Well, we made it through January by the skin of our teeth.

I look back at the goals and feelings I had at the beginning of the month and I am humbled by reality and exhaustion. My goals need a serious reassessment. Why, I wonder, was there more than one thing on that list in the first place?

I got a call from Caleb on Friday afternoon.

He just wanted to say hello. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to have adult children. Like I made my own personal posse of friends. Well done, me.

It was a newsy phone call full of updates on classes and work and his love life and left me grinning. I remember thinking that life is just so good.

The very next day I was reminded just how painful life in a fallen world can be when we heard news of more than one wonderful family suffering through real trial and loss.

Tonight I wonder how to make sense of it all: the struggle, the joy, the excruciating pain. All of it part of life here in mortality. It’s nearly overwhelming.

I had to give the opening prayer in sacrament meeting today. I asked heaven to look down on us—their children in a lost and fallen world—and send their help. Because, oh how we need it.

This week I was reminded of God’s words about suffering—that it shall be “but a small moment.” But nothing about it feels small. The requirements for improvement, the magnitude of the blessings, the depth of the grief and pain—small is not the word I’d choose for any of it. In the face of the enormous depth and breadth of the human experience, the only thing that feels small is me. I feel vulnerable and powerless and yes, very small.

All I can do is send my prayers heavenward: Have mercy. We are weak. Rejoice with us. We are unworthy. Save us. We are irreparably broken. And then I make my tiny, miniscule efforts to change, to appreciate, and to ease. It is not much. I can see that clearly. But I do what I can. Small and insignificant as it is, I do it anyway. Try, try, try.