Good afternoon, brothers and
sisters. I’d especially like to thank my friends who have come to share this
meeting with us.
I’m the mom of the fine young man
who just spoke. David is our fourth child and third son. We’re very grateful
for every day that he is with us and in relatively good health.
Having a child with a
life-threatening illness is hard. Really hard. Some moments I double over in
nearly unbearable heartache. However, I’ve been on this earth for 58 years and
I’ve learned that there are many, many hard things in life. I’m sure that right
here in this room are some who have borne terrible, private griefs and intense pains.
Sometimes it just hurts.
In 1839, Joseph Smith was jailed in Liberty, Missouri, in
filthy conditions and cut off from family and friends. The Lord told him:
“The Son of Man hath
descended below them all”.(Doctrine and Covenants 122:8)
In other words, Jesus Christ, our Savior, has experienced depths of pains,
sorrows, and afflictions that no mortal human could survive. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Alma teaches this about the suffering
of the Savior: As we read in Alma 7:
…he
shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind
… he will take upon him the pains and
the sicknesses of his people.
And
he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind
his people;
I don’t know why a particular person
suffers a particular thing. But I trust, deeply trust, that there is meaning in
the suffering and that God is keenly aware of us and wants the best for us.
On Wednesday it will be exactly 8
months since David called us from Korea to tell us he was in the hospital with
leukemia. At the end of
May, David was
transferred to Mass General: a short 13 miles from our house instead of 435
miles. Several treatments
later, the leukemia has relapsed. We pray every day for complete healing, but
we also have to prepare for a good bye.
I’ve had the deep spiritual confirmation of the power of
prayer: prayers offered for us by our own family of children, parents, brothers,
and sisters, and friends from all over. I know that those prayers sustained me
during the bleakest times at Walter Reed and again when we discovered in August
that the leukemia had relapsed.
Hopefully, I’ve also learned some
things. One is empathy
for others.
When my mom died last year, one month shy of her 90th
birthday, with my sorrow I came to understand some of what others had
experienced with the death of a parent. I just hadn’t “gotten it” before.
I recently studied The
Book of Job in The Bible as part
of our Sunday School class. I first read the whole Bible when I was about 13, and have read Job several times since. I never
understood why it was so long: 42 chapters. ‘Just get on with it, Job! You say, “the Lord gave and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the
Lord”, so now, move
on, just deal!’ However,
this summer, as I read Job’s laments, it brought me to tears, many times. Here
is a soul-wrenching expression of human sorrow at the edge of capacity. Job
believed in God, Job accepted his calamities, but Job hurt, deeply, gnawingly,
inconsolably. And that’s okay.
On April 6th of this year,
I was able to watch the Sunday morning General Conference, broadcast from Salt
Lake City, at the theater of the Visitors Center
on the Washington Temple grounds. It had been a long 18 days since David had called
us from Korea. Two talks spoke directly to me: “Grateful in Every Circumstance” by President Dieter
Uchtdorf, and “Bear Up
Their Burdens With Ease” by Elder David Bednar. I wept in the darkened theater,
touched by the comfort and wisdom these men conveyed.
President Uchtdorf taught that although we should
“count our many blessings” as the hymn suggests, gratitude is deeper than that.
Gratitude is recognizing God’s hand in our lives, whatever our circumstances.
Elder Bednar told a true story of a friend who
went to cut firewood in the mountains. When a snow storm started, he foolishly
kept going, trusting in his new 4 wheel drive truck. However, he got stuck,
really stuck, and was in a dangerous situation. Since he couldn’t drive out, he
decided to cut firewood to pass the time. With his truck bed full of wood, he
tried one more time. This time he got traction and was able to return home
safely. And how could he get out? As Elder Bednar says, “It was the load…”
He says: “Sometimes we mistakenly may believe that
happiness is the absence of a load. But bearing a load is a necessary and
essential part of the plan of happiness.”
I want to say, that if I am
weathering this difficult time with any grace, it is largely due to my mom. When
I was almost 3 years old, my younger brother, Michael was born. He took a very
long time to learn to crawl, eat by himself, walk, and talk. Mentally, he never
advanced beyond the capacity of a 2 or 3 year old. It was a great sorrow to my
parents that their beautiful, brown-eyed boy was so handicapped. And he was a
beautiful child!
When I was a
teenager, my mom told me, “We’ve prayed for Michael to be normal. We’ve prayed.
But sometimes the answer is no.”
I don’t know what
the answer in David’s life will be. He may not live to be 28, he may live to be
90. But I am grateful for the great peace I have felt from time to time during
these 8 months. I know God lives and I know he knows each of us, by name. He
knows all the details of our lives.
I don’t know why hard things happen
in life, but I do know that Jesus Christ, our Savior, suffered all things to
rescue us from eternal death. That may not make the current pain less, but it
is a promise I cling to.
And he will take upon him death, that he may
loose the bands of death that bind his people.
May we each feel
the deep and abiding love that Heavenly Father has for us and may we find
comfort in all our times.
In the name of
Jesus Christ, Amen.
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Thank you for your beautiful words and testimony.
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