Great Things

“For verily I say unto you, that great things await you.” (Doctrine & Covenants 45:62)

To some today may be an ordinary day, but to others it may be the greatest day of their life. As I go into another year, I feel the normal hesitancy that most experience who have lived life. Will this year be the best year of all? Will I experience heartache this year? Will it be a year of wonder? Or will it be one filled with lots and lots of “learning experience”? You never really know. You can’t read the future. It only can be experienced. Even those that have a pretty good idea of what their year will bring may be surprised. The future has a way of doing that.

But one thing I’ve learned in my limited experience is that God has a way of evening things out. The years I have experienced the most heartache have also held the most joyous days. And the “easy” years seem to always outweigh the challenging ones. I recall a time in college about a year after Lee and I had broken up. I was a bit of a mess. I didn’t understand why we weren’t together. A wise person who knew I played the violin told me, “Loralee, if you play the right note in a composition at the wrong time, it’s still the wrong note. God will help you to play the right note at the right time.” I’ve never forgotten that. Four years later, Lee came back into my life and we got married. Sometimes I have wondered why things haven’t come at certain times in my life. But God knows all the right timing. In Uganda, I wondered why Ethan due to bizarre circumstances couldn’t come home. I didn’t understand why God wouldn’t give us the visa he deserved. How could it be good for him to not be home with his family? But had Ethan come home, I would have never gone forward with our adoption of Vienna. As the Lord planned it, He knew whatever harm Ethan would experience living in Uganda as a baby would be far less detrimental to him than not growing up with a sister. He knows what He is doing.

Another experience that has stayed with me happened in 2001. I was an EFY counselor and one of the girls I was over had many problems. I asked her if she wanted a priesthood blessing. She said yes. Right before the blessing took place, I began praying that the little girl be blessed with the things she badly needed at the time. The words, “She is in my hands.” came quickly to my heart and mind. Not six weeks later, I was in Africa in a rural village. Dozens of half naked children were running up to me. thanking me for coming, and then they lined up and began singing. In the midst of all the little children singing, stood one tall girl. She was about the same age as my little EFY girl six weeks earlier. She had on a tattered dress and was an orphan. As I watched her, I began to pray that the Lord would bless her; she had so little in comparison with all the girls I had been counseling that summer. Yet before I could get far in my prayer, the same words came to my mind with more poignancy than before, “She is in my hands.” I believe this message was from God teaching me that we are all in his ever-capable hands no matter who we are or what our circumstances be.

So as we go into a new year, I enter it with the knowledge that great things await all of us, they may come when we expect them to or they may not, but either way we are in His hands and just like any loving Father, God gives us all the best He has to give. Great things await no matter the timing.