Sabbath Devotional :: From Grave to Garden

Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to attend a craft workshop on the Japanese art form of kintsugi, which involves gluing broken pottery back together and coloring the cracks with gold paint. Smashing a perfectly new white bowl with a hammer felt wrong, but the process of fitting the pieces in, repairing it, gluing it, painting it, and decorating it with gold flourishes, making an even more beautiful bowl, was very satisfying. The flaws and faults and broken parts are redeemed into an even better creation.

God promises a similar redemption to each of us. I love the line in the hymn How Firm a Foundation: “The rivers of sorrow shall not thee o’erflow, for I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless, and sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.” The promise is not to erase our pains and imperfections, but to help us face and change them into a meaningful part of our journey.

While touring the historic Manti Temple renovations, I learned a particularly poignant story about transforming hardship.

The Manti Temple sits on a hill and is visible from miles away. As our line wended up and down the hill, we spent hours contemplating the temple from many angles and in changing light. The hill is composed of oolite limestone, which was later used to build the creamy, luminous temple. As you walk inside, the rooms are elegant and finely wrought, but also retain the comfortable feeling of visiting your grandparents’ home. There is coziness amongst the grandeur, with grandfather clocks and floral carpets, the swirly banisters and colorful murals. I miss the rocking chairs and card table in the updated celestial room, but of all the temples, this one feels most like coming home to me.

But Manti was not always home. When the first pioneer settlers arrived in the winter of 1849, they built dugouts in that future temple hill, into which they backed their wagons for protection from the elements. It was a difficult winter. Many were ill and died, and they lost significant livestock. When spring came, they were dismayed to discover that rattlesnakes lived in the limestone cracks of the hill and were emerging from their hibernation. The pioneers spent several days fighting off the snakes, but in a miracle some compare to that of the seagulls and crickets, not a single pioneer was reportedly bitten.

When Brigham Young announced three decades later that the temple would be built on that particular hill, you can imagine how the pioneers felt. That hill had been a protection, yes, but also a site of fear and battle. They had traumatic memories of the illness, the death, and the snakes. Nevertheless, together they built an edifice that would stand as a testament to their sacrifices and faith. Did they worry about snakes as they quarried the stone, startling at imagined or real rattles? Did they mourn relatives lost, and remember how it felt to be sick in a wagon, with only a quilt for protection from the snowstorms? Did they look back at their beginnings and marvel at their naivete and cluelessness? Did they see how much they’d grown and learned as they made Manti home? Seeing that radiant temple triumph over their rattlesnake memories must have been redemptive.

We can each face the metaphorical snakes in the cracks of our lives and attempt to paint them with gold. For me, one of my hardest life experiences has been three miscarriages, which challenged me physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Yet that also was a necessary part of bringing my four children into our family at their appointed times. We wouldn’t be the family we are now without those wounds along the way. I look at a photo of my children gathered together, and still mourn those three angels, imagining how old they’d be now. Yet I rejoice in those who are here. The earlier cracks in my heart are mended and golden. As a friend of a friend facing an impossibly difficult situation recently said, “With the hole left in my heart, I get to choose how to fill it — with gratitude, with compassion, with love.”

Christ’s life exemplifies this concept: “Jesus once of humble birth, now in glory comes to earth. Once a meek and lowly lamb, now the Lord, the great I Am.” He sanctified the grave, and turned it into a garden of hope and promise. We can choose joy as we let God transform our hardships into the greatest blessings in our life: overcoming snakes with heavenly homes, and painting our broken moments with gold.

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Anita Cramer Wells is the faithful root senior director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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