I Am Grateful for Tender Mercies!

February 27th, 2010

Our organization for the children in our church is called Primary. It is such a blessing to be called to serve with the young children. One of my favorite Primary songs is entitled, "I Feel My Savior's Love". A thought has gone through my mind several times in the last few days as I've thought about doing my blog posting for the day...what should I focus on...what do I love today...and the thought has been this, "I feel my Savior's love in all the world around me..." One of the ways that I feel like I can more fully understand His love for me is to recognize more often the tender mercies that occur each and every day. "Tender mercies" are just that..."tender". Sometimes they are very obvious, and sometimes you have to look a little closer to recognize that what at first may be somewhat common place is, indeed, a tender mercy.

Nephi tells us in the Book of Mormon, "...that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith..." Elder Bednar testifies that, "the tender mercies of the Lord are real and that they do not occur randomly or merely by coincidence. Often, the Lord's timing of His tender mercies helps us to both discern and acknowledge them." I LOVE that thought!

Like I said earlier, some tender mercies are obvious. Some you have to look a little more intensely for. And some you don't recognize until some time has gone by. There's a sweet one I wanted to share. Katie was in college and taking a calligraphy class. She needed to do a project and needed a poem, so she called me...surprise, surprise...Mom has nothing better to do...right? I remember when she called...I remember that I was very busy and wanted to point her in a direction and have her do her own searching. But I also remembered that I had recently bought a poetry book for a class and as I had thumbed through it earlier I had come across one of the very few poems that I had memorized way back when. And I said, "Katie, I think I know the perfect poem..." and went and retrieved this one. (Daffodils, the other poem I had memorized, was too long!)

TREES

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

It had the perfect number of lines/stanzas, etc. So she went right to work on her piece of calligraphy and I thought no more about it...just that I had once again done my job as mom and felt good that I had been able to help when needed. So often I think that's how us moms think about it...no big deal, no one notices, just what we do, day in-day out. It's not that we're necessarily looking for recognition, but sometimes it helps.

Several months later Rich and I were celebrating our anniversary and found ourselves in the little town of Durango, Colorado. As I'm prone to do in cute little old-looking towns, I find the antique stores and encourage Rich along. So we walked into this little antique shop and sitting right there on a shelf, in an old gold leaf frame, was the above poem. At first I looked at it and smiled because I thought the frame was cute and the paper was cute...and then I saw the poem and it dawned on me what I was seeing. And I smiled some more, wondering just for a second about the thousands of poems in the world and the coincidence of finding just this one, this day, in this antique shop. I bought it as a gift for Katie...and as I reminder for me. It was just something very simple, but at the same time I knew that it definitely was not a coincidence. Just a tender reminder of His love for me. For which I am grateful.