A Life-Lesson on Trust: To be trusted you have to be willing to trust

My kids and I tried to rescue some stray kittens hiding behind the bushes near the Arctic Circle. Catch them so we could help them. That's all we wanted to do. Sadly, even opened cans of cat food failed to lure the kittens to a quick capture and rescue. Time and time again, these darling fur balls would timidly creep out from behind the bushes, swallow a chunk of cat food, and, before we could snatch them up, they would dart behind the thick bushes hopelessly out of sight. After an hour of trying, we left empty handed feeling horribly defeated because those kittens would remain orphans. All because they didn't trust us.


Trust is a tricky thing. One definition I found says: "Trust means making an exchange with someone when you do not have full knowledge about them, their intent and things they are offering to you." Think about it. God sends a baby to a twenty-something mom and dad who have never been parents, who know nothing about late night feedings, 102 degree fevers, and sharp corners on coffee tables. Now that's trust. Talk to me about trust in two years, when my daughter asks me to take the car for the first time all by herself. Yikes!


Ten years ago, when I showed up to teach my first class at a substance abuse treatment center, I learned how important trust was. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about addiction. Just like those timid kittens, the women in my first class didn't trust me. They had no reason to. If they could have, they would have run behind the bushes. Instead of cans of cat food, I could have lured them in with Hershey bars. But that wouldn't have lasted long. With my son on my hip and my two little girls following close behind me, I entered the room. Forty pair of eyes can make a girl feel intimated. And I was.


"Hi, ladies. My name is, Jodi. How is everyone today?" Then without thinking I handed off my 6 month-old son to a woman sitting to my left.


"Hold him just a moment would ya? I need to get my notes." I shuffled through my diaper bag and found what I needed to start my class.


Looking back I'm sure a few of those women were thinking, "Who is this chick with her craft buckets and kids in color coordinated outfits?"


Throughout my class, I glanced at the young twenty-something woman bouncing my baby boy up and down on her lap. She did a fine job of keeping him occupied. At some point, I asked her if she had kids. She gave a longing look. Come to find out she didn't have custody of her son. He lived with his grandparents. She missed him.


"Oh, I'm sorry." Pause. "I hope you'll see him soon."


I'd never met this woman before but I wanted to hug her, console her and tell her to be strong. I couldn't imagine not being with my baby. It was after I'd been teaching at House of Hope for a few weeks that I realized what a welcome site my kids were to many of the women in treatment. Some had lost custody of their children permanently. Others were waiting to regain custody. Some women had scheduled supervised visits on weekends. These women missed their kids and being with my children consoled their aching arms.

That was ten years ago. Last month, I sat at the House of Hope Alumni Tea, an honorary celebration for women still in recovery. Wendy, a woman who graduated from treatment nine years previous sat at my table. We talked about that first class. And you know what she said?


"You know how I knew you were the real thing, Jodi? When you let me hold your son."
I had forgotten. Tears welled up in my eyes. Wendy was the girl with the dark streaks in her golden blonde hair who bounced my son up and down on her lap in my first class. It was one of those flash moments, when you get it. Really get it. It was all about trust and someone had to go first. And that someone was me.


Over the last ten years, all four of my kids have been hugged, high-fived, and patted on the back by hundreds of women fighting for their sobriety. They have allowed me and my family to be a small part of their lives during their stay at House of Hope. And it has been life-changing.


It's been almost a decade since Wendy and I decided to trust each other. And today, we have a beautiful friendship. Our children have attended the same school for the past five years. We've been on a fieldtrip together, sat next to each other at the Christmas concerts, and ate lunch together. Wendy's even taught classes with me at House of Hope. She's a successful business woman and a loving mother to her two sons. And she's sober. Her life is good. Wendy is one of my heroes.

So back to that definition of trust. "Trust means making an exchange with someone when you do not have full knowledge about them, their intent and things they are offering to you." When I handed my son to Wendy, I showed her I could be trusted to love, not judge. Silly me, I thought that gaining trust was going to come from something marvelously inspiring I had to say. Turns out that it wasn't what I said that was important. It was what I did. If you want to be trusted, you have to show what that looks like. We don't always do it the right way the first time. Sometimes it takes a few do-overs. But being trustworthy is worth any amount of do-overs.


As for the kittens, well, I'm looking for resources on-line for teaching felines how to trust. I just can't stop thinking about how hungry and thirsty they are. I hate to leave those little fur balls out in the cold when I know they need some love and tender care.


Matthew 25:26 "Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me."

House of Hope women, you are my heroes. You're my teachers. You're my inspiration. I never knew the fullness of God's power until I met a drug addict and saw the miracles in the lives of the women who live to have hope! Ladies, thanks for trusting me with who you are and allowing me to believe in who you can become.

Our Temporary Home

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were snowmobiling in Paris Canyon in the Cache National Forest on the Utah-Idaho border. It was a chilly 16 degrees. Clouds hung low and it was about to snow. With all my winter gear on, I was warm. My hands were even a tad sweaty after being wrapped around the handle warmers of my snowmobile as we raced up the narrow, snow-covered path leading into what I call the “tundra.” After about 20 minutes, we dropped down off the trail into a valley surrounded by snow-covered mountains. From there, all we could see was a blanket of fresh powder. The scene was pristinely beautiful. 

Just as we turned off our sleds, the sun peeked out from behind a cloud and snowflakes started to fall. My husband and I pulled out some beef jerkey and a bottle of Gatorade and began mapping out our course. For miles and miles, it was just the two of us and some tall evergreens draped in white. It was below freezing so the snowflakes that fell on my black snow pants stayed for while, so I got out my camera to take a few pictures. I don’t have a high-tech camera, but I did my best to shoot a few pictures. This is as close I could get.

Rarely, have I had a chance to see snowflakes up close. They melt too fast. They’re just too temporary.  But on that day it was too cold for them to melt, so I could watch them fall and, against the backdrop of my black pants, I could study the intricacies of each snow crystal. As I looked at them individually, I remembered what I had recently read about snowflakes:

“Snow crystals are crystals that have formed around tiny bits of dirt

that have been carried up into the atmosphere by the wind. So snow crystals are really soil particles that have been dressed up in ice.”

So, isn’t that interesting? Snow crystals are bits of dirt dressed up in ice. I would have never guessed that something so beautiful could come from dirt. As the wind picked up a bit, it was harder to watch these tiny crystals up close. It turns out that snowflake watching, even in freezing temperatures, is only temporary.

Temporary means momentary, passing, or short-term.
Life itself is temporary. This life that we live, here and now, is short-term, not long term. Just like those snowflakes’ brief fall to earth, mortality is a brief dance through eternity. So, what does this mean? How should that affect how we live our life?

I’m blessed to have a strong belief that there is more to this temporary existence. I believe life here on earth is part of something far greater and, just like the snowflakes, we, as human beings, are pieces of dirt, or dust, you could say, on a temporary journey, not meant to last forever. I know we’re just passing through this life going to a better place where God lives, where forever goes on and on.

Recently, I was sitting in a Wal-mart parking lot waiting for my daughter to come out. It was a cloudy day. The rain hadn’t, yet, turned to snow. As I looked out my window, I watched people pushing their shoping carts full of groceries through the automatic doors.  A song called "Temporary Home" by Carrie Underwood came on the radio. The song painted the picture of a young boy in foster care getting a new mommy and daddy and a new home, but he wasn’t afraid because he knew it was just a temporary place with windows and rooms that he was passing through.

The next verse told of a young, single mom with a baby girl, living in a shelter. And the same thing. She wasn’t afraid because she knew it was only temporary and something better would come along. The last verse told of an old man dying ready to pass on to next life.  He told his loved ones it was okay because he was going on to something better.  Here’s the chorus:

This is my temporary home

It’s not where I belong

Windows and rooms that I’m passing through

This is just a stop on the way to where I’m going

I’m not afraid because I know

This is my temporary home.

That song sung truth. Every human being on this earth is in a temporary home. We don’t belong here. We're spiritual beings passing through this mortal existence on our way to live in eternity with God. But how easily we forget that.

For eight years, I have volunteered teaching life-skills and motivational classes to women who are recovering drug addicts. This past Friday, a woman came up to me and said, “Jodi, you have a big heart wanting to do this for people like us.” I immediately corrected the woman and looked her straight in the eye.

"You and I?"  I said pointing to her and then to me, "We’re the same.” I’ve said it hundreds of times before to the women who have passed through the doors of House of Hope; women who have been in my classes; women who are just passing through on their journey to sobriety. Yes, our choices may be different, but our journey is the same. We’re all here temporarily working out our own salvation (Philippians 2:12). At times, some of us get sidetracked on some really bumpy roads. But we’re all here learning, growing and trying to get somewhere better than we were the day before.

When something is temporary, sometimes we don’t take it as seriously as we should. We don’t savor it as we should. We don’t treasure it as we ought to. Sometimes we place too much importance on quick fixes.

Ezra Taft Benson said that because of this temporary existence, “our affections are often too highly placed upon paltry, perishable objects. Material treasures of earth are merely to provide us, as it were, room and board while we are here at school. [We must learn to] place gold, silver, houses, stocks, lands, cattle, and other earthly possessions in their proper place. This is but a place of temporary duration…We live on and on after earth life, even though we ofttimes lose sight of that great basic truth.” 
In the past two weeks, we’ve seen live video of crumbled buildings in the earthquake stricken nation of Haiti. Men, women, and children camped on out on streets. Throngs of hungry people grabbing for any morsel of food they can get from relief workers. Nameless individuals lying on stretchers waiting to receive medical attention for cuts and broken bones. In one newscast, I was broken hearted to see an innocent, little, dark-eyed boy, about 4-years-old--about the same age as my youngest daughter--sitting next to a reporter. His parents were killed in the earthquake the week before. In this world, there is devastation. Heartache. And suffering. What do you say to all of this? What do you tell your children? How do you answer the unanswerable?

How do you find peace in the unjustifiable? Take yesterday, for example. After my son’s basketball game, I stood in the parking lot talking to a young mother, newly divorced. We stopped to chat. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her children get in the car with her ex-husband and his new girlfriend.

“I get the day to myself,” she said behind a quivering voice and held-back tears. She hid it well. I was ready to fall apart, at first, but then she shared her faith with me. She was okay. She was going to be fine because her strength was in her higher power. She wasn’t afraid. She was going to pass through this trial because in her words, “I know this is only temporary.”

No, I don’t have answers to the tragedies of this temporary existence we call our earthly home. But may I offer a “temporary” answer that, for me, brings permanent peace. When I remember that this place; this existence we call mortality is just a temporary home filled with windows and rooms, and that we’re merely passing through on our way to something greater; when I remember that this is just a stop on the way to where God lives, and although sometimes we’re afraid, and sometimes life isn’t what we expect it to be; when I remember this...that there is a plan, an eternal plan of happiness...I feel peace.

President Benson wrote: “As we travel through this topsy-turvy...world filled with temptations and problems, we are humbled....Sadness comes to all of us….But there [should be] gratitude also—gratitude for the assurance...that life is eternal....'I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live....'  We are eternal beings. We lived as intelligent spirits before this mortal life. We are now living part of eternity.” (John 11:25–26.)” (Ezra Taft Benson, “Life Is Eternal,” Ensign, Aug 1991, 2)

Just like those snowflakes, falling in Paris Canyon, we’re dust dressed up as ice just passing through. And as scripture tells us: ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Gen. 3:19).” “And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26).

Everything in this life is temporary except for the ordinances, covenants, and gospel principles that bind us together as eternal beings and families. Knowing that living here is only temporary isn’t a curse. It’s a blessing. I know without a shadow of doubt that there is something beyond, not of this world.

This is my temporary home

It’s not where I belong

Windows and rooms that I’m passing through

This is just a stop on the way to where I’m going

I’m not afraid because I know

This is my temporary home.

--Song by Carrie Underwood, “Temporary Home”

Dear friends...may you find joy in the journey and peace in the temporary.

With love and friendship,


Jodi


QUESTION OF THE DAY:

Have you been feeling a little sidetracked with life? Have you been caught up in temporary fixes for temporary happiness? How are you filling your temporary home? What are you doing in your temporary life to prepare for your eternal journey? How are you filling up your days?