Crystal Clear

Early in May, before May blew up like it always does, I attended a church social focused on oxen and yokes and the best way to handle life's stresses. My friend Amy passed on some minutia she learned while traveling in Jerusalem; Christ, as the son of a carpenter, would have made hundreds of yokes in his lifetime because yokes were a high-demand societal item. Yokes were made-to-order back then. The carpenter measured each individual animal and created a custom-fit yoke. If the yoke was built right the animal would feel minimal pain from the load it was hauling. The Savior made hundreds of wooden yokes as an apprentice and craftsman; he would later make infinite spiritual yokes as the Son of God in Gethsemane, which is why he can say

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,

and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you...

and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

[St Matthew 11:28-29]

My favorite tidbit was learning when oxen are yoked together it is nearly impossible for them to move backwards. I've remembered that this month on days when my horizon was retreating. Man + Christ can only progress. Courage, and move forward!

Crystal Lund, my soft-spoken neighbor of ten years, was asked to talk about a time in her life when she yoked herself with the Savior. Crystal is Mrs. Claus meets Mary Poppins; she has rosy cheeks and a kind disposition and is either smiling, baking, or hugging children. Her other hobbies include kneeling in the dirt to help things grow, biking, and capturing her kids' personalities through a long lens. I was curious what she would say about relying on the Savior since I've never seen her flustered; she is calm as a morning lake.

Crystal opened by revealing she was an ETERNAL OPTIMIST and as such never worried about things working out because they always did. She thought about her life all week and couldn't determine a specific life event that caused her to need to yoke to the Savior. At this point I thought to myself, "What do you mean you can't think of a hard time that broke you? Has your life been that easy?"  

She continued:

My dad died when I was 14. Our house had just sold because my dad was going to move us all to Utah for his new job. My mom, now without a husband and a home, decided to stick to the plan and move to Utah. And it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

My mom went from a size 14 to a size 2 in less than a year because it was hard. She met a man who had lost his wife to health and they got married just 16 months after my dad died. He had four kids, we had four kids. He had just finished building his dream home with his first wife and we couldn't ask them to move out of their dream so we moved in. A new married couple, eight kids sharing rooms, and four of us were teenagers. Four teenagers in a house was...awesome.

After being voted captain of the school swim team I tore my ACL on a freak bike accident and never swam my senior year, nor did I attend BYU on a swim scholarship as previously anticipated. But I still went to BYU and school was easy for me. I took heavy loads of classes and flew through college, I only had two semesters left after I married Matt.

We moved to American Fork when we had two little kids and were in our prime. Life was awesome. Now I have six kids and life couldn't be better.

At this point I picked my jaw up off the floor and again thought to myself, "What do you mean you can't think of a hard time that broke you? Have you seen your life?!" Mind-reading what all the attendees were thinking, she said,

All those big things in life didn't break me. Everyday life did.

She confessed she found her tipping point shortly after the birth of her 5th baby on a day when the laundry was higher than the windowsill and sought help through prayer. Laundry, a sense of order, the kid that won't do homework regardless of clever schemes and reward systems; these are among the reasons she yokes daily. Her yokemate is more than just muscle, He is her mentor. At the bottom of her can of worms she shared two secrets to happiness:

Yoking myself to the Savior helps me have the strength to pick up my head so I see the big picture, not just the ground.

Yoking helps clear my eyes so I can see all the happy things around me.

No wonder Crystal is always smiling.

Blue-eyed Becca told me she is never afraid to ask Crystal for help because Crystal always responds with, "I'd love to!" So I asked her something myself as a secret little test and that is exactly how she answered. I thought of her when I heard the recent conference talk about being truly good without guile. Crystal is the female version of Shiblon, Charles Funke, and Gordon B. Hinckley combined. And she gave me permission to share her story in case you thought I was a big fat blabbermouth.