As I am sure all of you know by now, last Sunday, January 27th at 7:00 pm, Gordon B. Hinckley, Prophet, Seer and Revelator, died in his home. He was 97 years old. As I have reflected on this great loss, I have had many diverse feelings: happiness, sadness, joy, depression, hope and hopelessness. I have pondered the reasons why the loss of a man I did not personally know has effected me in such a way. When I was young I vaguely remember President Benson and President Hunter but for more than half of my life, President Hinckley was the Prophet and President of the Church. It was his face I saw and his name referenced with many different programs and talks. He put himself out there to advance the Lord’s work in a way that it had never been before and everyone who crossed his path was a better person for it.

My experience with a Prophet of God…
When I lived in Birmingham, Alabama, we were blessed to have one of President Hinckley’s smaller temples built. I remember that President Hinckley came all the way to dedicate that temple. I don’t remember exactly, but my father was serving in some capacity on the temple committee. That gave us the opportunity of being in the Celestial Room during one of the sessions in which President Hinckley dedicated the temple. Because this temple was one of the smaller ones, the Celestial Room was not very big. I remember sitting in my seat waiting for President Hinckley to enter the room to then give the dedicatory prayer. The feeling when that man entered the room was so peaceful and hopeful and joyful. You could feel it wash in as though a dam had broken and the flood waters followed this man. The spirit was so intense and I remember thinking that I would never feel it stronger. I don’t know that I have felt it stronger than at that moment in any other experience except for one. On Friday, February 1st, I decided to go down the conference center to wait in line to pay respects to the man I called Prophet for 13 years. I waited for a little over 4 hours, about 1.5 hours of that outside in the 20 degree weather. A news report said that over the two days, Thurs. and Fri., that President Hinckley’s body lay in state at the Conference Center, that over 60,000 people waited in those lines for a 20 second view of a Prophet of God who had returned Home. As we got to the floor on which the Prophet lay, I remember talking to the people in line behind me. We received a gentle “hush” from a Conference Center worker and we turned a corner. As I crossed the threshold into the next room, I remember that same feeling. That flood that washed over me back in Birmingham, Alabama, hit me again, only stronger. It was almost unexpected and in an instant I could not keep tears from my eyes, no matter how hard I tried. The feeling became stronger and stronger the closer I got to casket. As I walked past it, I looked at the man who had been called of God to serve. Everything inside me affirmed what I had already known, here lay a man of God, a Prophet called to lead the Restored Church of Jesus Christ. As I crossed the threshold out of the room, I felt that feeling remain with me, though not as strong. I would have waited in line, in the freezing cold, for days to experience that again. Again, there is no doubt in my mind or my heart that God is real, that His son Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of mankind and that this church is lead by Christ through a Prophet who is called and set apart by the laying on of hands.

While he was always an old man, he seemed to identify with my younger age group very well. Whenever he spoke to us about issues that faced our age group, he was very well versed and spoke as though he he truly understood what we were going though. You could always see the love and caring spirit in his eyes. Because of this, I had always felt that he would live forever as our prophet. Even though, of course, I knew inside that the day would come that he would pass on, it just didn’t seem as though it would ever happen. I have talked with many of my friends and peers and they have said the same thing. We all loved our prophet and will miss him terribly.

However, with the death of a prophet, our loving and caring Father in Heaven has promised us, ever since the First Vision and the calling of Joseph Smith as the prophet of the restoration, that He will never again leave His children without a prophet. Today, the church had an official press conference in which they announced the new prophet and 1st presidency. The new Prophet and President of the Church is now Thomas S. Monson. President Monson is then given the opportunity to choose two counselors. These three men make up the 1st Presidency. President Monson chose President Henry B. Eyring and President Dieter F. Uchtdorf as his 1st and 2nd counselors, respectively.

The calling of a prophet has been reported by several media sources as a “long-standing tradition”. To many it might seem to be this way because the most senior Apostle is always chosen as the president of the church. However, from an LDS point of view, we look at this as more than a mere tradition. I believe that when God calls a man to serve in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, he is in a way of expression, set on a track. This track eventually leads to one of two ends: a call as the president of the church or a call home to that God that gave him life. I believe that if God does not intend for current most senior Apostle to take the presidency of the church, He will call that most senior Apostle home to Heaven before He calls the current president of the church home. This in turn will advance the line of seniority amongst the Apostles.

The Lord guides and leads The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Of this I have no doubt. It is now His will that President Thomas S. Monson take over the mantle of Prophet and President of the church. And now as a Church, we sustain him as a Prophet and we will follow his counsel and guidance as we did President Hinckley’s. As for me, I hope that I can give greater heed to our newest Prophet and follow his counsel better than I did that of President Hinckley.

Glenn Beck had some thoughts on the passing of President Hinckley:

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“They” say that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. What “They” don’t say is that it is more painful to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. While this pain is not explicitly stated in what “They” say, anyone who can affirm this saying knows that pain goes hand in hand with ‘loving and losing’. From this, we can understand that the deeper meaning of this phrase is that those who experience an opposition in regards to love, are better people for it. We can broaden this scope to include all things and should. For example, a baseball player would never improve his skills if there didn’t exist other baseball players to oppose him.

This concept is an eternal principal given to us by God in the scriptures. In Genesis chapters 2 and 3, God gave Adam and Eve a tree that contained the fruit of knowledge of Good and Evil and furthermore He gave them the commandment to not eat the fruit. Enter temptation… The serpent (Satan) tempted them to eat the fruit and to disobey God. They chose the opposition and were punished by God and cast out of the garden. However, had they not had opposition to God’s commandment to not eat the fruit, they would never have considered it and thus they would have remained in the garden for eternity in an endless state of innocence. That means that they wouldn’t have had children and those children wouldn’t have had children and so forth… and we would not exist today, relegating the Great Plan of Happiness that was engineered by God to a tall bookshelf in God’s study to gather dust. Now, God, being God, foresaw this and allowed there to be opposition so that we could learn and grow by making choices. In my opinion, Lehi says it much better than I just did when he gave counsel to his son Jacob, “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility” (2nd Nephi 2:11).

Ok so the point of all of that is this… I have loved, deeply loved, and lost. Coming to terms with this has been extremely difficult and doesn’t seem to get any easier. It has been over 1 year and 3 months since Lorna died and I still wear the ring I bought her when we went to Moab and the pictures of her and me are still all over my room and there are mementos and reminders everywhere I go. I have put them there because the hardest and scariest feeling of all to overcome is the fear that I might forget her if I don’t remind myself everyday. I have never been able to understand why this feeling of fear grips me so hard because I know, in the logical part of my brain, that I will never forget her and yet I’m scared to death that I will. Well I have come to realize that part of that fear is because I am holding on so tight by keeping all of these reminders around me all of the time.

Tonight I made a decision to, while I am strong enough in this moment, take everything I can find and put it in a box that I can keep forever. I will always know what is in that box and I know that I will never forget her even though I have to let her go. Letting go and forgetting aren’t the same thing. As I was doing this tonight, I could barely stand it and I started to think about a lot of things. Mostly about what is written above. I started to think about the relationship that Lorna and I had shared. I thought about the capacity I have gained for love and joy but also the equal and opposite capacity I have gained for hurt and pain. To quote another scripture from the Book of Mormon, Alma the Younger is teaching his son, Helaman about the pain of sin and the repentance process he had gone through as young man. He says, “Yea, I say unto you, my son, that there could be nothing so exquisite and so bitter as were my pains. Yea, and again I say unto you, my son, that on the other hand, there can be nothing so exquisite and sweet as was my joy”(Alma 36:21). It is my belief and feeling that God has designed us to only feel a measure of pain equal to the measure of joy we have the capacity to feel. These capacities come through our choices. With this measure I do not say that there is equality in duration, only equality in intensity. The length of time in which we feel joy or pain comes through our actions and choices.

Back to the phrase above that started all of this, it is my assertion that those who love and lose are better off because they have a greater capacity to feel love, joy and happiness, because of the pain they have suffered, than does a person who has never experienced the pain of losing someone they have loved. Whether that love has been a gradual fade out and the loss occurs because the love is gone or whether the person lost someone they have loved dearly in an unexpected way.

With all of this circling my brain and stirring up so many emotions and feelings, I decided to sit down with my mementos of Lorna and just write down all of my feelings. I did this in the hopes that all of the love and pain and anger and frustration and hate and happiness and good memories and bad memories would leave my heart and stay in the ink on the paper. I can only hope that this is the way to end the war inside me and give way to an environment in which my heart can finally begin to heal. I am so tired of fighting my anger and not being left with any energy to make new friends, to work, to study and excel in school, and so many other things.

This is what ended up on my paper…

I Remember

I remember you, the girl of my dreams,
You were smart, you were beautiful and you were so kind.
I didn’t know how or why way back then,
But when you entered that room, I Knew you’d be mine.

I remember that night, so cold and so clear,
Your eyes burning bright just like the stars in the sky.
It took so much nerve but I knew it was right,
I leaned in real slow and took you by suprise.

I remember you fell, your knees could not hold,
I grabbed you up in my arms and held you in tight.
I knew in that moment, standing there in the dark,
I would promise to hold you with all of my might.

I remember the feeling, so intense and so warm,
It filled all my body, my soul and my mind.
I had boarded the train and I wouldn’t look back,
At last I had found who I had come here to find.

I remember the ride, it was bumpy and rough,
But I had paid for the ticket and I had stood in the line.
No matter the twists and no matter the turns,
I would never have thought that you wouldn’t be mine.

I remember that morning, so cold and so clear,
I had sent you a message but you didn’t respond.
My mind feared the worst and it soon was confirmed,
Our train had derailed and now you were gone.

I remember you, the girl of my dreams,
You were smart, you were beautiful and you were so kind.
They say people like you aren’t meant for this world,
All that I know is you’re gone…
And now you’ll never be mine.