You can learn a lot from your kids. Grant spoke in church yesterday, and gave a beautiful talk about what he learned on his mission:
1. Don't be a baby. This is never a bad thing to learn, and generally needs to be learned over and over. And over.
2. Put God first in your life - He is your DAD. No one loves you more, and your prayers should be TALKING to Him. It's so much more than "We thank Thee, we ask Thee...." from Primary.
Grant told a story about a little tiny boy, Tino, the stake president's son, who gave a prayer and kept calling Heavenly Father "Poppy," as he asked Heavenly Father for things that Grant felt that he specifically needed at that time. Grant said he was very grateful to have learned to TALK to His "Poppy" from Tino.
He told about a tiny little outpost of the church, down at the tip of the continent, called the 28th of November (it's cooler in Spanish). He said one member's home was the most holy place he had ever been, besides the temple. He said the man felt his home needed to be sacred, because of being so off the path of any church jurisdiction. Grant said he could feel that the Lord had not forsaken these few saints in this tiny little area, out in the middle of nowhere - that no one in the world may know about them, but the Lord knew about them, and watched over their lives. "For can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on ths on of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee, O house of Israel. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me." (1 Nephi 21:15-16). He learned that he is not alone from the 28th of November.
Lastly, Grant told of David and Maria, a family who had a huge trauma befall their family the day after their baptism. He told of counseling David that this event could bring him closer to God, or tear him away from God - but that he, David, would be the one to decide. He said one of the most meaningful moments of his entire mission was watching the change come over David's face as he made the decision to stay with the Lord. He learned to stay with the Lord, through anything that could happen to him, from David.
The last area in Grant's mission was a return to an area where he served very early in his mission. He spoke about how powerful it was to see different people's choices to move closer to the Lord - or not - over that year and a half in between. It reminded me of Alma meeting Ammon and his brothers after their fourteen-year mission to the Lamanites, how overjoyed Alma was at learning that his dear friends were still faithful to their covenants. It was particularly poignant to consider, after hearing about a family who could have been ripped away from their tender, newly-planted gospel roots at the very outset of their planting, but instead, to reach down deep into that soil and cling to their covenants, and to their God.
I love what I've learned and how my faith has been strengthened as I've watched my son serve a mission. I'm sure gonna miss those Monday emails.
Grant and cousin Isaac
Grandpa Simper and Uncle Dick
Cousin Sarah - new Aggie!
Aunt Julee and Val
Why didn't we get Grant in here?
Susie Peterson, David Mann, and Megan
High school friends - Chantelle and Mietra Aarabi
Cousin Bronson, and friends Cory Swensen and Jordan Prestwich
Megan and Jeanne Huffty, with Jeanne's hubby Elmer
Grandma and Grandpa Naylor
Aunt Michelle and cousins Ashton and Peyton - who turned twelve the day before
Megan with Shaunie Mendenhall
Elder Cameron Beatty, one of Grant's companions, with Aunt Tammy and Sarah
Shaunie and I in deep conversation, Connie and Julee chortling over chips
Two days ago, we had a taste of what I imagine it's like to pass through the veil at the end of our lives. As I stood in the airport waiting to see our missionary man child come down the escalator inside the terminals, we waited with three other families whose sons were traveling with Grant: Elders Harris, Healey, and Peterson. Naturally, we were all instantly friends, because we were all there for the same purpose, to welcome valiant sons home. Then we caught that first glimpse of them, predictably near the end of the disembarkment, and suddenly, we weren't one big group. We were four individual groups, sacred family units, sharing a private, sweet moment of reunion. Suddenly, Grant wasn't the disembodied idea of Grant that he had become over the past two years. He was my Grant, our Grant, that sweet little boy, loping down that hallway towards us, a man home from his first big commission from the Lord.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and because of changed travel plans, the dear boy had essentially been up since Monday morning at 6:30 Buenos Aires time. He looked dazed and confusedly happy.
This must be what heaven will be like, welcoming each other after completing our life's missions. There will be people there to greet us and welcome us home again. It will be familiarly strange....and strangely familiar. Being together again with people we may have been separated from our entire mortality, it will surprise us that we remember and know grandparents and others whom we never met in this life.
You can't really say that it feels like he's never been gone, because the separation mattered so much. It was vital that Grant's first two decades of life be tithed for the Lord, and all four of us are different people because he served. I am so grateful for this son. It was joyful, yesterday, to watch him get up and study, make his bed (!), clean up after himself, ask every few minutes, "What do you need? What can I do for you?", thank me for the meals I've fixed him, allow me to chase him around the bar in the kitchen for hugs, the way I used to before he left.....only now, turn around suddenly and run right into my arms. I'm so grateful for children who grow up and still want to come home!
The apostle Paul calls followers of Christ "children of light." I am so grateful to have raised children who love light. Light is the way by which we see everything else. The Light, is what helps us discern truth - "things as they really are."
Lookin' for the Boy...
Here he comes!
Best friends
Grandma Naylor & Megan
Grandpa Naylor
Uncles Kyle & Bryce
And the one who makes him cry? His first mission president - President & Sister Argyle
"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." -Dr. Seuss
President Argyle gave his missionaries specific "return and report" instructions when he left Argentina in July, 2010. This is Grant, obeying those instructions.
Dan Furner, Grant's bishop who sent him into the mission field
Tim Richardson, Grant's Weblo's leader, then, the Young Men President when Grant was a priest
Mom #2 - Connie Bell - Grant's piano teacher from age 5 to 18
Mietra Aarabi - one of Grant's best friends since junior high
So much to do in the next 30 hours. So for now, I just have to say that tomorrow, my little boy is coming home. He'll get on a plane in Buenos Aires @ 10:30 tonight (their time, 7:30 our time), and land in Miami tomorrow morning @ 7:00 a.m. He will be in my arms @ roughly 4:45 p.m., tomorrow afternoon.
Being in Grant's air space is a very, very good place to be. He really knows how to be present. In fact, I love to say that he will never be mistaken for being absent! He sees people, and he loves what he sees. He has one of the most beautiful hearts that I have had the privilege of knowing in this life, and I'm honored to be his mother. His patriarchal blessing said he asked to come to our home, which I will marvel over until my dying day. After that, I'm hoping it'll make a little more sense. :)
The very best thing I have done with my life is bringing up two amazing human beings that are making this planet a better place. Today, I am having joy in my posterity.
Gotta go make somebody's favorite peach dessert.
When did he go from this...
.....to this?
Last time I saw Grant's face, I yelled to him, "Come what may, and love it!"
Feeling a little punk on this day, but I love this picture of study time!
BBQ-ing with one of Grant's dear convert friends, David
True sign of manhood: burning your boyhood blankie
Preaching to the penguins
Grant's standing on a frozen river...he wrote, "I walk on water on a daily basis."
Just think: there are thousands of groups of missionaries like this all over the world. What an army!
Six months ago, in the thro's of bleak mid-winter (yes, it was April, and yet, this particular year, it WAS the bleak MID-winter) I started to worry that I may be slowly dying.
So much of my life was in a comfort zone, that - as often happens when we get a little older - I was starting to feel like that comfort zone was beginning, ever-so-slightly, to shrink. I'd been teaching piano, off and on (more on than off), for 28 years (yes, I started when I was 10). I had had teaching callings in the church for 12 consecutive years. I struggled with routines, but I was even used to that, recognizing my need to approach them with my unique little A.D.D.-ness, and knowing that with the ebb and flow of each year, it always felt like I was fighting my way out of a paper bag...
When in May, as I was still fighting my way out of this year's paper bag, I started to have problems with tendonitis in my right wrist. I continued to nurse a war wound in my left foot as well - aka: zip line injury from girls' camp four years ago. I laughingly noticed one day that every single move I was making - to get in and out of my car, put groceries away, change laundry, etc. - was designed with one major objective: AVOID PAIN. As very often happens when I make these wry little observations, the spirit whispered the eternal truth connected to my observation, "You're doing that spiritually, too."
That feeling I had had in the previous several months, that I was slowly dying inside, crystalized in this new realization, and with it, the further realization that if I was going to make the choice to avoid pain in this life, I was going to die before my heart had the sense to stop beating. If I continued on the path I had set my unwitting feet on, I was going to become incapable of feeling, all because I had decided it might be too painful.
C.S. Lewis said,
"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk [my italics] of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
"I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness....We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it."
In my prayers, I began asking Heavenly Father to help me wake up, and live. In feeling the kind of pain connected with my current trials, I didn't want to shut down and be incapable of feeling anything. And as part of that, I didn't want to sleepwalk through life, incapable of being an instrument in the Lord's hands, to bless, and serve, and minister. I've always loved learning new things, and I didn't want to shut myself off to one of the biggest joys in this life, and in the next life: growth and progress.
Fast forward to Sunday...
I was talking to a friend about having too many new things on my plate, and it hit me how every single thing going on in my life right nowhas me in a huge learning curve. Six months ago, everything in my life was in my comfort zone. Now, everything in my life is OUT of my comfort zone. And since I begged the Lord to not let me die inside, it's all tender mercies. It's like the Lord plucked me out of my old life, and tossed me into the deep end of the swimming pool. To have EVERY. SINGLE. THING be out of my comfort zone puts me in a state far, FAR from grace. That learning curve is messy, and awkward, and clumsy. And when you've been in your comfort zone for any extended period of time, all your natural man instincts practically scream at you to go back to the old way, where you're comfortable, where it's easy. I just have to know that the Lord's grace is available in all of these new circumstances...AFTER ALL I CAN DO. And it's just going to look messy until that starts to happen. He is sooooo good to me, to answer my prayer in such a huge way. It's one of the reasons I feel hesitation to put anything down while I'm figuring it out. I keep trying to just take one day at a time, and since all these messy things are gifts from a loving Father, I plead for guidance, and strength, and FOCUS. Always focus...
And then, as I get up off my knees, and wonder where on earth to plunge in today, I hear this hysterical little voice:
