A Wart Named Michelle

It's been quite the week. Sister Megli has had this wart on her toe for the last couple of months that has been super painful, so we went to the praxis to get it taken care of.

 

It was an adventure.

 

First of all, they couldn't decide what Sister Megli's first name was, and then they didn't quite know what to do with her middle name. We hadn't even gotten to the wart yet!

( So, Sister Megli's name is Erin Michelle Megli.)

Then, we get into the office, and the doctor looks down at her papers, and then looks up at Sister Megli and asks

"Who is Michelle?"

We both looked at her kind of blankly, then we all sort of figured it out.

Well enough.

We decided later that Michelle was the wart, and what Sister Megli should have said when the doctor asked

"Who is Michelle?"

was

"Why that's the wart, ma'am...Would you care to meet her?"

 

We got to participate in a super cool service activity this week. There is this awesome member going to Vietnam, and she always takes these little "candy bomber" packages of candy to the orphanage that she visits. So, we got to help her package a ton of German candy into cute little packages to give to the kids. So much fun!

 

 

My brother wrote something in his email last week that I found interesting.

He said:

" The great thing is that the Lord works with you in whatever shape you're in. "

It reminded me of what Elder Holland said in General Conference in his "Lord, I Believe" talk.

" Except in the case of His only perfect Begotten Son, imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with. That must be terribly frustrating to Him, but He deals with it. "

There were multiple experiences this week that reminded me of this principle, but I'm only going to share one of them.

It was after church yesterday, and we were casually invited to a after church luncheon with some of the members of the ward, but we could tell it was more of a ward thing than a missionary thing, so we decided to go when we could have stayed. So that one choice put us on the Bahn at exactly the right time. We ended up behind this guy who was sitting by himself. Then an older lady got on, and tried to stamp her Bahn card with the "open door" button instead of the time stamper. The guy noticed what happened, and helped her out. He stamped her card, and then gave her his seat. And then....get this! He turns to her and asks her

"Do you know of any good churches in the area? I'm looking for a church."

Sister Megli and I almost fell out of our Bahn seats. We looked at each other and then planned out what we were going to do next.

We followed him off of the Bahn, and stopped him. Turns out he lives near the church, and is totally interested in coming and meeting with us. MIRACLE!

 

The things that led up to us being on the Bahn included some personal weakness, but our weakness put us in the right place at the right time.

 

"Our own intellectual shortfalls and perplexities do not alter the fact of God’s astonishing foreknowledge, which takes into account our choices for which we are responsible." Elder Maxwell

 

That's something that I have always believed. I've always been of the opinion that God's perfect plan had to include the undeniable fact that folks were going to mess up, misunderstand, misinterpret, and miss seeing eye-to-eye. If He didn't plan for that, there's no way that His plan could be even close to perfect. Some people make try to think of this as God taking control, or being a puppet on a string, or not really having agency, or something of the like. But I want to testify, with all the force of this 5'6, missionary-badged person of mine that His perfection covers our imperfection, and that without Him, no matter how cool or good or well-educated we become, we would still be living a lie, because without God, we can never truly know ourselves.

 

This quote again, because it blows my mind every time.

 

by Joseph Smith:

 

“What kind of a being is God?” he asked. Human beings needed to know, he argued, because “if men do not comprehend the character of God they do not comprehend themselves."

You may wonder why you have certain weaknesses, or certain shortcomings, or tendencies, or trauma, or opinions, or whatever it is, but I'm here to tell you that there is a reason. There are no "bystanders" in the marathon of life, unless we consciously choose to be. There is always another round, where we can "get back into the game".

That's the final glory of the Atonement.

Even our greatest failures can be the fiery catalyst that catapults us out of self-centered, narrow-minded mortality, into glorious freedom.

We need each other's strengths,

but shockingly enough,

we also need each other's weaknesses.

We're all trying to get home, and live life fully on the way there.

 

Your weaknesses are a part of that process.

 

May our gracious, tender, all-knowing, all-loving, perfect Heavenly Father be thanked for loving us enough to know that we need to know what it is like to be weak.

 

The beautiful thing is that your worth exists outside of your weakness.

 

 

And sometimes even through it.

 

 

All my love, always.

 

 

 

Sister Roderer