A Perfect Brightness

My blog began, at the suggestion of my sister Kerri, as a way to record my feelings about Thomas having been recently diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. It turned out that many of my feelings on that matter were too tender, spiritual, and deeply personal to blog about. But my blog is named "a perfect brightness of hope" because of this talk by Elder Uchtdorf.

New Year's Eve 2008 was quite a dark day for me, I think I spent the whole day googling "Hodgkin's Lymphoma" and "chemotherapy", and while the prognosis seemed good, there were a lot of frighteningly stark statistics available at the websites I visited. As the clock struck midnight, I just stood there and cried on Kerry's shoulders, unwilling and unable to welcome in the new year which would bring ocologists and chemo into our vocabulary.

I didn't want any of my kids, especially not Thomas and Caley, to see my fears and sorrow, and think that maybe I didn't have faith, because I did. Early on the morning of New Year's Day, I found the conference talk by Elder Uchtdorf entitled "The Infinite Power of Hope." I decided that would be my personal mission statement of the year. I printed it off, and have read it many times this past year. Out of the darkness of New Year's Eve came the brightness of New Year's Day. Out of the darkness of winter came the hopeful spring, and then the warm summer. As a family, we celebrated the end of cancer treatments for our brother and son by jumping in Coeur d'Alene lake on a perfectly bright July day.

Elder Uchtdorf was sustained as an apostle at October Conference, as we watched from out hotel room in St. George, following the marathon in 2004. Five years later, we are going back to the marathon, and I expect that St. George is going to be perfectly bright, once again.