This year as I have contemplated Thanksgiving, there have been a certain few events that have led me to feel deeply grateful. Our three youngest children have one-at-a-time, oldest-to-youngest, gotten croup. And as a mother, my heart has hurt, wishing I could take the misery and sickness away. Of course the first thing to come to mind is how thankful I am for the health we all normally have, and for modern medicine.
But the thing that has hit me even harder than that is my understanding of what this life is all about. I don’t have to wonder about those questions of where did I come from, why am I here, and where do I go after I die. A while back I was doing some searching for family members a ways back on one of Tom’s lines and in the process I found a family that had quite a few children. The second youngest, from what I could gather, passed away when he was 13 months old from croup. In the process of looking for information on this family I never found any christening, or baptism for any of the children until after this little boy had died. They had one more daughter and had her christened. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, I can only speculate, but my own yearnings to make sense of this, leads me to think that this mother and father felt the loss of this little boy so keenly. They were looking for something, some way to make sense of this life and a way to do better with the knowledge they did have. So they changed things, looking to religion and God for answers, just as I do.
I was able to do the work for this family in the temple that allows them to be together forever as a family. And now as my littlest boy of five months has croup, I think of Tom’s great, great, great, great grandmother who lost her son in this life to croup, but now has the opportunity to be with her family and her little boy in the life to come and forever.
I know when I think of what I would do if some major catastrophe were to happen, as it has recently happened to the people living in the Philippines and also a little closer in Illinois, I wouldn’t care that much if I lost my home or my car. I would just want my family to be safe. In those situations we realize that things don’t really matter. But our family and people do.
I am grateful for my family and for temple covenants that can seal us to our family as a chain down through the generations. I know the family is the organization that is most beneficial in helping us learn the things we were sent to this earth to learn. I am grateful for this season of the year that brings the things and the people that are most important back to our remembrance. I am most grateful for Jesus Christ who has given hope to all mankind through His sacrifice.