Writing Sample 3

Christ's Victory over Death

It was early in the morning on October 1^st, 2018, when I got the news. It was P-day, the only day of the week when I was allowed to read through emails from family and friends, and almost as soon as I opened my eyes, the messages began pouring in.

“I’m so sorry,” they said. “I don’t know how to tell you, but Grandma’s had a heart attack, and we don’t expect her to make it through the night.” Normally, having a large family was a blessing. Today it only meant eight menacing blows of terrible news.

When I collected myself an hour later, lying on the bathroom floor and streaked with tear stains, I asked myself why. Why her? Why did she have to go? And why on earth would I leave my family, travel 8,000 miles away only to live on my own and be surrounded by a people and language I could barely understand when I could have stayed home and had so many more days with her?

Questions and doubts rolled around in my head for days on end. Sitting in the back of a rain-pounded taxi, taking half-hearted notes at zone conference, making it silently through a P-day activity my companion chose, I wondered why.  

It was only a few days later that M. Joseph Brough, second counselor in the young men general presidency, gave a conference address entitled, “Lift Up Your Head and Rejoice.” As I sat in a little chapel in a suburb of Bangkok, Thailand, I realized his words were meant for me.

            He said, “Frequently, our first reaction to hard things is ‘Why me?’ Asking why, however, never takes away the hard thing. The Lord requires that we overcome challenges, and He has indicated ‘that all these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good.’” He later gave two recommendations to help us triumph over our hard times, one of which was to give ourselves over to Heavenly Father.

            This was exactly the advice I needed to pull me out of my grief and into missionary work again. As I studied what it meant to give myself over to God and tried to live the principles I learned, I started receiving answers to my questions. I started understanding that part of the purpose of serving a mission was for days exactly like the ones I’d been having; it was because of young girls just like myself who loved their grandmothers but who were scared and didn’t know that they could be together forever. It was because the Savior, our Redeemer and greatest comforter, came to this earth long before me, but who, with a love greater than I could ever imagine, went to Golgotha, to Calvary, to his grave, and then came back up again. It was because that kind of hope—of knowing about eternal families, about the plan of happiness—needs desperately to be shared.

            Grandma Squire was buried in the cemetery directly across the street from the Manti temple. The beautiful building crowned the graveside, turning what would have been a place of mourning into a sacred site filled with hope. As I looked at the pictures from her funeral, I remembered standing with her in her house, looking up at a picture of the Savior she had framed next to a quote that had become her motto: “He didn’t say it would be easy, He only said it would be worth it.”

            After long, hard days of grief, I finally smiled, knowing that when I finally see her again, I will be able to tell her, “You were right. It was all worth it in the end.”