Welcome.

I attended my maternal grandmother’s funeral this weekend. It was a lovely little celebration of her faith and hope filled life. While there were tears for her graduation, there were also many warm smiles and tender recollections of her covenant keeping life. In the end and until the end, she was a covenant keeper. Largely because of that, her funeral felt more happy than sad to me.

Here I am leaving the gardenia pinned in my hair (all the female daughters and granddaughters wore one in honor of grandma’s favorite flower) on her casket at the graveside service.

The one thing that saddened me more than I expected was seeing my cousins. Well, I don’t mean it quite like that. I loved seeing them, and it was so fun to hug each one of them. However, many of them are not presently on the covenant path, and I was saddened by that. While they are still contributing wonderfully to the world in many ways, many of them have abandoned their covenants and allowed their testimonies to become precariously dim or altogether stamped completely out.

During the funeral, I looked around at many of my cousins. I observed an interesting thing. For those who are presently not living as they were raised, it seemed they felt less peace. It appeared as if their hope was more hampered. Their presences appeared less illuminated. One practically cried through the whole funeral. I’m not saying they were dark and dungy, but I am saying I could perceive a lesser radiance. In contrast, there is one in my own family circle who is making his way back to a fuller gospel participation, and his presence was lighter than when I last saw him. The hope that attended him was dancing on his joyful shoulders, and it made me so happy.

One of my grandma’s sons spoke somewhat of hope and delivered a very moving message. As he spoke, the Spirit personally prompted me to increase my hope and learn more about it. So, on the heels of some meaningful and precious study, I now want to write about hope and how we must hold onto it.

My grandma was a woman who consciously and consistently – day after day – chose hope and as a result, experienced some really mighty miracles in her life. She understood the trio companionship of faith, hope, and charity, and she persistently clung to hope which strengthened her faith in Christ and her love of mankind. I love the interrelatedness of hope, faith, and charity and of late, see more clearly how the combination makes, as Elder Uchtdorf said, “a three-legged stool…[that] stabilize[s] our lives regardless of the rough or uneven surfaces we might encounter…” (“The Infinite Power of Hope, Uchtdorf, D. October 2008)

My grandma was married at the tender age of 16. At 22, she had delivered her fifth child. Suffering from a retained placenta and hemorrhaging, my grandma knew her life was slipping away. In a moment shared just between her and her God, she made a meaningful covenant with Him in which her life was spared, and she went on – all the 67 years thereafter – to honor her part of that pledge. Moreover, she demonstrated powerful hope in the promises of the Lord to her. As I have written, she was a participant in miracles because of this – her hope in Christ.

As a little girl traveling with her family from California through Salt Lake City, my grandma had a meaningful experience, one that changed her life forever. The family car broke down and while it was being repaired, grandma and her little sister made their way onto Temple Square and into the tabernacle where they heard the sweet sounds of “Oh How Lovely is the Morning.” Some few years later when my grandpa was dating my grandma and took her to his [LDS] church for the first time, the same song was sung, and grandma was converted to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. She had incredible hope in its message and let it change and bless her life.

Beautiful hope. So important yet sometimes it threatens to flee. Satan is so good at robbing us of it – every ounce – if we permit him.

As I sat listening to the Spirit backed messages of grandma’s funeral, I remembered a time in my own life when I permitted the enemy of my soul to take my hope.

As a medic serving on active duty in the United States military in 2007, I stood trembling beside a cot whereon laid a motionless and speechless soldier in the supine position. His upper and lower extremities were firmly secured and restrained by leather straps. My job was to watch him, to protect him from himself, to make sure he remained secured and safe until he could be loaded on a plane and flown back to the USA for psychiatric care.

I was crying silent tears for him, for the desperate, hopeless state of his soul that caused him, while bravely donning his country’s uniform, to threaten and/or attempt suicide in the arid land of the Middle East. I marshaled all the courage I had and searched his eyes with my own. He was far away, sinking in the quicksand of deep and intense sorrow. I can still feel—16 years later—the torment of his soul.

He was without hope and consequently wanted to surrender his life.

In a twist of wild irony, some few years later, I found myself living devoid of hope. It was an intense battle for several years, and some days, I narrowly escaped with my own life. There was a time that I, too, was without hope and consequently wanted to forfeit my life.

Today at Untoalltheworld, I write of hope for all who may be despairing. I once was, for a period of several years, buffeted by Satan incredibly intensely and did not guard my faith in Christ well enough. As a result, I downwardly spiraled to the awful place of hopelessness.

But my message now (from the other side) is that there is hope, and we must hold onto it. That is akin to holding onto Jesus.

Our greatest hope – the kind that sustains and succors – is found in Jesus Christ, and His message is that there is hope (because He offers it through his incomparable sacrifice for all of mankind) – so much so that it has been the beautiful topic of holy writ and modern anointed ones.

“Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is.” (Jeremiah 17:7)

Truly! Such a one is so blessed.

We know to hope means to have faith and trust in the promises of God – that they will be fulfilled. Yes, in His own due time and in His own way, but fulfilled nonetheless. Some years ago, I realized that believing people are the ones who receive. Receive what? Well, lots of things but among them, hope.

I just love Mormon’s epistle as recorded in the eighth chapter of Moroni. I love what is taught about hope in verse 26:

“And the remission of sins bringeth meekness, and lowliness of heart; and because of meekness and lowliness of heart cometh the visitation of the Holy Ghost, which Comforter filleth with hope and perfect love, which love endureth by diligence unto prayer, until the end shall come, when all the saints shall dwell with God.” (Moroni 8:26)

So from where does hope come?

From the Holy Ghost! From his visitations. The chain all starts with our meek repentance which brings God’s forgiveness. In that state, the Holy Ghost is permitted to not only come as a visitor but stay as a companion, and then he fills us with hope and “perfect love.”

When I lost hope for too long, the Spirit once spoke to me through this verse. I was too unrepentant and proud to receive hope until I was humbled and received the visitation of the Holy Ghost. Only then was change, growth, and hope possible.

I love these words by John Groberg to BYU students many years ago:

“Why do we keep on hoping? They say, “Hope springs eternal,” and it’s good it does, for it gives us something to live for, to strive for, to hope for. But why? Why does hope spring eternal? Why do we keep coming back and back after so many defeats? Simply because God is eternal and God is hope (as well as love—and they may be the same) and we are his children. Therefore, as he is the embodiment of hope and has a fullness of hope, there is planted deep within each of us something we cannot deny, for it is part of the very essence of ourselves and that is what we all, in mortality, hope. A person without hope is like a person without a heart; there is nothing to keep him going. As the heart gives life to the body, so it seems that hope is an enlivening influence to the spirit—which is the real us. It is a fact that there is always hope, for our spirits are eternal. No matter what people try to say, it’s always there—that hope is within us. It just depends on how brightly we allow it to shine in our lives. The degree of “shining” (or the strength) of this hope that is in all of us is in direct proportion to our faith in God and particularly to our faith in (belief in, love of, hope in, etc.) Jesus Christ. Specifically then, the basis of all righteous hope is the person of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In him all hope has its existence. Without him there is no hope. But because he was and is and ever will be, there is always hope—hope in all areas. He is hope.” (“There is Always Hope,” Groberg, J., 3 June, 1984, BYU Speeches)

The image of that sorrowing soldier, devoid of hope, strapped to that green military cot in the windswept Middle East still haunts me today. I wonder if he chose life or succumbed to death. If I could find him again, I would tell him that the same nasty Goliath came for me, too, but I would reassure him that an incredible freeing and authentic hope is possible. It is found in gentle Jesus and in His words and the words of those who minister for Him.

There is hope forever and always. Thanks be to Jesus.

Unto all the world: Hold onto hope.