Family
Letter 72
Redemption
November
20, 2014
Dear R’el, Peter and Xiomara,
Matt, David, Annie, and Sam,
As I start this letter, on November 18, Mary and David and I
are in deluxe quarters at the Sea Crest Beach Hotel in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
I am seated in our living room. Out the window to my right I see the incoming surf
of Buzzard’s Bay in brilliant sunshine. The light blue sky is streaked with a
few clouds, remnants of yesterday’s rain. The deep green-blue water contrasts
with the white foam of the breakers. The clean white sand comes within twelve
feet of our room. We have our own door that opens onto the boardwalk and the
sand. We’re on an excursion that combines my work on Nantucket and in Falmouth
with some sightseeing, rest, companionship, and delicious meals.
Sunday, David, Mary, and I (in that order) spoke in sacrament
meeting. Three of Mary’s DBSA friends came, and also two of my Vistage
associates. Michelle Romano, Marilyn McIntosh, Eric and Becky Rebentisch, and
Laurie Low came from other wards. Mary recorded the talks. I’ll refer now to
the notes I used in order to say to you in this letter what I said in the talk.
It
was very moving to hear David speak, and Mary also. From the time I got David’s
phone call from Korea on March 19, the experience of David’s leukemia has
brought the three of us together strongly. Sunday was a wonderful day for me.
Although David’s medical outlook is not at all good, he is stronger and feeling
better and looking better now than any time since April. It added to the peak
moment to have you, R’el, and you, Peter and Xiomara (and Andrew) at the
meeting. I felt blessed and fortunate.
Being in a
sacrament meeting with the Latter-day Saints can be an amazing experience.
Sacrament meetings have molded and formed me since I was a young child. I’ve
often heard people express themselves in very intimate, personal ways,
sometimes more so in a sacrament meeting than even in family settings where you
might expect greater intimacy than in a big meeting. I think it is a great gift
we enjoy as a people that when we stand at the pulpit, we are moved to speak
honestly and from the heart and sometimes to be very unguarded. Being myself a
man who tends to be cautious and guarded, I really appreciate this gift. On Sunday
my desire was to speak from the heart, as David and Mary certainly did.
What
is happening to David is certainly a tragedy for him and for all who love him.
The last time I saw him completely well was just after Christmas. Mary and I
had gathered with my mom and most of our children at my sister’s house in
Charleston, South Carolina. From there, we took David to the airport, for him
to return to Fort Hood, Texas. He was heavily weighed down with a couple of
Army duffel bags. He made a strong impression on me, bent over a bit with the
weight of his bags, with his head and neck notably erect and thrust forward as
he strode very purposefully into the terminal.
Less
than three months later, we saw him next. This was also at an airline terminal,
at Dulles, where he arrived from Korea. We took him from there straight to
Walter Reed in Bethesda. He was there for two solid months. Those were very
tough months, especially the second month. David showed tremendous patience,
willingness, quiet strength, and occasional good humor during this time. At one
point, the first week of May, he could not eat, could not sit up without help,
could not speak, could not see well enough to read, and had a life-threatening
intestinal infection. During those two months, Mary was with David nearly all
the time, often through the night. David bore all this with patience and
humility. He’s so much better now that the memory of early May feels unreal.
During
that time, we all began to realize, not just intellectually, that David’s life
really was in danger and he might die soon. Since then, he has strengthened
remarkably but the medical estimate of his chances has actually gotten worse.
Unless something changes, his doctor expects David will not survive. Intellectually,
I’ve always known that death is part of life. Birth brings us from our spirit
existence into this, our mortal existence and death takes us back. Death is
also a birth, you could say, into that next phase of our lives. This is
actually starting to sink in for me, and to become real. I realize I will die;
we all will die. I think of the Doc
Martin television series, a great favorite of mine. In one episode, a bunch
of panicky teen-age girls come running into the doctor’s office. One of their
friends is bleeding because she had tried to cut a mole off her belly with a
knife. The girls breathlessly ask, “Is she going to die, is she going to die?”
Doc Martin gruffly says, “Yup….But not today.”
So
here we are. Am I going to die? Yup. Is David going to die? Yup. But not today.
We take one day at a time.
I’m
open to a miracle. I can imagine David going to my funeral in a few years
instead of my going to his. I can imagine David’s wonderful doctor saying, “I
just can’t explain what has happened. David is cancer-free.” It would be great
for David to live, to pursue his interest in further medical education (the
last nine months have added a lot to his army medic training), to marry, and to
have children. This would be a story we would treasure forever. I pray for
this. I say to Heavenly Father, “Please heal David. Please intervene. Please
let him live.” But I’ve come to realize that this is not the only miracle to
look for. In fact, if the miracle we seek is for sickness and death never to
come, we are seeking the wrong miracle.
God’s
plan is to use birth, life, free agency and choice, experience, opposition,
sickness, and death to teach us the gospel, to teach us what we need to know to
progress eternally. If we could learn all this by detached study, we wouldn’t need
to be here. Some of what we need to learn we can learn only by experience,
including what I’ve learned in the past few months. And, I’m sure I have much
more to learn, still.
The
nature of God is that He can make everything redemptive, even tragedy. I know
this now in a way I did not know it before. This
is the big miracle. I saw this redemption in Mat Burnett’s radiant happy
look in the weeks before he died. I’ve seen it in Deb Butler’s transformation
during Marc’s illness and after his death.
I’ve
found that having a disaster strike is a great way to see the Church in action
and to appreciate my membership in this great society. When we were first in
Bethesda, we looked up David’s ward there. Although he never set foot in their
church building, they definitely made him a member of that ward. We talked with
Bishop Young in our first days. When we arrived at sacrament meeting the first
Sunday, we were late. I caught Bishop Young’s eye as we came up the aisle, and I
could tell he knew who we were. It felt good to be known and to be embraced by
him and that ward. He sent home teachers to take the sacrament to David and
many new friends stopped by David’s hospital room.
Bishop
Kenny Bement came to see me on May 5, a very low point. I was alone here; Mary
and David were in Bethesda. Bishop Bement brought me dinner and we talked for
an hour or two. It was just what I needed.
I’ve
thought about why I continue to be an active member of this Church. As it
happens, my son’s leukemia has increased my sense of God’s role in my life and
my commitment to being part of this Church. But I know that sometimes,
seemingly senseless tragedy and suffering can destroy faith and commitment.
I’ve thought about other things that can seem to repel us at times. For
instance, the way we dress for church meetings. On the one hand, it shows that
we think church is special. On the other hand, this practice, which has no deep
doctrinal foundation, could make someone who dresses differently feel
unwelcome. In general, the standards of behavior we try to live (such as
treating sex as sacred and private and reserving it for marriage between a man
and a woman, not using tobacco or alcohol, and not doing recreation or work on
Sundays) can all bind us to God and to each other in a wonderful way, but can also
be the off-putting obstacle that makes Church members seem arrogant, prideful,
peculiar, or joyless. This can make the Church not feel like a home at times.
Behind
and within all this, there is a central core of the Church and the gospel. This
core is radiant, intense, unchanging, and it’s universally applicable to every
human being. If we make our way past the obstacles, if we see them as doorways
instead, and reach this inner core in even a small way, it is wonderful. I feel
I touch this core when I consider any of the following:
The
Mormon pioneers and what they did for the conviction they had that Joseph Smith
was a prophet of God and the truth was restored.
The
bonds of husband and wife, which can be forever.
The
Savior, Jesus Christ and what he taught and did, and the power he has to redeem
us.
The
knowledge that life has meaning and purpose and that God our Heavenly Father
loves us more than we can comprehend, and knows the end from the beginning.
The
covenants we make at baptism and in the temple endowment.
Creation,
choice, the fall, redemption, and covenant making are the center of the temple
endowment. Partly, the endowment is a story of what happened in the past to
other people. But if it were only that, it would not be at the core of our
worship. What makes it the core of our worship is that in our own lives we
ourselves live the drama of creating, of choosing, of falling, of being
redeemed, and of making covenants. It’s not a once-for-all time drama, it’s
continuous. Each week, during the sacrament, we find that the impossibility of
Adam’s and Eve’s situation is ours, too. We promise to obey, we fall short, we
need redemption. There is something unresolvable about this situation, the way
the nature of light is unresolvable between wave and particle. This underlying
unresolved tension in our relationship with God is like our being a planet and
He being a sun. Like a planet’s, our forward momentum is always taking us away
in a straight line, but our path nonetheless is constantly bent into a curved
path around our Father and we stay in orbit. We are always fighting to go in
our own direction and also always being drawn to Him.
My
own orbit is wobbly at times, but I feel God’s attractive power keeping me from
flying off into the void that my own direction would take me. In the end, his
redeeming power can keep even me in orbit. I’m grateful for this.
Love,
JimDad
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