I have been sick for the past week. I will one day acknowledge—I won’t yet—that I have become old. When one is sick or old it goes without saying that one cannot do many things that at an earlier age came so easily. But, in one of life’s ironies, the ill or the aged can do some things better and see things more clearly than they could previously. Every time I get sick I think I see more clearly. I will cite two better examples of this of dear people who mean much to me.
The first is my late wife Merrilee Kim (Hafen) Miller (1958-1995). Everything of that which I note about Kim could also be said of my late wife Karen Lynn (Underwood) Miller (1944-1992), the wife of my youth. They were cut out of the same cloth.
Surely Kim was an intelligent and lively and cheerful and kind and faithful girl and woman before I met her. I have read the journals she faithfully kept and the comments in her high school and college yearbooks and I have listened carefully to people who knew her and members of her family who spoke of their sister and daughter and neice and friend. Yet during the short time of our courtship and marriage I saw those wonderful qualities amplified and even intensified as her candle burned down. Toward the end the veil between this life and the next became very thin indeed. She came to see and know things that she could not have seen and known had her physical health been better. I was supremely blessed by her communicating many of these things to me. The irony was that, as fine as it was in her wellness, her spiritual health intensified and it brought her greater joy. For some it would bring despair, but not for her, for she was grounded, as the apostle Paul said, “according to the riches of [God’s] glory to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man…that [she]…being rooted and grounded in love [was] able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge….” (Ephesians 3:16-19)
The second example is my friend Harold Bartlett. Bud, as he is known by his friends, is the most stalwart man I have ever known. He is an inspiration, since his illness, to every person who has ever had the privilege of meeting and being with him. Bud was brought down in the prime of his physical manhood by a neurological disease that has robbed him his mobility and coordination. He has been in this condition for over 20 years. Though he continues to physically deteriorate, his spiritual aura increasingly illuminates as he does what he can with his diminishing resources. I don’t know that I have ever seen a more joyful Christian. He knows—as cited by inspiration given to Benjamin Franklin, given in an earlier posting on this weblog—that his body ‘will appear once more in a new and more elegant edition revised and corrected by the author.’ His spirit is already in that ‘more elegant and revised edition…corrected by the author.’ What a man!
2 comments:
This week in the temple I had a profound experience concerning a plea to be healed. My RA is progressive and I see it advancing as an enemy as it is attacking my bodies ammune system. I pleaded with the Lord to let his promise of "no combination of wickedness shall have power" (D&C109) to harm me as this physical invasion takes place in me because I have been faithful to "hold a name" in the temple weekly for 20 years. As I entered the Celestial room I saw two women in great distress, sobbing in separate corners of the room. I wondered what they were pleading for. I wondered if my request was insignificant and decided to count my blessings and realize that worse tragedies could befall me. I felt to repent a little and say "thy will be done."
Illness has a way of refining people. It shocks me that those who embrace whatever life they have left after diagnosis with terminal illness are often the most at peace, fulfilled and inspirational people out there.
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