Not long after Elder Jeffrey Holland’s General Conference comforting talk two weeks ago about depression and hope, I was amused to see the tug-of-war among my Facebook friends as the sisters each claimed that his talk was meant specifically for them.
I joined in and, of course, and claimed that it was meant especially for me and my daughter who has struggled with cerebral palsy for 40 years. In fact, I had spent the day visiting her and before I had pulled up in my driveway had received a phone call from my sister telling me that I needed to listen to Elder Holland’s talk before I went to bed that night and a text from one of my daughter’s telling me the same thing.
In what has become a Groundhog Day movie-like trip to Richmond, Va., three hours away, every week or two for the last 15 years my daughter has lived away from home, I had just remarked to my mother, who accompanies me, that 20 years from now when I am 80 and she is 101, maybe I’ll hire us a young cute chauffeur to drive us so we can rest.
I was teasing on the outside, but when facing that future, it is sometimes an effort to choose hope. Drinking in Elder Holland’s talk later that night, however, reminded me why I choose to hope and believe in a brighter, happier future, just as President Monson’s talk at the general Relief Society conference, had assured me of God’s constant love for me.
Together they focused the lens of my testimony back on my childhood as an Army brat traveling throughout the world and helped me see how God has always been aware of me and guided my life.
The only problem is that it starts out a little weird, so stay with me until the end! Hopefully, the payoff will be worth it.
Traumatized
Being a writer, I’m highly impressionable to feelings and images, so years ago I was somewhat traumatized by, I think, the first Christopher Reeves’ Superman movie in which the villains were squashed into those Plexiglass plates and sent speeding into outer space as their imprisonment. (Just looked it up: 1978. Wow.)
Very claustrophobic, I thought that would be an awful and very lonely way to be punished and it’s been an image I’ve associated with death. For years I’ve tried to push that image deep into my subconscious as surely as those bad guys were squished until I started getting older and suddenly that image came crashing back just like they crashed onto Earth at the beginning of one of the sequels. Hmmm . . .
What to do? As an aside, when I teach college literature, my students always want to know why writers and poets either become alcoholics, or commit suicide. I tell them it’s because sensitive souls like writers, poets, and composers always feel Death’s wings beating at their shoulders and unless they have a faith in God to give them hope, they turn to drink and, I guess, decide to face their fears head on and just get it over with.
I contemplated recently what image of growing older and dying might be more appropriate for a devoted, covenant-keeping member of Christ’s church than science fiction super-bad dudes being crushed into super-strong glass plates and jettisoned into cold, dark space, where no one, not even a God-if there is a God in those movies- would ever know where I was.
It was then I felt a still, small voice reminding me how God had always been aware of where I was in the past and would always know where I was in the future. I would never be beyond the reach of His love. I would not be by myself or lost, squashed between some plates or not.
That impression came to me about the same time I felt that President Monson spoke directly to me during the general Relief Society meeting and assured me and the rest of us sisters that God’s love is always there for us and that we will never walk alone. He said that even when we think we are walking alone, one day we will be able to look back and see that God was always with us.
Jettisoned back to pre-baptism
Memories of my past are always divided into my pre-baptism and post-baptism life. I was baptized on my 18th birthday-the first day I could be baptized without my parents’ permission.
So as I contemplated a future without the Superman-movie image, I felt led to consider my pre-baptism life in light of a new awareness that, yes, God had always been with me and been aware of a little Army brat He had plans for and assignments for in His kingdom. The time just needed to be right to bring her in.
Most of the time I think in terms of the gospel just majestically appearing when my knowledge of it came into being, but that wasn’t so. I went back and thought about my life with the restored gospel unseen beside me as the Lord led me gently toward it.
I could see me as a little eight-year-old girl in Kansas, reading her New Testament and getting a sticker of Jesus for her Bible, memorizing the Beatitudes, and wondering which one applied to her, or should they and could they all?
I don’t remember the details, but I remembered earning a puzzle piece for every friend I brought to Sunday School until I had a whole puzzle of Jesus which I glued together. I wondered about Jesus and how I could serve Him. I remembered the wonderful mystery of the Nativity and Christmas Eve services with my family at the Army chapels, singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and the haunting melody of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” I sought the Savior as they did.
I remembered going to church in junior high in California with my Pentecostal Holiness friend and going up to the altar to “receive Christ as my Savior,” wanting to make that formal declaration to God but wondering why I didn’t feel the fullness of the Spirit afterwards as I was promised. I never went back.
Then I was the girl in the Christian Reformed Sunday School class arguing with the teacher that the doctrine of pre-determination left out all the people who had never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ through no fault of their own. Where was the love of God in all that?
But I also remembered sitting on a hill on the beach on La Jolla, California, and looking out over the wide expanse of a black ocean and black starry sky at night during a church youth trip and singing “How Great Thou Art” and making a commitment in my heart that I would find and follow God.
Getting close
As I began high school, my father retired from the Army and we had gone to live in a small southern Virginia city. I had never heard of Mormons, except for a story in the Readers Digest about someone named Joseph Smith who had had a bone cut out of his leg without the benefit of anesthesia and the vague memory of a Mormon temple when I lived in Hawaii when I was in kindergarten.
I didn’t even know out of that city of 55,000 people and an LDS ward of about 12 families that the Lord had moved us in next door to a blended family in which half the family were members of that tiny ward.
I wondered and questioned all through high school why there were so many different churches on the face of the earth all proclaiming to have the truth. If there was one Christ, why were there so many churches? How could all of them be right?
I walked with my sister on Sundays after our Methodist Sunday School down to our cousins’ Baptist church service because I wondered if Christ were baptized by immersion than was my being sprinkled on the head good enough to get me into the Kingdom of God. My sister said I promised her one Sunday that I would find the true church one day and when I did, I would tell her about it.
I prayed, I read my Bible, and I sought.
And then came the time, the summer after I graduated from high school and was leaving home for college, that I started to ask my neighbors about their beliefs. I knew it was true before I finished the first Joseph Smith pamphlet. I got the missionaries’ number and called them, asking them if I could be baptized. The poor elder who answered said, “Uh, I’ll have to ask. I think you have to take the discussions first!” (Thank you, Elder Glenn Sykes and Neil Powell, for asking.)
As my patriarchal blessing states, “It was a re-awakening of truths [I] had known before and loved.”
In a nutshell, my family wouldn’t let me be baptized, but I waited a few weeks until I left for college and turned 18 on Sept. 18 and was able to be baptized. So then it “happened” to be just the right time after all those years of searching that God had been aware of this little Army brat of a girl moving all over the world looking for the truth and waiting for the right time and right place for her to find it.
Easier to look back
As always it’s easier to look back and see how God has worked in our lives in the past. But then we can take that testimony of God’s help in the past and turn it into faith, trust, and courage as we look toward a future that can seem oh so scary. That’s one of the reasons I believe we are taught so often by Book of Mormon prophets to remember, oh remember.
Superman movies weren’t around when Joshua faced his own big, ugly villains, but God’s words to him apply to us today:
Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. (Joshua 1:9)
And that’s what I will do. With President Monson’s words of reassurance ringing in my heart and Elder Holland’s promise of a brighter future, especially that of seeing my daughter in a resurrected and perfected state standing before me one day, I can reject faith-weakening thoughts and silly, frightening images that have haunted me for so many years.
How grateful we can be that President Monson and Elder Holland can speak to all of us at once and we can each hear exactly what we need to hear.
Susan is a freelance writer who lives in beautiful southern Virginia. Her book “Miracle of the Christmas Star” may be purchased on Amazon.com.
Kathleen FulmerOctober 26, 2013
I could so relate to your conversion story as I was an Air Force brat, attended many churches, and I was baptized the summer before my senior year, in South Jersey. My father was stationed in Hawaii at the time and my mother took the discussions with me, but was not baptized. They signed their permission and also supported me serving a mission, a few years later. I count my blessings!
Lyn SotoOctober 26, 2013
Beautiful article, and a beautiful testimony! I have a special needs child too, and there have been times that I was only able to get through each day with a lot of help from Heavenly Father. But I know that one day my son will be resurrected, and perfect, and a beaufiful part of my eternity. That brings a smile to my heart.