This week I went to a Relief Society meeting.
Before I left, I asked David, “Do you think I need to wear a dress?”
“Probably,” he said.
“But I don’t want to wear a dress. I’m not wearing a dress.”
A few minutes after I arrived at the meeting, I send David a text:
So ya, should have worn a dress. This is
how it’s going to feel on judgement day…
regret for my neck of iron sinew.
I’m a slow learner. With a stiff neck. A lethal combination.
Today Ethan broke the bread and blessed the water of the Lord’s sacrament for the very first time. I was overwhelmed as I watched his thin, familiar fingers tear the soft slices into bite-sized pieces as we sang the words, “Oh remember what was done, that the sinner might be won.” He tore piece after piece and they piled in front of him like a mound of miracles. One of those pieces was for me and my neck of iron sinew.
I sat there, stunned and fully aware of the eternal patterns at work in front of me—my son, born as a baby and held in my arms, now grown and thoughtful, providing and participating (in a small way) in his own mother’s redemption, which made me think of Mary, of course, and all the other mothers from the beginning who were not enough of what they wanted to be. A long line of mothers, as fallen and flawed as me, all in need of their own miracle.
A couple of years ago, we went to the Grand Canyon. On one of the walls of the visitor’s center there is a quote by Enos Mills that reads: “Given enough time, there is nothing more changeable than rock.”
Today as I put my piece of the miracle into my mouth, I was grateful for one more week. A little more time. Because given enough of it, even my stony heart and neck of iron sinew has a chance at change.
Perhaps that is all any of us need: enough time. Here we are in the longest month of the year. We start with so many plans for transformation and growth, and the days drag by without any visible evidence of real change. The work is so hard that it seems like I should be fundamentally and irrevocably different just from the monumental effort involved. But here I am in the same body with the same brain with the same recalcitrant heart. It feels like the fourteenth week of the January and I am no closer to who I want to be than I was in the first one.
But don’t worry, I tell myself. Rock takes time to change. A few billion years of steady progress and voila! It’s only the fourteenth week of January, after all.
We just have to take it one bite-sized miracle at a time.