Blueprint

Brace yourself. I'm going straight to C.S. Lewis.

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace."

My life until I was 25: Everything I had ever wanted happened on time as planned. Perfect grades, valedictorian, scholarship to BYU, married my junior year, graduated from the program I loved, bought a house, went off the pill, had a baby a year later. I literally checked everything off my Life Checklist in order and without consequence. I refer to that phase of my life as COTTAGE.

My life since I turned 25: Not what I had planned. In fact, I haven't checked anything off my Life Checklist since I turned 25. What I was hoping for was more children, our next home that would have a library and a dining room table as big as the one Belle and Beast eat on, a trip to Europe and those crazy "soccer mom" years. Instead I got a decline in my once-perfect, previously-unappreciated health, a decade of infertility, owning specialty retail stores during a recession, legal woes and an ongoing internal struggle to find the joy in these journeys. I refer to this phase of life as PALACE.

It can be tempting to sink into despondency. To cry to the heavens, "What did I do to deserve this?" Or worse, to question if God even loves me.

I once heard that every stone in the Salt Lake Temple was numbered. Not a fan of faith-promoting rumors, I read up until I unearthed the documentation to prove that statement. Every stone was indeed numbered, the majority counted by Truman O. Angell, Sr., architect of the now-famous monument that took the Mormon pioneers forty years to build. Each slab was quarried in Little Cottonwood Canyon, pulled by oxen/railroad 18 miles to Temple Square and then shaped by men with imperfect, yet patient, hands. Too much labor to be done incorrectly, hence the need for detailed instructions.

I realized after my study that the architect took great pains to ensure the minimum labor necessary to build such a glorious temple. He only asked the saints to find and cut and place stones essential to the structure. No one was asked to haul heavy bonus rocks and cut them to the wrong dimensions for fun. Every task aimed at glory, not waste. The effort resulted in a perfect fit.

God loves us perfectly and would not require us to experience a moment more of difficulty than is absolutely needed for our personal benefit or for that of those we love.

I take great comfort in the metaphors of remodeling cottages and numbered stones as well as the words of a modern-day apostle. If the God of the universe knows when a sparrow falls, He also knows exactly what his children stand in need of. I love that quote, that we are not given even one extra moment of difficulty that isn't imperative to our progression. No extra stones. (Of course, we also suffer the consequences of our own bad judgement and poor choices, but we bring those upon ourselves.)

I have the utmost faith that life's PALACE PHASES are not meted out by an austere, schoolmaster God that hovers in the wings waiting to punish us, but that they are tests tailored for us as individuals by a loving Father in Heaven that, like any father, spares his children every pain possible while still allowing us to mature as needed. Life's hardships are not senseless, random acts. They are calculated refiner's fires, or numbered stones, bestowed with love. The architect of my spirit, that same Heavenly Father, has rendered a life for me that will surpass the tiny cottage and checklist I designed for myself.

It does not matter that I can't see the blueprint. I trust the architect.

*Quote by Elder Richard G. Scott. Illustration of Salt Lake Temple tower with numbered stones by Truman O. Angell, Jr., November 1887, taken from Salt Lake Temple: A Monument To the People, p. 77.