Wishlist

I carried a student-sized leather Franklin day planner as a high school sophomore (the full size would have generated more mocking). It had everything: lined daily sheets, U.S. and world maps, time zone chart, anniversary gift and birthstone-of-the-month legends, and a built-in ruler with magnifier on the clear bookmark. You name it, it had it. Hidden between two lesser-used tabs was a unique sheet of paper that became the depository for MY SECRET LIFE LIST. In the worst-case scenario of my planner being lost and found by the biggest loudmouth in school that secret list was the hardest page to find. It felt safe. (Still, a Franklin that locked like the diaries at Hallmark would have been *ding* golden.)

I kept MY SECRET LIFE LIST long after I got rid of the planner. I reread it when we moved, when I single-handedly decided the life or death of every piece of paper under my roof. It made me chuckle to remember what young Melissa Durkovich was dreaming about on a bench in "The Commons" at Rock Bridge High. It is a long list, but here are some of the bullets an older, more secure me can reveal:

MY SECRET LIFE LIST

•  GO TO BYU
•  GET MARRIED IN THE LDS SAN DIEGO TEMPLE
•  VISIT ALL 50 STATES
•  VISIT ALL 7 CONTINENTS
•  ALSO VISIT THE CARIBBEAN
•  GROW MY HAIR TO MY BRA STRAP
•  GET A SIX-PACK (abs, not cans)
•  WATCH WATERFALLS WITH MY TRUE LOVE
•  AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATE MY OWN LINE OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS
•  BORROW A BOY'S SWEATSHIRT AND SLEEP WITH IT
•  BE AS HAPPY FOR OTHER PEOPLE'S SUCCESS AS I AM FOR MY OWN
•  BE LIKE CINDY LONG
•  BE FAMOUS

As luck would have it, a boy named Mike Jones left his sweatshirt at my BYU apartment the night I helped wrote an essay for him. He used a lot of grooming products and his sweatshirt smelled divine. I wadded it into a ball and snuggled it like a teddy bear for over a week before he came knocking for its whereabouts. When I gave it back to him I played it cool; I even took my time hunting for it since I clearly had no idea it was in my apartment.

Also lucky was marrying Greg, my one true love who won us a Caribbean cruise months after we were hitched. Before we'd even celebrated a first anniversary we were watching waterfalls in Dominica. Any list maker loves a triple check. ✔✔✔

Sadly, hair growth cycle is a real thing and my scalp is preprogrammed to only grow hair to my collarbone. That's it. I will never have long hair. And lots of other things on my list. The stinger is I can't locate Cindy Long, my favorite church leader of all time, who made me grilled cheese sandwiches at 2 a.m. when I had sleepovers at her house. She also introduced me to the teddy bear hamster, of which I later owned two. She got remarried, I tossed her announcement, I can't recall her new last name, I have nothing to Google. I last saw her in 1999. So sad.

I'm glad I had secret dreams and I'm even happier some of them came true, but the greatest thing I ever did wasn't even on my list. The most important thing I've done in my life has been staying close to the Lord.

My daughter is just like me in the list-making department. She has her own SECRET LIFE LIST but it's a color-coded note in an app written in all lowercase with no punctuation. She's about to graduate and spread her wings. For years now I've been telling her if she only remembers two things from me to remember these:

1. Don't underestimate the power of the turkey carcass! Eat bone broth! It heals you!

2. I don't care what you do or where you go in life as long as you stay close to the Lord.

I mean it. I don't care about her ACT score, choice of college, or declared major. I don't care what hobbies she pursues, who she marries, or where she ends up on the globe. From my own experience I know no matter how well-equipped you are, how smart, how loved and supported, or how carefully you plan YOU WILL GET THINGS YOU DIDN'T PLAN ON.

Those unplannables, which never belonged on your dream list, will have the nerve to show up front and center in your life. Knowing what to do with them will require a closeness to God and understanding of His plan, plus gobs of patience and trust. If God's love feels familiar to you then all things really are possible...or at least endurable, survivable, forgettable, understandable. Those are a lot of made-up words for something I'm serious about but the nutshell, the essence of it all, is that I don't care what RE does, I only care about who RE becomes while she does it.

Which is exactly what Heavenly Father must be thinking as he watches me write my list every morning.

Photo of my gilded to-do list notepad. What, you don't have a gilded to-do list? You must not love lists as much as I do.

Photo quote from "Divine Discontent" by Michelle Craig:

Sisters, you and I can plead for the Holy Ghost to show us “all things what [we] should do,” even when our to-do list already looks full. When prompted, we can leave dishes in the sink or an in-box full of challenges demanding attention in order to read to a child, visit with a friend, babysit a neighbor’s children, or serve in the temple. Don’t get me wrong—I am a list maker; I love checking things off. But peace comes in knowing that being more does not necessarily equate to doing more. Responding to discontent by resolving to follow promptings changes the way I think about “my time,” and I see people not as interruptions but as the purpose of my life.

The other thing I associate with to-do lists is something Meckenzie Dietz said in Sunday School at least three years ago. She taught on the three degrees of glory, a lesson she was dreading due to her father's suicide when she was a child. There was a truly beautiful discussion of hope (and really great quotes and insights from Matt McBride) and at the end she said something to this effect:

As Church members we often look at the degrees of glory like checklists. If I don't want to be Telestial I shouldn't murder (check), lie (check), commit adultery (check), etc. If I want to be Celestial I need to fill in all the perfect-and-holy checkmarks. We read the descriptions and make our checks and estimate where we think we belong. But the thing she said that still has me thinking is, "God doesn't need checklists to know who we are." I've thought about this so much. I'm still thinking about it. Obviously it's not doctrinal or anything, but I do think it's true and tied to perfect love negating loads of peripheral gray matter.