The following was part of a lesson given (6/13/2022) on healing from difficult trials (RS-BYU). The teacher, McKenna Dahl, shared the following words from one of her relatives who, after years of infertility, gave birth to triplets but lost them soon after delivery. I found the analogy so beautiful, insightful and relevant.
There is a room at the hospital called "The Serenity Room." It's meant to be a quiet place where anyone can go to escape the chaos and stress of the hospital, sit, reflect, and just be still. One wall is entirely made of stained glass, and a light shines through the back of the glass to illuminate a mural of mountains, trees, rivers, and a big blue sky. It's beautiful. On one particularly difficult day at the NICU, I decided to go in there and just sit. I was looking at the stained glass and realized that it's made up of many individual pieces. The pieces aren't cut to look like anything in particular; they are all different shapes, sizes, and colors.
I imagined what I'd think if someone popped out just one of those glass shapes from the mural and handed to me as a gift. I looked at a single crooked grey piece that was part of the mountain and thought to myself, "Well that's ugly...I wouldn't have any idea what that piece would be or what I'd do with it." I imagined myself turning that one piece every which way, holding it up to the light and flipping it over and over again, trying to figure out by the crooked edges what it was supposed to be. I knew that if I hadn't seen the entire mural of glass, I'd never have come to the conclusion on my own that it was meant to be part of a mountain. I looked at the mural again and realized that even though that one grey piece didn't make sense by itself, it had its own place in the entire picture, and, as small and strange looking as it was on its own, the picture wouldn't look complete without it.fit, but we will see that the picture wouldn't look nearly as beautiful or as complete without them.
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