Everything is going to work out just right

Ever have your own words thrown back at you?

I mean in a nice way, silly.

Sometimes that happens to me when I flip through my journals.

Sometimes it happens when I scroll mindlessly through facebook.  Not that I hardly ever do that, but… y’know… I think it might have happened, like, once or twice.

Sometimes it happens in discussions with my children.  I try not to think about those times.  “But yesterday you said…”

And just now it happened on a friend’s blog.  She’s a great writer and has a way of capturing raw feelings in such a way that when I’m feeling something raw myself, I sometimes click random suggested posts.  It’s like therapy I don’t have to pay for!

So a long time ago,

I randomly sent this friend a quick little message.  Just a hi and how are you, with a little encouragement tagged onto the end of it because the Spirit said she needed a lift.  No biggie.

Except it was a big deal.  Turns out she was going through a hard time.   And it meant a lot to her that Someone Cared.

Fast-Forward to Today…

It was Mr. Smith’s very first full-day-of-work this year.
(He’s been at the office half-days and trying to work from home & juggle the six kids while I recover from being hit by a few trains.)

It went 45 minutes longer than I was planning for.

I totally fell apart.

Well, okay, not totally, but almost.  46 minutes might have put me there.

And so my dreams of greeting him with a happy hug, a tidy house, and the smell of dinner almost done were rather shattered.

I was back up in my tower, rocking in the fetal position in the corner, fingers in my ears, humming, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” when he got home.  

Or something like that.

Instead of a shining smile and a “YES!  Look, I told you I could do it!  High-five!” he got a straight face and a “Keep them away from me.  No, I don’t want to talk about it.”  I had been Mary Poppins the whole day, troubleshooting the sick baby, getting the fussy 2yo to take a nap even though he didn’t want to, and lovingly managing the needs of the older kids.  I made appointments, did dishes, and planned dinner all with a grace and cheerful nature that could have won me an Olympic medal if such days were judged events.  

Me at 4:30pm.  Totally got this.

In a matter of 40 minutes I went from First Place to Face-in-the-Mud.

That might be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.

And although there’s lots of mud in Hawaii right now, I guess there’s not as much mud going on in the Olympics right now anyway.  It’s more like snow.  Okay.  Face-in-the-Snow.

Me at 5:30pm.  (I’m on the right.)

Disappointment is part of life.  This was a little thing.  A very little thing.  The big deal is not that I fell apart 5 minutes before he got home.  The big deal is that things went totally, 100% fine the whole rest of the day.

But when I was hiding in my tower, wishing I was more capable and feeling sorry for myself and my sweet husband who doesn’t deserve to come home to such a basket case, it didn’t seem like a little thing.  It was A Big Deal.  I mindlessly scrolled through fb & only found more reasons to be sad.  Hate when that happens.  I mean, um, in the twice that I’ve ever mindlessly scrolled fb.  
I had lds.org/youth/music play me a nice soundtrack as I blog-hopped a little, and then I ran across the post in which my little encouraging note came back to me.

“Everything is going to work out just right.”

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  It’s going to be fine.

Look a little harder — it IS fine.  Today was a 90%-good day.  That’s amazing!  We’re all together.  I’m almost better.  We’ve got our angels that can step up and take care of the in-between when I can’t hack it any more.  If I don’t like that “almost better” does in fact mean “still sick” – well, oh well.

We’ll get over it.

As the wise bumper sticker once told me,

Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

I wonder sometimes if  pioneer women had moments like this.

“It really doesn’t matter that he ripped his trousers.  It’s not like anyone cares.  They’re still functional.  We’re 500 miles from anywhere, though, and I just hate the thought of walking 500 more before I find time to mend those pants!”

Somehow I doubt it.  They’d probably find ways to mend those pants while walking.  With the kid still in them!  But thinking about pioneers is always inspiring.  Man, were they tough.  This is a little excerpt from a talk about Faith in Christ.

A few years ago, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland shared his feelings about the deep-rooted faith of pioneers who pushed toward the Salt Lake Valley even after the deaths of their children. He said, “They didn’t do that for a program, they didn’t do it for a social activity, they did it because the faith of the gospel of Jesus Christ was in their soul, it was in the marrow of their bones.”

He expressed, with tender emotion:

“That’s the only way those mothers could bury [their babies] in a breadbox and move on, saying, ‘The promised land is out there somewhere. We’re going to make it to the valley.’

“They could say that because of covenants and doctrine and faith and revelation and spirit.”

He concluded with these thought-provoking words: “If we can keep that in our families and in the Church, maybe a lot of other things start to take care of themselves. Maybe a lot of other less-needed things sort of fall out of the wagon. I’m told those handcarts could only hold so much. Just as our ancestors had to choose what they took, maybe the 21st century will drive us to decide, ‘What can we put on this handcart?’ It’s the substance of our soul; it’s the stuff right down in the marrow of our bones.”⁴ Or, to put it another way, it is what is written in our hearts!

It’s in the trials that you find out what’s really written in your heart.

And it’s also in the trials that we can be the most open to giving our hearts to God and letting Him do the writing.

It’s kind of nice, actually.