How is it that when I looked out my bedroom window this morning I saw red leaves on the tupelo trees and yellow ones on the tulip poplars?! How can Quinn already be almost half-way done with his mission?! How can Seth be turning into such a tall, skinny guy who knows his letters and numbers (I promise I didn't teach it to him; he just learned it)?! And now I only have three more years to prepare Luke for a mission, and much less than that for Adri--she's beginning to fill out her papers today.
To that end, for morning devotional we've been reading John Bytheway's What I Wish I'd Known Before My Mission. This week I hosted the LDSHE Adult Conference Committee for 48 hours while they planned the May 2014 conference, but I broke away to come upstairs and read to my kids on Thursday morning. We read the story of how Elder Bytheway had felt the Spirit guide him in knowing what to say to a 75 year-old man Filipino man who had lived through the Japanese invasion during WWII. He was prompted to turn to the page in the flip chart that said (and I remember this well--I've still got my flipchart!):
"Where did I come from?"
"Why am I here?"
"Where am I going after this life?"
The old man silently walked to the back of the room and picked up a little book. Inside he had written,
My Eternal Questions
1 - Where did I come from?
2 - Why am I here?
3 - What do I need to accomplish?
4 - Where will I go when I die?
As they taught him the Plan of Salvation, he said tearfully, "I have been looking for this for forty years." This also made me cry as I realized how blessed I've been to have had ANSWERS to these questions for forty years. (After I finished blubbering I returned to my meeting downstairs.)
But, yes, time does pass so fast, and unless we take this little fact seriously (carpe diem!) we'll get to the end of our mortality and wonder what just happened to us. And mortality comes crashing in on you pretty fast when you get a call from your married daughter (that same morning) that she's in the back of an ambulance headed for the hospital and someone ran into them as she and her husband were on their way to work and their car is totaled. Thanks to God and seatbelts and airbags they are both fine.
