Good afternoon wonderful people-
So… Are you ready for week FOUR? I can’t believe we are already one fourth of the way done with our challenge! How was last week’s journey of looking at your childhood and trying to see yourself through different eyes? I hope it was fun, refreshing and eye opening. I can’t wait to hear how it went and see what you learned about yourselves. Did anyone maybe see more in themselves than they thought was in there? Did it help in some small way to see yourself through God’s eyes? I really hope you found some benefit in the experience and will keep trying the new challenges each week and MOST importantly, keep working on the four daily challenges! If you can do nothing else… PRAY and READ your scriptures and He will help you find time and energy for the rest!
I am so excited for this week and to explain to you why and how nature is such an important part of this challenge. As you know, I lost my sister, Liza to suicide four years ago. One thing that really helped me cope with her loss, and feel close to God, and close to my sister, was being in nature. There were several reasons behind this. One was how much Liza loved nature and trees. She worked for several summers for National Youth Corps, clearing trails in the Oregon and Washington mountains. She loved trees and being in nature and it was very healing to her, and she was actually making a lot of progress emotionally before everything fell apart. After losing her, I started paying more attention to the beautiful world around me and tried to let it’s beauty sooth my grieving soul. But an experience that my sister-in-law, Jennifer Koski had, one week after my sister’s funeral, made me look at trees and all of nature in a whole new light which was such a blessing! Here are some of her words describing her experience (this is just a portion of her experience, I attached her entire essay).
“That I May Learn from Vaulted Skies”
If it is true that sorrow stretches the soul for joy, it was not long before I received a generous return. I had tasted a measure of hell; little did I know I was about to receive a portion of heaven.
February 12, 2011. Just about one week after Liza’s funeral I had an astonishing, beautiful experience – perhaps one of the most memorable of my life. I was driving to the store, not thinking about anything in particular, when I turned onto a tree-lined street. Right before my eyes, every tree I could see revealed itself to me. The unfolding scene was so beautiful I caught my breath. Each tree seemed acutely aware of me, and I of them. The trees appeared to be reaching toward me with compassion, their branches stretching out to offer an embrace. As peculiar as it may sound, I felt connected to, and cherished by those trees. I felt immeasurably loved and remarkably comforted. I don’t have any more words to try to describe it.
This seemed all the more strange since I’ve always thought bare, winter trees looked so drab and lifeless. Now I felt the opposite – scarcely has anything appeared more beautiful. For several weeks, just the sight of a tree warmed me. I would look at trees as I drove and think in my heart, “Oh thank you! Thank you!” February used to seem the ugliest month of the year, but this year it was one of the most beautiful. I wish others could see what I saw.
It wasn’t until much later I made the connection between these experiences and being deceived by appearances. I recalled that dark night of hopelessness. In contrast, this encounter with the trees seemed opposite. What on the surface appeared desolate, I saw to be marvelously alive and filled with love. I experienced what Wordsworth might have meant by “Moving about in worlds not realized.”
When Jennifer told me this story, it became so special to me, even more so when she reminded me that I had made her a necklace for Christmas a few months before, the pendant was a tree. Not a tree with leaves, but a tree with just branches.
A few weeks later, on a Sunday in March, I was feeling surrounded by gloom again myseld and it was so bad and all encompassing that I asked my husband to give me a priesthood blessing. While we were still at church he found an empty room and invited our friend, Rick Neiner, to help him administer the blessing. Immediately, I felt so much better and then later that afternoon my friend, Brooke Sampson, came over with a gift for me and it was such an answer to prayer, it was perfect. She had printed up a talk, by Elder Hugh B. Brown and gave it to me to read. She said it had helped her during a hard time. It was so tender and perfect and exactly what I needed to hear. And it tied into what Jennifer had experienced as well, so I knew Brooke had been inspired to bring it by that day. I knew God knew me and was blessing me through my family and friends and that I would be ok. This story is about so much more than nature. It really ties perfectly in with our challenge!
Here is the talk. ENJOY! At the end is the survey link! Please see the Mystery Challenge in the survey and complete the survey by Monday at midnight.
AND…Get out in NATURE this week. Give yourself points each time you exercise outside, or go on a walk, a hike, (or if it’s cold outside, give yourself points for reading your scriptures in front of an open window, or maybe look online for beautiful pictures of trees or bundle up and have a snow adventure). Be creative and feel the sun on your face and enjoy this beautiful world that God has given us to help us feel His love and the love of all the things that surround us!
The Currant Bush
by Elder Hugh B. Brown
of the Council of the Twelve
This month the New Era is happy to introduce the first in a new series of articles to be published in the magazine: Stories from General Authorities. Over the years our General Authorities have recounted stories that have touched the hearts of their listeners and changed behavior. Many of these stirring examples come from their own lives or from the lives of friends and acquaintances. All ring as true today as when first recounted. It is with the permission and blessing of the authors that we print these Stories from General Authorities.
You sometimes wonder whether the Lord really knows what he ought to do with you. You sometimes wonder if you know better than he does about what you ought to do and ought to become. I am wondering if I may tell you a story that I have told quite often in the Church. It is a story that is older than you are. It’s a piece out of my own life, and I’ve told it in many stakes and missions. It has to do with an incident in my life when God showed me that he knew best.
I was living up in Canada. I had purchased a farm. It was run-down. I went out one morning and saw a currant bush. It had grown up over six feet high. It was going all to wood. There were no blossoms and no currants. I was raised on a fruit farm in Salt Lake before we went to Canada, and I knew what ought to happen to that currant bush. So I got some pruning shears and went after it, and I cut it down, and pruned it, and clipped it back until there was nothing left but a little clump of stumps. It was just coming daylight, and I thought I saw on top of each of these little stumps what appeared to be a tear, and I thought the currant bush was crying. I was kind of simpleminded (and I haven’t entirely gotten over it), and I looked at it, and smiled, and said, “What are you crying about?” You know, I thought I heard that currant bush talk. And I thought I heard it say this: “How could you do this to me? I was making such wonderful growth. I was almost as big as the shade tree and the fruit tree that are inside the fence, and now you have cut me down. Every plant in the garden will look down on me, because I didn’t make what I should have made. How could you do this to me? I thought you were the gardener here.” That’s what I thought I heard the currant bush say, and I thought it so much that I answered. I said, “Look, little currant bush, I am the gardener here, and I know what I want you to be. I didn’t intend you to be a fruit tree or a shade tree. I want you to be a currant bush, and some day, little currant bush, when you are laden with fruit, you are going to say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for loving me enough to cut me down, for caring enough about me to hurt me. Thank you, Mr. Gardener.’”
Time passed. Years passed, and I found myself in England. I was in command of a cavalry unit in the Canadian Army. I had made rather rapid progress as far as promotions are concerned, and I held the rank of field officer in the British Canadian Army. And I was proud of my position. And there was an opportunity for me to become a general. I had taken all the examinations. I had the seniority. There was just one man between me and that which for ten years I had hoped to get, the office of general in the British Army. I swelled up with pride. And this one man became a casualty, and I received a telegram from London. It said: “Be in my office tomorrow morning at 10:00,” signed by General Turner in charge of all Canadian forces. I called in my valet, my personal servant. I told him to polish my buttons, to brush my hat and my boots, and to make me look like a general because that is what I was going to be. He did the best he could with what he had to work on, and I went up to London. I walked smartly into the office of the General, and I saluted him smartly, and he gave me the same kind of a salute a senior officer usually gives—a sort of “Get out of the way, worm!” He said, “Sit down, Brown.” Then he said, “I’m sorry I cannot make the appointment. You are entitled to it. You have passed all the examinations. You have the seniority. You’ve been a good officer, but I can’t make the appointment. You are to return to Canada and become a training officer and a transport officer. Someone else will be made a general.” That for which I had been hoping and praying for ten years suddenly slipped out of my fingers.
Then he went into the other room to answer the telephone, and I took a soldier’s privilege of looking on his desk. I saw my personal history sheet. Right across the bottom of it in bold, block-type letters was written, “THIS MAN IS A MORMON.” We were not very well liked in those days. When I saw that, I knew why I had not been appointed. I already held the highest rank of any Mormon in the British Army. He came back and said, “That’s all, Brown.” I saluted him again, but not quite as smartly. I saluted out of duty and went out. I got on the train and started back to my town, 120 miles away, with a broken heart, with bitterness in my soul. And every click of the wheels on the rails seemed to say, “You are a failure. You will be called a coward when you get home. You raised all those Mormon boys to join the army, then you sneak off home.” I knew what I was going to get, and when I got to my tent, I was so bitter that I threw my cap and my saddle brown belt on the cot. I clinched my fists and I shook them at heaven. I said, “How could you do this to me, God? I have done everything I could do to measure up. There is nothing that I could have done—that I should have done—that I haven’t done. How could you do this to me?” I was as bitter as gall.
And then I heard a voice, and I recognized the tone of this voice. It was my own voice, and the voice said, “I am the gardener here. I know what I want you to do.” The bitterness went out of my soul, and I fell on my knees by the cot to ask forgiveness for my ungratefulness and my bitterness. While kneeling there I heard a song being sung in an adjoining tent. A number of Mormon boys met regularly every Tuesday night. I usually met with them. We would sit on the floor and have a Mutual Improvement Association. As I was kneeling there, praying for forgiveness, I heard their voices singing:
“It may not be on the mountain height
Or over the stormy sea;
It may not be at the battle’s front
My Lord will have need of me;
But if, by a still, small voice he calls
To paths that I do not know,
I’ll answer, dear Lord, with my hand in thine:
I’ll go where you want me to go.”
(Hymns, no. 75.)
I arose from my knees a humble man. And now, almost fifty years later, I look up to him and say, “Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for cutting me down, for loving me enough to hurt me.” I see now that it was wise that I should not become a general at that time, because if I had I would have been senior officer of all western Canada, with a lifelong, handsome salary, a place to live, and a pension when I’m no good any longer, but I would have raised my six daughters and two sons in army barracks. They would no doubt have married out of the Church, and I think I would not have amounted to anything. I haven’t amounted to very much as it is, but I have done better than I would have done if the Lord had let me go the way I wanted to go.
I wanted to tell you that oft-repeated story because there are many of you who are going to have some very difficult experiences: disappointment, heartbreak, bereavement, defeat. You are going to be tested and tried to prove what you are made of. I just want you to know that if you don’t get what you think you ought to get, remember, “God is the gardener here. He knows what he wants you to be.” Submit yourselves to his will. Be worthy of his blessings, and you will get his blessings.
I love you all so much! Please share some pictures stories or experiences from this week with us. Email me pics or tell us stories in the survey! I will share them next week! NO GO ENJOY NATURE and FEEL THE LOVE!
Love-
Sarah
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