On Finding Our Place

Sometimes I learn important life lessons in the rarest of places. Like driving frantically to church on a Sunday. ('Cause is there any other way to drive when you are running late for the millionth time in one week?)

In Primary this year, we are focusing on scriptures, and giving a small reward to the kids for remembering to bring their set of scriptures to class each week. Because of this, our kids' interest in the scriptures has been kindled, and I find them reading in their Books of Mormon much more often than before. (Mostly in the car on the way to church, but who am I to complain?) Early last month, during our usual frenetic drive to church, Dryden was reading in his Book of Mormon. He suddenly got upset because he lost the place where he had been reading and couldn't find it. I asked him if it would be okay to find another place and pick up reading there instead. He somewhat stubbornly replied that that would NOT be okay. I tried to explain that I was sure it would be alright to start back up somewhere else, and that the important thing was that he was reading the scriptures, not necessarily where he was in his reading. He disagreed, so I dropped it and left him to have his moment of frustration. It took just a minute for the wheels in my brain to start working, and then I had a lightbulb moment right there in my crusty minivan.

Let me preface with this: We had just recently been talking in our foster care licensing classes about the importance of place. Place in a family, especially. We had also discussed the roles we play within our families; which ones were the most important to us, and which ones we felt like we could give up if we had to choose. (This part was incredibly hard, believe me.)  Place is extremely important. It is, at the least, how we define ourselves from day to day, and, at the most, how we judge the worth of our entire existence. It effects both how we see ourselves and how we perceive and interact with the entire world around us. Once we find a place and begin to feel comfortable there--to feel like we belong there--it feels completely perilous when we are faced with the threat of losing it.

Back to the traveling (slightly over the speed limit) minivan. It occurred to me that Dryden, in his refusal to start over, was teaching me an important life lesson: It's hard to lose our place. Starting over is extremely intimidating, almost impossible. We want to stick with where we are, with what we know, and leave it at that. We'd actually almost rather give up completely than have to pick up at an entirely different place than the one we know and try to somehow make sense of it. In essence, finding a new place creates a loss of identity, leaving us with an overwhelming, helpless desire for things to just go back to the way they were.

All of us in our family were {and really still are} having this crisis surrounding the loss of our places and roles within our family unit. The baby of the family was now no longer the youngest. The oldest to three was now the oldest to five. The child who used to be the oldest in his family of boys had become a middle child, in between two girls, at that. The baby with one older sibling was suddenly the baby with five older siblings. The parents to four were now parents to six. The provider for a family of six was now a provider to a family of eight. And all of these changes literally occurred from one day to the next, with almost no notice at all. We were all scrambling to find our niche again, our place in the family. None of us knew exactly how to deal with the changes that had occurred. A big part of all of us wanted things to simply revert back to their original, comfortable, predictable state.

I started to think about my own advice to Dryden and apply it to our situation. Wouldn't it really be okay if we just started over in a different place, even if it is entirely new to us? Isn't it enough for us to know that what we are doing is important and good, even if we aren't exactly where--or who--we think we should be? Won't the Lord be happy with our efforts, no matter how unfamiliar the terrain is to us, or how different our roles have become within the framework of what we used to know?

Of course it is. And of course He will be.

Because we are enough. What we can offer is enough. Who we are in the family is not as important as who we are in our Father's eyes: His children, who, though they have no idea what they are doing, nevertheless put their best effort forward every single day. We don't need to scramble for our old place, or flip frantically through the book of the life we used to know and try to somehow get back to where we left off. We might not celebrate these changes. We might not always enjoy them. But we can absolutely accept them. See the good in them. Make the best of them.

No matter where we are, or where we were, we can start over. And it is perfectly, wonderfully okay.