A Simple Phrase that Changed My Life Forever

Fifty-five years ago this morning, I woke up, knelt by the side of my bed in my off-campus apartment at BYU, and prepared to utter the same prayer I had been offering for the previous nine days. 

Ever since I had met David Stone, I had been pleading with my Heavenly Father to tell me if David was indeed the person whom I should marry and be joined to for all eternity. On our first date, arranged over the telephone after a friend of David’s had spoken highly of me, we both sensed that we might have met our future spouse. 

A few days before, the two of us had fasted and prayed to know the Lord's will, and although David felt he had received a positive answer, I hadn't.  Before he left Provo the day before, we had agreed that we would keep in touch and see how our relationship developed.

Staying in the Lane

As I was driving to the Seattle temple by myself for the first time after my arrival in Washington last month, I began to feel very sad that David, my late husband, was not beside me. I felt I had made great progress in the last few months in usually remembering him happily, but at this moment, thinking about how, long ago, he had carefully given me the driving directions I was now carefully following brought tears to my eyes.

Suddenly, my mood completely changed. My mind was flooded with joy as that memory from a decade ago came forcefully into focus. I recalled David’s voice repeating to me the important advice I needed to follow if I was to arrive at the temple on time, “Stay in the lane, Rosalie!” It now struck me in a new way that I knew could help me deal with the waves of sorrow that still threaten to engulf me from time to time.

An Answered Cri de Coeur

The anguished cries of my three-year-old grandson, combined with a statement by Dostoyevsky and hymn lyrics by Isaac Watts, prompted me to ponder how we can discover and attain our deepest desires. 

While visiting the family of our youngest son some years ago, the adults in our group were startled one evening by the sudden, impassioned crying of our three-and-a-half-year-old grandson, David. He was apparently having a nightmare. Our daughter-in-law attempted to calm him with soft words and rocking, but he continued to cry out and talk nonsense which related to what he was dreaming.

She carried him downstairs to join the rest of us, and mentioned that this sort of thing had happened before. Once David was fully awake, she assured us, he would calm down. For a couple of minutes he continued to wail and display deep distress, despite his mother’s efforts to awaken and reassure him.

Maintaining Trust When God’s Ways Seem Inscrutable, Part 2: Reflection vs. Reality

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” I Corinthians 13:12 

In the verse above, from a letter the apostle Paul wrote to the relatively new church members in Corinth, he used an analogy that was particularly meaningful to them when he described how we  understand God and his ways. That analogy becomes clearer for 21st century English speakers if we know that the words translated into English as “glass” and “darkly” have slightly different meanings in the original Greek. “Glass” meant a looking-glass, or mirror, many of which were manufactured in Corinth out of polished brass. Those mirrors often revealed a distorted or discolored image of the thing being reflected. The Greek words translated as “darkly” meant “in a riddle or puzzle, by an enigma.”[1]  Paul’s analogy helped the Corinthians resolve questions that were creating disunity in their congregation. I believe it can help us, in our day, to deal with questions about spiritual matters that some find puzzling, or even disquieting.

Maintaining Trust When God’s Ways Seem Inscrutable, Part 1: Understanding the Meaning of Revelations

While a student at Brigham Young University, my husband had a very intriguing personal experience with President Hugh B. Brown (an apostle and a counselor in the First Presidency of the LDS church at the time), his wife, and one of their granddaughters who was a good friend of David’s. The four of them had lunch together in a restaurant in Salt Lake City sometime in 1963 or 1964.

Considering himself a lowly university student, David remembered feeling very much in awe of President Brown. One part of the conversation in particular stuck in his mind, and he told me about it after we were married in 1966, because it raised such interesting questions and possibilities regarding the policy of Priesthood ordination not being available to men of black African ancestry at the time.

Oh Say, Where Is Truth? Part 3: Facts or Feelings?

This final post in a trilogy on discerning truth recounts a poignant example of memory distortion that has bittersweet connotations for our family now that my husband has passed on.

Genuine tragedies have occurred when false memories have resulted in false accusations. Fortunately, most false memories are relatively harmless, and easily corrected when brought to light. Our family has a “false memory” story, which we laughingly bring up whenever we doubt one another’s recollection of an event.

During a time before everyone had cell phones, when we were living in a suburb of Baltimore, our seventeen year-old daughter J called from a friend’s house to ask for an extension of her curfew. My late husband, David, was in Europe on business, and as I listened to J’s request, I prayed I would make a decision that he would agree with.

Oh Say, Where Is Truth? Part 2: Do We “Remember It Well?”

Part 1 of this trilogy of posts about truth posited that fiction could sometimes be more “truthful” than non-fiction. This follow-up post deals with the challenge of finding truth in memories.

When faced with conflicting memories of our past, my husband and I often smiled as we quoted the opening lines from a duet “I Remember it Well.” They epitomize the tendency to we have to believe that we personally remember things correctly, even when faced with evidence that others remember the same events quite differently.

               We met at nine.

                        We met at eight.

 I was on time.

                        No, you were late.

Ah yes! I remember it well[1]

We all tend to believe that we remember things correctly, and often misunderstandings arise when people disagree about what “really” happened. But psychologists have discovered that our minds definitely can be fooled.

Oh Say, Where Is Truth? Part 1: Fact or Fiction?

This is the first in a trilogy of posts about finding truth.

While traveling across Australia by train with my husband in 2006, I became engrossed in a highly-acclaimed biography of one of the prophets of this dispensation, which was written by a believing, committed member of the LDS Church. As the author began referring to the accounts of certain incidents, however, I became at first uncomfortable, and finally very disturbed.

My unease did not come from fears that my testimony would be shaken, but rather because I sensed that much of what was being considered as "history" or "facts" was not really how things actually happened. I doubted the accuracy of some of the original reporting, and the memories of those being quoted, because they didn’t ring true to me.

I put the biography aside, and resumed reading a work of fiction which is loosely based on the life of a prophet of this dispensation, and which was written by another believing, committed member of the LDS church. A few pages into my reading I was struck by the realization that I felt a much stronger sense of "truth" while I was reading that fantasy novel, than I did while reading certain parts of the supposedly non-fiction biography. How could this be?