband change it. I mentioned it to him, and he immediately got up, pulled the old battery from the detector, grabbed a pack of 9-volts from his desk, and put a new one in. We had both forgotten. Now, though, as we remembered, we were doubly thankful for the Lord’s protecting hand this night.
Perhaps I should have saved this story for another Ensign article or for a book, but really, my joy, gratitude, humility, and rejoicing is such that I simply must share it now. Besides, I think I just read a very similar story in one of the chruch magazines–only it was a chimney pipe. So, they don’t need this one. Maybe one of you does.
Some people may laugh that the church is so full of such stories and experiences, but truly, they are a testimony to the true and living gospel! What joy, to know, amidst all the dangers of life, that we are protected–that because of a forgotten dead battery and a mislaid cardboard box, I would find myself still awake at three o’clock in the morning. Not surprisingly, though, as I find this written, I am suddenly quite sleepy.
I think I’ll sleep in until 7. Here’s a quick prayer that He will sustain me tomorrow on half a night of sleep just as He has preserved us tonight…
*Gratitude!*
I actually received a letter today that began that way. It’s my first official acceptance letter from a publisher, and it’s a special one. I sold an article to the Ensign. It seems so wonderful and strange to type that; I still can’t believe it. It hasn’t been scheduled for a particular issue yet, and it’s hard to be patient. I can’t wait to hold it in my hands on shiny paper all part of a ‘real magazine,’ not even considering that it’s that magazine. On the one hand, I’m proud of myself for finally making it to print, but on the other I’m just overwhelmingly humbled, like I get vaguely sick to my stomach when I think about it too long kind of humbled, like that I can’t believe I did it kind of humbled. Well, come to think of it, I didn’t really do it; at least, I didn’t initially mean to do it.
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I’ve just begun reading The Infinite Atonement, by Tad R. Callister. Before I fully dive in to what Robert L. Millet has, in the forward, called “one of the most complete treatments of the Atonement that I know of anywhere,” I wanted to stop for a moment (yup, right at the end of the forward) and capture a quick snapshot of my personal understanding of this profound gift at this point.
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When I first got my hearing aids, I was completely overwhlemed at just how quickly wearing them would overstimulate my mind. Time and again over the first few weeks of wearing them, I simply had to reach up and shut them off; I coudn’t take it. It was too much mental input. My mind just was not used to having to sort through and understand that much sound. I used to have normal hearing, and I had assumed that the hearing aids would effortlessly make everything sound like it used to. What I didn’t realize is that there’s two layers to hearing; there’s the sound waves themselves, the eardrum vibrating, which the hearing aids can help with, but there’s also the mental processing of the sound. For those first couple of weeks I was like a baby just learning to use her own senses again. Every few minutes I’d pipe up and ask my kids, my husband, or whoever else happened to be around “What’s that sound?” The vibrations were making it to me, and I was certainly aware that a sound was being made, but I just didn’t know what it was. Whether it was the fridge, a truck passing by on the street, or the hard drive of my laptop, I had to turn to someone to explain to me what the input I was receiving meant.
If only I could do that now.
The blog entry that I was typing on my pocket pc in the car on the way home:
This past week has been a trip—in both the figurative and literal senses. We took off for a somewhat impromptu visit to Utah, ostensibly to hang out with friends, and ended up stumbling onto what might just turn out to be a whole new path in life. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it all. Forgive me, but it wouldn’t be prudent to run through the specifics at this point. I can say, though, that it has strengthened my testimony–profoundly. I even joked to Michelle that the Lord’s hand has been so evident in it all that He was kind of taking an element of faith out of it for us. What is faith, but the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen? What does it become where there is so little left unseen? I suppose in a situation like this, faith comes in the attribution of the readily-visible seemingly charmed events to their proper Source.
I have cross-published this piece here and on A Prayer of Faith, from Blogger of Jared, where it is part of the current “Life of Christ” theme going on there now where there have been several excellent submissions. I highly recommend that you check it out.
Looking at the Life of Christ as reported in the four Gospels of the New Testament, we see that his behavior towards and teachings about women were profoundly, revolutionarily loving in a way that we, in our current state of gender equality (relatively speaking) might take for granted, to the point that we are in danger of losing their impact. Christ’s respectful treatment of women was socially radical to say the least, which lends added strength to the messages inherent in those moments.
I live across the street from the local seminary building, and yesterday, the sister who teaches there came to my door to return a copy of the Chruch News that had been mistakenly delivered to them. It was addressed to me, but she’d just noticed it. So, here I am reading the November 18 Church News, and on page 10 I’ve found a great surprise—an unanticiated wave of nostalgia.
Karl Ricks Anderson, who was my institute teacher my first year in the chruch and one of the best teachers I ever had regardless of topic, was recently honored by the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation, along with his brother Richard Lloyd Anderson, with the Junius F. Wells Award for 2006.
What a great class that was!
Nothing brings my hand to my forehead and an exasperated sigh to my lips like reading misinformation about the church in a news article. Whether the it was fed to or crafted by the writer, it’s frustrating. I am the only member in my family, and often I feel like they take these reporters’ words about what our church is ‘really’ about more than they do my own. Slandar, libel, and more inadvertent forms of misinformation have plagued our history even longer than we’ve been a church. These incorrect ideas and the opinions that they influence impact us all in different ways, and up until now there really wasn’t much that we could do about it. Now, there is; it’s the LDS News Watch website, brought to us by the More Good Foundation. (more…)
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