Safekeeper

 

Earlier this year I was asked to play the piano at the funeral of a woman I never met. Other than tinkering out some prelude and a few hymns my role was silent observer. At one point a wrinkled woman approached the pulpit and said in the microphone:

"Every person deserves to have a friend they can tell anything to and know it stops there. She was that kind of friend for 80 years."

I know a lot of loose lips but only a few secret keepers. How does the adage go? Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

One thing I love about prayer is I can unload anything...the good, the bad, or the ugly...and know that it stops there. It is the perfect place to have no filter and the recipient is the best kind of friend.

"Isn't it marvelous that God, who knows everything, still spends time listening to our prayers? Compared to that cosmic fact what does the world really have to offer us? One round of applause, one fleeting moment of adulation, or an approving glance from a phantom Caesar?"

*artwork by Sugarboo Designs, quote from "The Tugs and Pulls of the World" by Elder Neal A. Maxwell (November 2000 Ensign)