The morning of December 19, 1969 dawned crisp and clear in
Salt Lake City, Utah. I picked up my bride-to-be, Patsy Hewlett, early on our
way to the Salt Lake Temple to be sealed for time and for all eternity to each
other. My Grandfather, Harold B. Lee, then one of the senior Apostles in The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was scheduled to officiate at the
ordinance that would bind us to one another. He was very emotional during the
brief ceremony, sensing, I felt, the spirits of those who would come through
our union. I believe he knew the identities of each one who would come to join
our family.
On another December day fifty years later in 2019 we would
gather as many of our children and grandchildren as we could to participate in
a sealing session in the Salt Lake Temple just before it closed for what will
be an extensive four-year renovation. We were assigned to the sealing room
behind the old sealing office just off the Celestial Room to perform proxy
ordinances of marriage for our deceased ancestors – all family names our family had
prepared. One by one we took our turns at the altar in the center of the room
and relived again the morning it all began with just the two of us in 1969.
This time the altar was surrounded by our cherished posterity, all of whom had
been sealed as couples in previous live ordinances for themselves. The
realization of that blessing pronounced upon us fifty years earlier had come to
pass, fifty years in the making.
Patsy and I have been through many wonderful and challenging
times together over those fifty years. Perhaps the most humbling of all has
been this last several years as we sought diligently to petition our Father in
Heaven for answers to my deteriorating health. The downward slide accelerated in
the last six months. I know it is good to be humble without being compelled to
be humble, but this last six months especially we have been compelled to be
humble. Our circumstances are not unusual for most people as they grow older.
Few old people I have known are afraid to die, it’s just the getting there that
is so difficult.
We simply could not find that elusive answer to why I was “off”
from what everyone had known me to be earlier in my life. Then the meningioma brain
tumor was diagnosed, and the answer to the medical mystery was staring right back
at us from the doctor’s computer screen. It was the brain that had been
squeezed and compressed over a long period.
So compromised had I become pre-surgery that I calculated I was at about a 2 on a 100 scale. I had my heart and my lungs that were still functioning well – everything else had been shut down as my brain’s way of compensating to keep me alive. Simple tasks in earlier years were now seemingly impossible to accomplish. My brain told me I could do these things – I had always done these things – but I had lost the ability to do them. My doctor had told me, “Anybody can exercise for ten minutes a day,” and I agreed in principle to that statement. I had gone for much longer periods of heavier exercise before. But I couldn’t do it anymore. I could barely get out of bed, and then I wobbled badly on my weak leg muscles.
Post-surgery I wasn’t much better for three weeks. I was
childlike. I had to master the control of my bladder and my bowels again like a
little child in diapers, and I was wearing adult diapers. I was compelled to be
humble. I had to learn to eat for myself again. I had to learn to balance and to
walk again, at first mastering only a few steps to the bathroom and back using
a walker for balance. I couldn’t do any of those things I had always done until
my brain fog cleared and the blood clot that occupied the space where the tumor
had been in my brain at the incision spot had dissipated. It took about three
weeks.
Now our prayers have been fully answered. I have been cured
and I have been healed. Humility is now once again a choice for me.
Fifty years is a long time to be married to the same person.
It’s a golden time in our lives now. That’s why no one knew me better than Patsy,
and why her instincts (impressions of the Spirit) could not be dismissed so
easily. She knew me better than I knew myself, and she certainly knew me better
than all the doctors and their scientific training. Once they listened to her
and responded to her demands for the MRI, the source of our long struggle for
answers was finally revealed.
We have been studying together the outlines of the Book of
Mormon chapters in Come Follow Me. We are now into the book of Helaman. There is
a constant ebb and flow among the Nephites and Lamanites at this point in their
history. One year the Lamanites are repenting and receiving great blessings
from the Lord, then they become prideful. Another year the Nephites are
repenting, and they become more righteous than the Lamanites and they are
blessed continually. Then this one verse leaps out as a pattern scripture for
us to learn to live by, whether we are “Lamanites” or “Nephites:”
Nevertheless they did fast and pray oft, and did wax
stronger and stronger in their humility and firmer and firmer in the faith of
Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation, yea, even to the
purifying and the sanctification of their hearts, which sanctification cometh because of their
yielding their hearts unto God. (Helaman 3:34).
My children are old enough now to see some of their friends
who were once faithful members of the Church begin leaving and taking their
families with them into the wilderness of apostasy because they have “done
their research” and learned about “facts” they were never taught in the Church.
They often come to me with their stories about their friends who have left, and
they are saddened by the stories they read on their friends’ social media pages
about their reasons for leaving. I encourage my children to be patient and to try
to be like Heavenly Father. Can you imagine Him pacing around His throne wringing
His hands over every soul who turns away for a season? Having vouched safe the
moral agency of His children from the beginning and put a Redeemer in place to
assure the demands of justice are fully satisfied through mercy conditioned
upon the repentance of His children, He waits patiently for the fruits of the
vineyard to come forth in the glorious harvest He envisions for each of His
children. That’s the perspective we must have too – be patient and wait for the
harvest that will surely come.
Mormon uses a phrase “thus we see” as an editorial comment
in his editorial work of summarizing the records:
Yea, we see that whosoever will may lay hold upon the word
of God, which is quick and powerful, which shall divide asunder all the cunning
and the snares and the wiles of the devil, and lead the man of Christ in a
strait and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery which is prepared
to engulf the wicked – And land their souls, yea, their immortal souls, at the right
hand of God in the kingdom of heaven, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and
with Jacob, and with all our holy fathers to go no more out. (Helaman 3:29-30).
Let us all “lay hold” upon the word of God, slow down, turn
down the noise in our busy lives, take a deep breath, ponder and pray, follow
the pattern given to us as cited above, and land our souls at the right hand of
God.
We are in a war for
our souls. Believe me I know that as never before. In the varied battles of
life Satan takes many prisoners and inflicts many injuries and even deaths. But
if we are true and faithful, we will prevail in the final battle of this war,
for so it has been written and the scriptures are true. We are building for the
eternities, and we are just now beginning to discern the light at the end of
the long tunnel of sin and deception.
