Heaven's Windows

"Does Heaven have windows?"

Three-year-old Dalen poked his head out from under the pew. He'd burrowed beneath it with his bottle and blanket, and despite his brother's ten dangling feet in his face, I'd figured he'd fallen asleep. What else would silence him five full minutes?

As a matter of fact, the Sacrament Meeting talk.

"Does heaven really have windows, Mom?" he repeated. "Really?"

I stared at him, somewhat stupefied --- first, that he'd processed Sister Bevan's reference at all, second that he'd quoted it in just such a way as to wake my own stultified heart. My attention spilt between Spencer's "I need to go to the bathroom!" and Seth's stabbing Lorrin with a pencil, I'd all but tuned Malachi out, myself. But from his toddler tongue, Dalen's query struck me as the Mormon nursery boy's equivalent of Virginia's request of The Sun: "Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?" (Frances Pharcellus Church, "Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus").

Circumstances barring an extemporaneous editorial, I nodded mutely. But I wanted to weep, "Does Heaven have windows? Ah, Dalen, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding" (ibid).

This year we've been living Exhibit A for Elder David A. Bednar's "Significant But Subtle Blessings":

Sometimes we may ask God for success, and He gives us physical and mental stamina. We might plead for prosperity, and we receive enlarged perspective and increased patience, or we petition for growth and are blessed with the gift of grace. He may bestow upon us conviction and confidence as we strive to achieve worthy goals. And when we plead for relief from physical, mental, and spiritual difficulties, He may increase our resolve and resilience.

I promise that as you and I observe and keep the law of tithing, indeed the windows of heaven will be opened and spiritual and temporal blessings will be poured out such that there shall not be room enough to receive them (see Malachi 3:10). We also will remember the Lord’s declaration:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). ("The Windows of Heaven," General Conference October 2013. )

We prayed for deliverance and received endurance. We prayed for rescue and received revelation. And almost imperceptibly, we received other blessings, too. Our resources, like the widow's oil, failed not --- though we could not replenish them. Healthy boys here, healthy vans there, we were subtly blessed by difficulties that didn't happen and mercies that did.

But this Christmas, there hasn't been anything subtle about it: we've been deluged in a heavenly downpour. My parents brought me a sewing machine one month before I even dreamt the ridiculous plan to sew jean quilts for my boys for Christmas. Jared eventually revived my senses, and I downscaled from five quilts to one. When my parents found out, they phoned from Utah. "We left you a Christmas present at Halloween that you ought to open now," they recommended. The gift replaced the machine they'd given me for Christmas twenty years ago and enabled one quilt's completion the day before Christmas Eve.

The windows didn't close there. A lovely friend stashed gifts for each of my boys in our van. My brother and his new bride made a generous deposit in our U.S. savings account. For twelve days, an anonymous pixie left presents from popcorn  to tablecloths to Christmas socks. One night, we found five colouring books and ninety-six crayons: a direct fulfilment of Dalen's wish weeks ago at preschool. "What would you like for Christmas?" Sister Roach had asked. He told her, "Crayons up to the ceiling!" and to a three-year-old, ninety-six is just that. Sunday night, a knock at our door revealed the High Priest Group leadership, singing Christmas carols. They brought turkey and fixings for a full Christmas dinner, plus a gift bag for Jared, me, and each boy. I just stood and squeezed Jared and cried. No sooner had they left than we heard another knock and found another box of turkey dinner on our doorstep. Jared had to phone his brothers to take some turkey off our hands, for we literally hadn't room enough to receive it.

As if all that weren't enough, Monday night Seth discovered a $100 bill on our bookshelf, rolled up and tagged, "Merry Christmas to you." We cannot figure out how it got there. Christmas Eve morning, we discovered another anonymous envelope taped to our door. That afternoon, we found two bags full of gifts on the porch, and then my dear friend brought a basket of specially-selected, symbolic ornaments to decorate our Christmas tree . . . along with a card stuffed with sacrifice. We had prepared our children for a simple Christmas, such that five-year-old Spencer would answer innocent inquirers, "I don't want any presents for Christmas. I just want a book." He got more books than will fit on our shelf and more presents than he's ever received. It's like living It's a Wonderful Life.

Does Heaven have windows? Oh Dalen, does it ever!

As touching as all of this generosity has been, I'm grateful it hasn't been God's only window. Kindness is humbling, but sometimes it leaves guilt: I want to give, not just receive. Throughout this year's financial ordeal, I've often remembered an experience I had as a teenager with my aunt and uncle and their several children. My uncle had just lost his job and was looking for another when they invited us over to make sack lunches for a homeless shelter. Slapping Kraft Singles on bologna, their example emblazoned an unforgettable impression on my heart: In the midst of their own crisis my uncle and aunt still acknowledged their blessings and sacrificed to give. When I learnt in my later teens of instance after instance of their generosity to me, I had a private conversation with my Father in Heaven. "Someday," I asked Him, "please bless me to be like them---to be able and willing to give."

In that spirit, we rallied our children this Christmas and tried to scrape together a little something to bless another. Our widow's mite seems rather meagre when we look at the cornucopia engulfing us, but Jared often reminds us of President Monson's advice: "It is well to remember that he who gives money gives much, he who gives time gives more, but he who gives of himself gives all" ("The Gifts of Christmas," Ensign, Dec. 2003). We gave carols, cookies, and what we could of ourselves. I cannot help but wonder how much other families gave up in order to give of themselves and share their family's mite with us. The thought humbles me to tears. We pray our loving friends will experience as we have for ourselves that President Marion G. Romney's words are true: "You cannot give yourself poor in this work. A person cannot give a crust to the Lord without receiving a loaf in return" (quoted by President Henry B. Eyring, "Opportunities To Do Good," General Conference April 2011). We feel like we've thrown God our crusts upon the water and He has sent back sufficient to feed five thousand (see Brad Wilcox, "Getting Over Feeling Under Appreciated," Ensign, March 2004).

And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers . . . to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not,

And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full;

Then beware lest thou forget the Lord. . . (Deuteronomy 6:10-12)

May I never forget, nor my children. And one day, may God make us His window to another, as Julie de Azevedo expressed:

I want to be a window to His love,

So you can look through me and you'll see Him.

And someday shining through my face you'll see His loving countenance

'cause I will have become like He is. ("A Window to His Love," Julie de Azevedo)

Merry Christmas and all our gratitude. Thank you for becoming Heaven's Windows to us.

Left Behind

My aunt Sue wore my grandma's dress to my brother's wedding in July. "I thought she'd want me to," she whispered to my dad as we waited for the wedding.

My aunt Kathleen brought the quilt---"The last Grandma pieced," she confided while we stood outside the temple after the ceremony.

I wore Grandma's shoes.

I wear them whenever I'm in the temple. I wore them again last night, tugged them on in the ten-minute pre-session frenzy wrought by my feeding the missionaries the moment we should have embarked for Cardston. To exacerbate my stress, I'd spent the thirty-five minute drive with Jared concocting Christmas. "Four jean quilts," I'd tried to convince him. "I've got scraps. Maybe Sheila could coach me." Short of stamping my forehead, "CRAZY," he shook his head. "It's not worth it," he moved; and I knew he meant my strain, not the project's expense. The last word as we dashed from the van to the temple was Jared's resolute, "It's just stuff. You can't take it with you."

No. But you can leave it behind.

Almost every Christmas, Grandma and Grandpa gave us books. Just books, but they were one way Grandma and Grandpa made thinkers, leaders, producers, entrepreneurs, and educators out of so many of their thirty-three grandchildren. Christmas after Christmas, those books instilled in us Grandma and Grandpa's value of great education. And they didn't just give books; they received and they read books, too---often several at a time.

After their death, they left their books behind. One of them came to me: Go Forward with Faith, Sheri Dew's biography of Gordon B. Hinckley. A Post-It marked one page quoting President Hinckley's philosophy on reading:

From the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way. It is not enough to read newspapers. . . . But to become acquainted with real nobility as it walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings. (72-73)

Beneath this assertion, which could have been Grandma's own, Grandma had underlined Robert Browning's aphorism: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." She had scrawled her own version on the page-marking Post-It: "Reach further than before." And she left it behind for me.

Grandma gave books; but sometimes, for Christmas, she gave gifts she created herself. One year she cross-stitched mugs in intricate floral patterns for each of her grandchildren. Another year she cross-stitched Christmas tree ornaments: not simple-stitch initials, like she'd helped me construct as a ten-year-old, but vintage circuitous Santa scenes, shaded and nuanced, every tiny square within the ornament frame etched in floss. Just stuff. We can't take it with us. But whenever I touch it, she touches me back, and she teaches me with the excellence of her work.

Then there were the quilts---not for Christmas, but for weddings. She let us choose any pattern. When I was engaged, she pulled out her books. But one was missing. I knew because I'd picked my pattern from it when I was twelve: the double wedding ring, in pastel pink and forest green. I was bold enough to ask for it, and Grandma produced it . . . with slight hesitation. Only after she'd finished the masterpiece did a cousin confess Grandma's resolution, sworn years before my marriage: "Never again," she'd vowed, after the serpentine production of an older cousin's double wedding ring. Why she reneged for me, I couldn't guess.

As a child, I felt sure she disliked me. She loved me, of course; but somewhere between Rule 23: Clean-Socks-On-The-White-Plush-Carpet and Rule 439: No-Unaccompanied-Children-In-The-Formal-Living-And-Dining-Rooms, I formed the vague impression of myself and my kind as a nuisance. I was a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, tip-toeing into the mortuary where Grandma awaited Grandpa's viewing, when I first knew beyond a doubt that Grandma loved me. I threw one arm around her---the one not holding my baby. "Oh, Sheralee. Bless your heart," Grandma wept. We cried together. That's when I knew.

What I didn't know---what I never knew until Grandma's funeral---was that Grandma lived most of her life in chronic pain. Doubtless her silent suffering must have amplified my childhood misdemeanours. She nursed her health with work, her personal panacea, and she expected us to follow suit. As an elementary principal or a senior Swedish missionary, a vegetable gardener, a pianist, or an Idaho Falls Temple worker, she lived by the maxim, "Work will win when wishy-washy wishing won't." Her work baked bread, froze  jam, bottled peaches, sewed dresses, crocheted blankets, molded lives. Her work built readers, writers, teachers, artists, musicians, moms, and dads. Even in her final years, after Grandpa left her widowed, dying in his sleep two nights after Christmas 2005, Grandma worked. "I still have quilts to make," she resolved as we left Grandpa's funeral. Just stuff, those quilts, and all that work. She didn't take it with her. But she left it behind.

My uncle Conrad said her death was peaceful, like passing through the temple's veil. He was consoling me as I wept over Grandma's casket in 2009. "Roseanne was there," he reassured me---she was my Uncle Jim's wife, long deceased---"and Grandpa, and Grandma's parents." He didn't say it, but I imagined Uncle Conrad's son Joseph there, too. "This is good for Grandma," he attested.

I didn't get to say good-bye. I'd phoned her one week earlier, to wish her a happy birthday. She was too sick to talk on the phone. I left a message, but I forgot to say, "I love you." I never even wrote her a thank-you card for the double wedding ring quilt.

She left her pristine living room. After her funeral, the white plush carpet still squished beneath my clean-stockinged feet. She left her books and her sewing machine and her cross-stitch. She left her bread pans and her freezer jam recipe. She left unfinished quilt tops for my devoted aunts to complete, and she left Aunt Sue her temple dress. She took with her God's promise that binds us beyond death; she'll always be my grandma, and my cousins', and our children's.

The rest she left behind.

To me, she left a turkey roaster, an amethyst necklace, a couple of jewelry pins, and books. She left me a queen-size double wedding ring quilt and a lifetime to live my gratitude. She left me her shoes, and she left me behind to continue the work she commenced in them.

The Change The World Needs Most

Wednesday night. Seven o'clock and all's well. The troops have devoured the chicken and rice and fast re-manned their rubber-band catapult: hundreds of elastics tied together in a ten-foot chain, each end secured to a piano bench leg. Belting Johnny Horton's, "Sink the Bismarck," Seth pulls the catapult's centre taut and on Ammon's command launches the missile: a flannel  beanbag that grazes Baby Benson, oblivious of danger, absorbed in  his blocks. Cheers erupt. Spencer and Lorrin unsheathe their cardboard daggers from duct tape scabbards and brandish them, hurrahing. Only little Dalen objects. He glares from beneath his red plastic fire hat,  his hands groping out from the blue plastic fire coat that droops to his boot-tops. He aims a threatening fire hose (two interlocked toy train tracks) at Major General Ammon and Lieutenant General Seth. "You guys!" he demands, in Benson's defence. "Go to school!" His brothers just laugh.

I should be putting them to bed. Instead I'm chewing a pen, drumming a notebook (the old paper kind), and fumbling for inspiration for my most audacious essay ever: "The Change the World Needs Most and How to Achieve It," the culminating assignment of my current events course. What business a stay-at-home mother of six has with a current events course still eludes me. I can't quite defend the difference it makes to my six boys in Raymond who governs Egypt or which weapons belong to Syria or why I even care to grasp the cycles of history.

"If we're worried about the world, let's look to the upbringing of our children," my husband suggests---and he's right. I know he's right.

That's why I'm taking the course.

That's why I'm devouring Oliver DeMille, Strauss and Howe, Orrin Woodward, and John Naisbitt like my six little boys scarf down chicken and rice---all simultaneously, six books at once, with audios while I wash dishes and the next-to-read list ever-growing. I rarely scan more than a page or two between diaper changes,  Mother Goose readings, Band-Aid-ing, and bottomless pit control; yet every glance I steal harasses my heart's conflict: is this worth it?

It is, insist my insides.

The boys waging beanbag warfare today may tomorrow man weapons more deadly---unless I bring them up to change the world some other way.

Intermingled with "The Bismarck," a counter-melody ensues: Spencer is singing his school song. His kindergarten teacher, Sue Olsen, composed it:

We are the rising generation, we're the future of our world.

We are children making life a little better on this earth. . . . 

We are the future, with help from you . . . 

And in his sweet soprano,  I've struck the answer to my question. My quest to grasp world issues, to distill cycles and events to their essence, to write audacious essays is not only worth it, it's essential. Because, as egocentric as it sounds, the change the world needs most is me.

The world needs me to nurture sons into statesmen and saints so it won't need so many soldiers.

The world needs me to build what opposition strives to break: families, friendships, future, faith.

The world needs me to produce, not simply to consume.

The world needs me to transform my home from a hermitage into a hospice---for the living as well as the dying; for foreigners as well as for family; for the body, the mind, and the spirit of every soul I can possibly reach.

The world needs me to forget myself, remember my Maker, and do as He directs---not just in the moments when the world is watching, but in every invisible choice and interaction in between. This is the change that changes the world---one heart at a time.

On Monday, I'll bustle my boy troop to the Cenotaph down our street. My husband will bugle "Last Post," and we'll struggle for two minutes of silence. We'll listen to orators recite Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional" refrain, "Lest we forget." My boys will remember the fighter jet flying 500 feet overhead, but I will remember the Recessional's more forgotten second stanza:

The tumult and the shouting dies---

The Captains and the Kings depart---

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, may I remember:

I am the change the world needs most.

Serious Trouble, Simple Outreach

“When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble, and you will be right more than half the time.”

- Quoted by Henry B. Eyring *

Last week my friend was diagnosed with cancer. She’s only fifteen.

Last summer I learned two loved ones were battling addictions. They both served missions. They rarely miss church.

Last year I watched a family suffer debt, depression, and unemployment. Their kids ride bikes, play sports, attend Scouts. They wear clean clothes, eat fresh food, and live in a comfortable house.

What looks hunky-dory outside sometimes proves hideous underneath.

Like my next-door neighbors’ porch. They purchased a can of paint to repair what looked like weathering. As they scraped off the peeling exterior, they exposed the entire structure—rotted.

I was thirteen weeks pregnant and my only living son was sixteen months old when I noticed during his bedtime stories one Saturday night that I was bleeding. I phoned my midwife. She said I was miscarrying. “You’ll have a lot of bleeding,” she explained briefly, “and then it will subside.”

A lot of bleeding. Okay. I put on a maxi pad, asked my husband for a priesthood blessing, and went to bed.

The next day was Sunday. My bleeding seemed to have slowed. “I guess that was that,” I assumed naively; and, childlike, I went to church.

I survived Sacrament Meeting but spent most of Sunday School locked in the bathroom. I nursed my living son to sleep and swapped my saturated maxi. I might as well have stretched forth my puny arm to stop the Missouri River (D&C 121:33). By the time Relief Society dismissed, I was in serious trouble. I stood in the hall, my backside to the wall because that backside was covered in blood.

People passed—virtual strangers; we’d only lived in the ward for a month. Acquaintances stopped to chit-chat. “Cute sweater.” “Great lesson.” “Your baby’s peaceful when he’s sleeping.” “Nice hair.” “Full hands.” “Looks like snow.”

I need my husband, I wanted to whisper. I need help. But I didn’t know how.

Within a few minutes, he came. He shielded me with his coat, shuffled me out to the car, and drove me home. Within twenty-four hours, everything was over; my body seemed to think it had never been pregnant. Within ten months, we had another son, and four have followed him—no long-term anything to sniff for. But I’ll never forget those five or ten minutes of serious, unseen trouble.

I wonder how many false fronts conceal blood-stained backsides. I wonder how many sorrows masquerade in plastered grins. I wonder. Sometimes serious trouble sports a slick facade.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t fault the friendly by-passers. I don’t propose intuiting perfect strangers’ shrouded needs. Ultimately,  I needed my husband, not the nice ladies leaving Relief Society—which is maybe why the unseen service inside homes is most sufficient.

But not all homes are healing.

Not all women in crisis have husbands.

Not all sorrows last twenty-four hours, ten minutes, ten months, or ten years.

I can’t reverse miscarriage, cure cancer, heal addictions, erase depression, offer employment, or even repair a front porch. Still, I mustn’t forget what I can do. Like the Old Testament’s Naaman, I’m usually looking for some great thing: ten-hour projects, twelve days of Christmas, casserole, cake, and the complete home make-over. Sometimes I'm so stressed trying to execute the elaborate, I neglect the essential small, silent, and simple. Sometimes I'm so busy cooking or cleaning or composing that I fail to smile, hug, listen, or ask. I too frequently forget that by small and simple means, great things are brought to pass (Alma 37:6-7). Christ fed five thousand not with casseroles and cakes, but with a few loaves and fishes. He opened deaf ears and blind eyes with His spit; He cleansed the leper and raised the dead with His words;  He healed the woman's twelve year's issue of blood with her touch on the hem of His clothes. And while my words and my touch can't eliminate ills, they may lend the needed courage to bear the on-going struggle.

Another Sunday, ten years after my miscarriage, I stood in the hall of another church building, cradling another sleeping baby. I should have been in Ward Council, but my son's squalls drove me out. Locked in the bathroom, I'd nursed him to sleep. Now I wanted to go back to my meeting, but I couldn't bring myself to interrupt it one more time. So I stood outside the Bishop's office, superficially serene but stormy within. It wasn't just one meeting. This was the third such Ward Council in a row. Who thought to call you as Young Women's president? my thoughts seethed. You can't even quiet your baby. Serious trouble? Maybe not. But in the moment, it felt serious to me.

Another ward's Sacrament Meeting dismissed—my sister-in-law's Sacrament Meeting. People passed. "Hi there." "Hello!" "How are you?" My brave front fooled friendly acquaintances; but my sister-in-law wasn't deceived. She stopped and put her arm around my shoulder. Our familiar, familial relationship and that simple gesture invited my tears. She took her daughter to the nursery and then returned to my  side. We talked until Ward Council adjourned; then she hugged me and left for her meetings. She didn't change my circumstance. She did change my heart.

“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,” wrote contemporary Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye (80).

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.**

References

*  Eyring, Henry B. “In the Strength of the Lord.” Conference Report April 2004. Web. 2 Nov. 2013.
** Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Famous.” Words Under the Words. Portland: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1995. Print.

Seventeen Pounds and a Thanksgiving Mercy

“I like turkey better than chicken.”

Ammon, 11, frowned at the frozen bird his dad had scrounged up from the deep freeze. June 2012, read its wing clamp. Triumphant as Daddy appeared, this bird was a chicken. Nobody eats chicken for Thanksgiving.

I understood Ammon’s disappointment. I’m a traditionalist, myself. But where he saw a mistake, I saw a mercy: We had a chicken in our deep freeze.

It’s been a pioneering year—just the kind you would expect initiating an entrepreneurial enterprise. As my husband, his dad, and his brothers put their hands to the NutraTek plow, their womenfolk lightened the loads in the family handcarts. Seventeen pounds per person wasn’t far off, we sometimes felt, as we chucked the nonessentials from the carts. Powdered milk replaced the jugs and saved twenty dollars a week. Bread-baking ousted our trips to McGavin’s, and supper menus centered round the storage shelves’ number-ten cans. Our family piled Subway sandwiches and swimming lessons, book orders and birthday parties, date nights and dollar store sprees on the trailside and travelled on.

Of course, my pioneering metaphor deconstructs with even superficial probing. It reminds me of my first phone conversation with an Ensign editor, who called to discuss my 2500-word treatise on motherhood’s traumas. “It’s overwritten,” he broke it bluntly. “And while I don’t doubt you’ve expressed sincere feeling, it reads as though you’re whining.”

Whining. It’s what I do best. But I meekly bled that baby down to the seventeen-pound blip that the Ensign actually printed four years later.

That editor’s voice in my mind, I recalled my year; and yes, I was whining. Pathetic pioneer that I am, I prayed from the get-go for rescue wagons. They came, too, as little as I deserved them. Easter eggs appeared on our front lawn Easter weekend. A visiting teacher and a Relief Society leader each brought flats of strawberries. People passed on clothing. Neighbors shared produce and baking. A family friend employed our boys to dog-sit. When my oven broke down, another appeared out of nowhere in two days’ time, free for the taking. Our garden grew abundantly, despite hail damage in early June. Business didn’t boom, but neither did our expenses break the bank.

That was just the beginning of God’s rescue. The longer we pursued the trail, the more my perspective widened. I began to see the silver lining in our challenges themselves. Our children were starting to value the good things they possessed. I liked to think they were starting to value people even more than things. I began stretching, increasing my personal capacities to manage and make-do. Had we never commenced the journey, I never would have initiated business ventures of my own. The byproducts? I studied more, talked more, wrote more, thought more. I built new relationships, learned new skills, and (most the time) kicked my self-discipline and personal production to a whole new level.

And now, Thanksgiving morning, God sent another mercy: first a chicken in our deep freeze, and then a revelation.

“It seems like Joseph Smith just lived his entire life in misery,” Ammon mused Thanksgiving morning as we closed our daily devotional with the first four verses of D&C 121. “First he lived in confusion, then in persecution.”

“You seem pretty troubled by that,” I replied to his comment and frown.

Silence.

“Do you think Joseph Smith was always miserable?” I explored.

“Well, I would be! Hiding the plates, leaving state after state, eating poisoned food in prison with the rats and no toilet to pee.”

I nodded but flipped a few sections forward. “Listen to this,” I suggested, and I read from Section 128:

Now, what do we hear in the gospel which we have received? A voice of agladness! A voice of mercy from heaven; and a voice ofbtruth out of the earth; glad tidings for the dead; a voice of gladness for the living and the dead; glad tidings of great cjoy.

Brethren, shall we not go on in so great a cause? Go forward and not backward. aCourage, brethren; and on, on to the victory! Let your hearts rejoice, and be exceedingly glad. (vs. 19, 22)

I looked up from my reading. “Does Joseph Smith sound miserable?” I asked.

“No. He sounds elated.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because he knew what he had.”

Sister Carole Stephens’s words from last week’s General Conference fell from my lips and lodged in my heart.

“Do we know what we have?” I quoted Sister Stephens.

We have a chicken in the deep freeze. Despite eight months this year without an income, we still have surplus in our savings. We have each other. We have a prophet. We have answers to our prayers.

We have the priesthood of God to bless us; to seal us; to bind us to belong to each other, to our ancestors, to our posterity, and to Him after death and throughout eternity. We have the Holy Ghost to lead us in the more fertile parts of the wilderness (1 Nephi 16:16); and though worms destroy our bodies, yet in the flesh we shall see God (Job 19:26).

We may have suffered some slight tribulation, this pioneering year. In our feasting today, we may forego turkey for sixteen-month-old chicken. But this Thanksgiving, when I tally our blessings, I thank God for all that we have: seventeen pounds per person of priesthood, perspective, and promise.

So on, on to the victory!

Thank God for His Thanksgiving mercies.

Keeping Childhood

Last week a blog post transformed my heart. This week, I needed the transformation.

I was scanning my email last Thursday while scarfing a bite for lunch, knowing my nephews and niece were coming and that I hadn’t yet loaded my dishwasher or put away the Duplos bedecking my carpet. In my scramble, I stumbled upon my cousin Jessica’s blog post almost by accident. Almost. When something moves you that much, it’s rarely really accidental. In the five minutes it took to digest Jessica’s article, God turned my heart from keeping house to keeping kids; and in the five days since I read it, I’ve recognized how deeply children—all children—need that turning.

Living in a Sacred Space. The title itself subdued me. I perused Jessica’s account of the unthinkable: the death in 9/11 of a man from her hometown, Sugar City, Idaho, “Where Nothing Ever Happens. Including Bad Things!”

Like Raymond. Where the Merc and the local Canada Post represent the community social network. Where there are only three Events: Christmas, July First, and Zones. Where there are no strangers, only second cousins thrice removed. Where the Expressions reports quilt raffles, high school football scores, and real estate sales as our only front-page news . . . except, of course, when Kraft Canada comes and Raymond is on TV. Then the whole town shuts down. All thirty-seven hundred of us don red, stampede the rodeo grounds, and abandon our lives to watch a couple of celebrities try to rope calves and race barrels. But once the TV cameras have pulled out of town, what’s left are the kids riding scooters down Broadway, the youth biking from basketball practice to Burger Baron, and the stay-at-home moms who still send homemade cupcakes to elementary school classes for birthday treats.

Jessica juxtaposes this small-town utopia with intrusive and ugly realities. A neighbor’s death in 9/11. A lock-down drill in her nine-year-old’s school. My thoughts race: my kids have lock-down drills. Even in Raymond. And this week, the school announced a revolution: no more parents wandering unchecked through the halls of RES. No grown-ups period without office-issued visitor ID. Doors locked at every entrance save the office after 8:25. A safety initiative. “So some grown-up can’t just come to school and shoot you,” my husband explained to my sons.

So standard procedure in schools across the continent has finally penetrated Raymond. So what? My stomach wrenches as my head computes: so perhaps there really is no such thing as Never-Never Land, not even in Raymond. Perhaps Corrie ten Boom had it dead right when she attested, “There are. . . no places that are safer than other places” (The Hiding Place). And if my children rely on teachers and administrators to lock-out the dangers at school, for what do my children rely on me when they tumble back home to my care?

Jessica sketches her vision:

Around each of my children - and the whole world they inhabit - is the beautiful bright dome of Childhood. That's the world of coloring and swinging and learning and songs, and so, so much laughter . It's a sacred place, and so I feel incredibly blessed to live - most of the time - inside that dome, too. My entire life is better and more beautiful and funnier, and viewed from much closer-up because of these two small people in my care.

But their dome is a fragile one, and it's part of my job as Mama to keep it in place for as long as I can, to keep them safe and carefree and joyful, to keep our life a place of magic and caterpillars and bubble-blowing and refuge. It's the only way the world stands a chance, after all. Those sacred spheres inhabited by children.

Yes, Jessica.

The administrators and the teachers lock my children’s doors at school. They keep my children safe from maniacs and guns. But I lock the doors on my children’s sacred childhood. I do not just keep a house; I keep the laughter, self-worth, trust, security and innocence of every child who enters it. Most compellingly, I keep my children and all children who enter my home safe from me. I lock the doors on my grouchiness, my bad hair days, my insecurities, my fear. I lock the doors on my compulsions for quiet and clean. I lock the doors on my rising voice and rising temper. I lock the doors on my frustrations and I keep their childhood. I keep eyes to see their sorrows and their triumphs as they see them: not as passing insignificance, but as all-important—as my kindergartner expressed when I told him, in attempt at reassurance, that his pooping his pants at school was not a big problem. “It is a big problem to me,” he wept. I keep ears to hear that weeping—ears to listen to their tattling, their prattling, their prayers. I keep lips to kiss their owies. I keep fingers to tickle their tummies. I keep shoulders for them to lean and cry on and arms to encircle them in love.

Small trust, such locking and keeping? Maybe. Or maybe it's more like Scrooge answered that query, delivered by Christmas Past's Ghost, referencing the modest sum Fezziwig spent to supply a staff Christmas party:

‘A small matter,’ said the Ghost, ‘to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.’

‘It isn’t that,’ said Scrooge, heated by the remark. . . . ‘It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then. The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.’ (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 53-54)

Fezziwig’s power is mine for my children, for all children who enter my influence’s sphere. I can render their childhood happy or unhappy, light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. My power lies in words and looks, in locking and in keeping; and I want to keep their childhoods as Fezziwig kept Christmas.

My niece and two nephews arrived before I loaded the dishwasher or picked up the Duplos. I didn’t care. They constructed MegaBlock jails, and I gave them obsolete vehicle keys to lock them. When they got tired, they cuddled near me on the couch. My niece snuggled right inside my lap. My own sons hovered over my shoulder atop the couch, and we read Franklin and The Thunderstorm and Franklin Goes to School. I fed them crackers and grapes and carrots. They fed me plastic pizza.

They live in little Raymond where nothing ever happens but where teachers now lock doors in case it does. But more importantly, they live within the clasp of my arms, within the sphere of my love. Father, help me lock my worries and my weakness. Help me keep their laughter. Help me keep their trust. Help me keep the fragile, sacred spaces of their childhood.

Bad Mom, Good Mom: A Sketch

Monday. Seven o’clock. Half an hour late—as usual, and we’re nowhere near ready for Family Home Evening. Tostito crumbs, overturned tomatoes, spinach stems and pilfered peppers litter table, chairs, and floor. Boy 5 squeezes Ranch into the salsa bottle while Boy 2 hollers and slugs him: family law enforcement at its finest.

“Family Teamwork time!” I intervene, scooping tomato-smothered Baby (Boy 6) in one arm and howling Boy 5 in the other. Daddy, in our bedroom, abandons his attempt to reduce Mt. Laundry Heap and instead rallies our Teamwork Troops as I retreat with our two youngest to the bathtub.

It’s an average Monday night.

I scrub some No More Tears into Boy 5’s hair. He grimaces. “You a bad mom,” he accuses, his pout pulling down his dimpled, three-year-old mouth.

I feel like a bad mom. “I’m being the best mom I can be,” I reply and tip him over to rinse his bubbly blonde head. Baby splashes water into Boy 5’s eyes, and Boy 5 swats at Baby. I pull the plug, lift both boys from the tub, and wrap them in towels against their protests.

Diapered and dressed, only a breast can soothe Baby; so I nurse while I diaper Boy 5.

“Not that sleepa,” he grumbles at the one I produce. “My Bob the Builda ‘jamas! They back he-ya.” And, sure enough, he tugs the crumpled Bob bottoms from his drawer’s deepest niche. Of course, the top is nonexistent.

“How about a t-shirt?” I suggest.

Wrong. Again. “Not a t-shut!” he insists. “A nighta shut!”

“A nighter shirt. Let’s see if we can find one in Laundry Mountain.”

Still nursing Baby, I lead Boy 5 to Mt. Laundry Heap atop my bed. I rifle one-handed through Fruit of the Loom, Joe Boxers, and Levis; Boy 5 essays ascent. Better than any autumn leaf pile, Mt. Laundry Heap tantalizes Boy 5’s dare-devil spirit. Jump in me. Jump in me. Jump in me, it taunts; and Boy 5 hardly hesitates.

Whatever, I resign myself. Why stifle his fun?

Neither of us accounts for the crib’s oak sideboard adjacent Laundry Mountain. The heap obscures the crib’s outcropping enough to mask its danger but not enough to cushion its blow to Boy 5’s forehead.

He shrieks. My gut convulses. Now I really feel like a bad mom, but I quickly forget about me. I clutch Boy 5 with the arm not holding Baby. As he wails, his forehead’s welt swells to Easter-egg size.

“Ice!” I order Team Kitchen Patrol; but to Boy 5 I speak soothingly. I stroke his hair and press his face to my chest, and his wailing turns to whimpering as he escapes into my embrace.

Daddy brings a frozen zucchini compress and relieves me of Baby. I rock Boy 5 and tell him the story of Boy 2’s cracking open his head in his toddlerhood. Immediately, Boy 5’s eyes open wide, his whimpers subside, his breathing calms.

“While we waited for the doctor to stitch him up,” I recount, “I rocked our Boy and held him close; and before I knew it, he fell asleep. Heavenly Father blessed him to sleep all through the stitches. Heavenly Father made that miracle because He loves Boy 2. He loves you, too. Do you think He can help you?”

His lower lip trembles. Tears well in his long-lashed eyes. I hold him close. “He can,” I testify. “Shall we ask Him?”

In the living room, Daddy’s tenor leads Boys 1-4 in singing. “Keep the commandments,” they chorus, a youthful unison. “Keep the commandments, in this there is safety and peace.”

I cradle Boy 5. Our center cushion is open and waiting on the big couch. Daddy calls on Boy 4 to open Home Evening with prayer. “Remember to ask Heavenly Father to bless Boy 5 and his hurt.”

Boy 5 cuddles close. “You a good mom,” he whispers.

Mt. Laundry Heap still bedecks my bed. My kitchen is still strewn with taco salad. My toddler bears a battle wound. But somehow, I feel like a good mom.

It’s an average Monday night.

I cuddle him back and kiss his welt and close my eyes for prayer.

Mothers Move the World

Last week one of my students broke through her dyslexia barrier and to everyone’s astonishment (including her own) shattered her personal writing record. Much as I’d have loved to take credit, I recognized I’d only been privileged to witness a tipping point. Instead of garnering glory, I learned a lesson: Mentors may motivate, but mothers move the world.

Reagan* phoned me Thursday morning as I was simultaneously kissing my school kids good-bye and hugging my preschool class hello. Her daughter, McKenna, had completed her third tutorial with me Wednesday afternoon, and I thought she might have encountered some questions. “We have something to show you,” Reagan announced. The first two of my six three-year-olds were already building blocks in my living room, but I could hear Reagan’s urgency. “Come right over,” I invited.

They arrived in minutes, their faces aglow—and not just with eight-thirty sunshine. McKenna pulled a notebook from her pocket and started to read. Wednesday night, she couldn’t sleep; so she’d put pen to paper and recorded her day. “Sheralee told me to write, so I’m going to,” claimed one of her opening sentences. She must have filled three or four pocket-sized pages with musings.

What made those musings remarkable was that, stifled by her dyslexia, McKenna had never independently written so many consecutive sentences before. Her brain creates stories that suck me right in to lands lying deep in my Thanksgiving dinner or to history behind the Canadian coins in my pocket; but her dyslexia strangles her actual writing.  McKenna circumvents her handicap by illustrating her stories and then dictating them to her mother. Reagan’s biggest concern with McKenna’s first tutorial was that Reagan couldn’t possibly keep taking daily story-book-length dictations and meet all the other demands of her motherhood. “We’ve got to narrow it down to the sentence-level,” she insisted. “I can’t keep up; I’m exhausted!”

I’d be exhausted, too, had I devoted the energy to McKenna that Reagan has exerted for the past six years. Her efforts extend way beyond dictations. She has assumed responsibility for her daughter’s education. She has enrolled her in literature classes. She has researched literacy programs and liver cleanses, micronutrients and ear training, brain gym and brain integration and brain repatterning. She has sought the dyslexia’s roots, and any she can’t eradicate, she is bridging. As McKenna’s breakthrough attested Thursday morning, Reagan hasn’t wasted her effort. One seemingly insignificant step at a time, she is moving mountains and working miracles.

Mothers are the mentors that move the universe. Though not everyone expresses it quite like Abraham Lincoln, most individuals owe all that they are or hope to be to their mothers, angelic or otherwise. As E.T. Sullivan expressed,

When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way. He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home and of some obscure mother. And then God puts the idea into the mother’s heart, and she puts it into the baby’s mind. And then God waits. The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are babies. (qtd in Gordon B. Hinckley, “These Our Little Ones,” Ensign Dec. 2007)

Babies and mothers, Montserrat Wadsworth, 2013 Nevada Young Mother of the Year, expounds. “While battles rage, diseases spread, and evil rears its ugly head, God is working quietly behind the scenes using mothers and babies to change the world” (Lucy Scouten, “Nevada Mom Changes the World One Baby at a Time,” Church News and Events, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

I saw that world-changing impact Thursday with Reagan and McKenna. They reminded me why Charlotte calls her egg sac, not her Wilbur-saving webs, her “magnum opus” (E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web, 144). They reminded me why it is even more important that I mentor my sons than my students.

Rachel DeMille captured mother’s potential impact when she wrote,

Raising children is the thing that changes the world the most. Everybody knows this, but Modern Feminism has convinced us that it is cliché, even patronizing. Eve didn’t think so, nor did Sarah. Raising children and mentoring the next generation is the most important thing we can do to change the world. It is the primary role of all women and all men, married or single. It is who we are. It is why we were born. We must train up the leaders of the future with confidence, power, and grace. We must deliver. We must achieve results. . . . If we fail, the world will fail. (“Steel to Gold: Motherhood and Feminism,” A Thomas Jefferson Education Home Companion, 65.)

I hugged McKenna Thursday morning. “Thank you so much for sharing with me,” I said. “You made my whole day.”

Reagan hugged me. “She made my whole year,” she proclaimed.

I nodded and waved and watched mother and daughter go back home to keep moving the world.

*Names changed to protect privacy.