Christmas Day 2022

 

Today, Christmas Day, my heart is filled with love and gratitude. My wife and I live with other senior couples in duplexes just a few hundred yards from where the Smiths lived. We can see the Sacred Grove from our windows. The Smiths celebrated about twelve Christmases here. This is our second. I miss my family, my children, grandchildren, brothers, and friends very much, and I should be lonely, being so far away from them, but I’m not. Why? Because I’m serving my Father in Heaven and his Son, Jesus Christ at one of the most sacred places on earth, and their love fills this place. From here, 204 years ago this spring, that love began to pour out upon the whole earth. My wife and I feel so blessed to be here.

How did we get here? Being called on a mission as a senior couple in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a little different than when the young men or women are called on a mission. We are given the opportunity to list the places where we would like to go, and though it’s not certain that we will serve there, it is likely.

In the spring of 2021, Covid had finally lost some of its grip on the world and my wife and I decided to serve another mission. We began filling out the papers online. We were given the opportunity to list a maximum of 8 places where we would like to serve. This place, Palmyra, New York, was number one in both our hearts, but we felt selfish choosing the place we really wanted to go to. So, we placed it down the list and put areas with critical needs and where we had skills high on the list. Three weeks later, we got our call by email from President Nelson and the Missionary Department of the Church. Imagine our surprise and joy when we saw that we were called to serve here, at the New York and Pennsylvania Historic Sites. We were so amazed.

Now, nearly eighteen months after leaving on our mission, I’m a changed man. Though contention, anger, and polarization still fill the headlines of the online news, I feel none of it. My heart is drawn out with love to all of Heavenly Father’s children, my brothers and sisters. It does not matter if they are of my religion or even religious, I love them. Contention and anger are gone from my heart as well as fear and distrust. “How did that happen?” you might ask. There are many reasons, I’ve been praying for just these feelings, but more than anything else it comes from this place. We’re living just a stone throw from where God the Father and His Son appeared to a fourteen-year-old boy. There is still an incredible Spirit there. In the last eighteen months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk about these places with people from Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, England, China, Taiwan, Japan, Ukraine, Croatia, Germany, Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tanzania, South Afrika, not to mention just about every state in the United States and every province in Canada, and the list goes on.  

With every single person that I’ve talked to, I’ve felt Heavenly Father’s love for them welling in my own heart. Is it any wonder that I’m a changed man?

On this Christmas Day, the world seems like a much smaller and warmer place to me. I’m not blind to the problems, but I know that everything is going to work out. What a wonderful place this world is going to be someday, when all of us feel the same, incredible love that now fills my heart.