I gave a talk in church on "consider the lilies" and I have not been able to stop thinking about it, so you guys are getting the blog version. Fair warning, this one is tender. It's about faith and it's about my kids and it's about some of the hardest years of my life, and I've decided I'm done being shy about that part of me on here (I wrote about why here: bellebucket.com/why-belle-bucket). So here we go.
I want you to picture a bedroom.
Popcorn ceilings. Bright burgundy walls. Candy wrappers everywhere. Dora the Explorer, lost yet again, on the TV. A flip phone that nobody's answering.
There's a twenty year old girl in the bed and she's been in it a while. She isn't sick in any way you could look at her and see. She's already a mom twice over. Her husband is deployed. She's going through something she won't have a name for until years later, she isn't walking with Christ, and she doesn't have one single idea how to get out of that bed.
Sitting right next to her is a little girl. Big hazel eyes, purple sweatsuit with the word "cutie" across the front, hair not combed.
And what I need you to know about that mom is that she was so scared with that little girl. Scared she'd grow up and remember. The years her mom couldn't will herself out of bed. The dry cereal in the little bowl on the nightstand. And then the years that came after, with even deeper postpartum depression and a loss I still can't fully write about and a whole lot of darkness. She was scared that little girl would resent her. That she'd never be happy. That she'd never know Jesus.
Her name is Lily.
Consider the lilies, and how they grow.
That baby is grown now. She's serving a mission in France. She's teaching people about Jesus all day long. She calls me every chance she gets and she WANTS to talk to me. She is happy.
I've been a mom for twenty years, which is another way of saying I've been worrying for twenty years. So this is the scripture I got asked to speak on, Matthew 6:28-30:
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
Okay so honestly, at first that didn't ease my worrying at all. Why are the lilies in the OVEN? Today it's here, tomorrow it's in the oven? Oh no no no.
But sit with it for a second. He didn't say no worries, nothing bad happens. He picked the most temporary thing in the whole field and said God dressed it anyway. That's a much harder promise than the one I wanted. I wanted Him to promise me nothing would burn.
I have worried about kids sick at 2am. I've worried that I was ruining my children. I've held two of them through their first breakups. And I have worried, more than anything, about all the ways I'm doing everything wrong.
This is where I'm supposed to tell you not to worry, because look, it all worked out for Lily. At least so far.
I'm not going to do that. Because some of your worries are going to come true. Some of mine did. After the most faith filled moment of my life, my son Austin isn't here. And all the worrying in the world didn't keep that from happening.
There's one more thing in that verse, though. It ends with "O ye of little faith." That exact phrase only shows up a handful of times in scripture, and one of the other times is in the boat. You know the one. The storm comes up, waves over the sides, and He's asleep. They wake Him up, He says peace be still, and then He turns around and says why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith. Same exact words. The flowers and the storm.
And this is the part I needed. Those men didn't do one single thing to cause that storm. It just came. But a lot of mine I built myself. I made the choices that made the weather, and then I sat in it. And I spent YEARS believing that disqualified me somehow. That a storm you brought on yourself is one you're supposed to just sit in and take.
He does not say that. Not one time. Not anywhere.
I could go through every one of my kids and tell you the thing I worried about and the person they turned into anyway. Grayson, who I was sure the principal was going to call about every single day, walked up to a stranger at BYU Education Week this year, a rough looking guy in a tank top with a big cross on it, and invited him to a concert with us and then just stood there and listened to that man's whole story. I watched my son turn into a leader right in front of me. Claire, who I was pregnant with during the darkest stretch of my life, on heavy medication, getting clean, full of sorrow and anger that I'd read a baby soaks all up, is the happiest, kindest girl I know. None of them toiled their way into who they are. None of them spun it. He just keeps growing them.
Joseph Smith wrote that God "contemplated the whole of the events connected with the earth... before it rolled into existence," and that "the past, the present and the future were, and are with him one eternal now."
Let me say that in my own words. He isn't watching my life go by in order. He sees all of it at once. He saw that twenty year old girl in the bed, and He saw her daughter walking into the Paris temple last week, and to Him those aren't two things twenty years apart. That's ONE look. So when I'm laying awake at 2am running through everything that could go wrong, what I'm doing is working really hard on a problem He finished before the world started. He is good. He is their Savior. Not me.
One more thing and then I'll let you go.
The week before this talk I was at BYU Education Week, and I bumped into Sister Kearon in a hallway. Because I had this talk on my mind I asked her what she thought about "consider the lilies," and she told me the song by that name was one she held close through losing her son to a heart condition. And I told her about Austin's heart. And we just stood there in that hallway and held onto each other. I haven't stopped wondering whether her Shawn and my Austin weren't somewhere doing the exact same thing.
Oh, and the windows in the Paris temple, the one Lily just walked into? They're made of French wildflowers. Lilies. Fleur de lis. Lily flower.
O ye of little faith. That's me, by the way.
So I'm not going to promise you it'll be easy. I'm not going to promise your worry won't come true, because mine did. But I will promise you this. It works out. It works out in ways you cannot see while you're standing in the middle of it.
You are one of His favorite wildflowers. He knows the you who made the mistake, and the you who stayed up worrying, and He already knows the whole beautiful thing and how it ends. He clothed that lily knowing exactly what was coming for it.
And He is going to clothe you. He already has.
xo, Amy