Summer was rolling along. We’d flown by the solstice so quickly I didn’t even recognize it before it was a few days behind me in the rearview mirror. July blazed onto the scene with all the pleasantness of a heartburn-induced head cold. I couldn’t even seem to enjoy the long summer evenings because even with the extra daylight, all I could focus on was the fact that I still couldn’t get everything done.
We’d turned the cows out on the mountain, but I could only appreciate that particular annual milestone for the myriad minor wrecks that seemed to accompany it. I couldn’t remember a year when I’d had so much trouble with the cows mothering up with their calves. I’d spent the better part of two or three days chasing around and gathering up baby calves and trying to reunite them with their mamas. This chore only highlighted the fact that I seemed to have way too many late calves this year. To compound my woes, I hadn’t finished all of my fence repair on the lay-down fence in the high country before turnout, and the cows wasted no time in discovering my negligence before I had a chance to get up there to finish the miserable task. Consequently, a couple dozen of the wandering hussies had found their way to the top and were now trespassing in the wrong Forest Service allotment.
If all of my bovine headaches were not enough, we were still fighting a two-front war against the cancer that had stricken my daughter-in-law and son-in-law. Although things were trending well for my daughter’s husband in his second battle with lymphoma, we’d experienced setback after setback with my son’s wife and her struggle with liver cancer. I felt I was due for a monumental miracle, a pillar of light blasting from the heavens to illuminate all the glorious answers. Yet, all I could see ahead were cold, dark clouds and impassable peaks, glaring down and mocking me and my failings.
It was with this fog of despondency surrounding me that my wife and I made the three-and-a-half-hour trip to Salt Lake, where our son’s wife was, yet again, hospitalized in the Huntsman Cancer Institute. She had taken a turn for the worse, and though there wasn’t much we could do to help her, we wanted to offer what support we could to her and our son and their 6-month-old baby. The gravity of the situation and its accompanying sadness overwhelmed me as we met with our son at his in-laws’ house in the foothills of nearby Bountiful. As I walked around the house with my newest grandbaby as he fussed with the apparent symptoms of his first incoming teeth, I came around the corner to find my son, a 27-year-old army veteran with arms the size of tree trunks, sitting next to his mother sobbing as he lay his head on his mother’s shoulder. At that juncture, with the yoke of despair threatening to overwhelm me, I was met with my miracle, not in the form of a mighty pillar of light, but instead a tiny ray of hope.
I wasn’t blessed with some assurance that all my troubles and heartache would vanish, but for a tiny moment I was reassured that God was aware of me and mine and our worries, both the trite and the grand. I could appreciate the miracle of the little boy I held in my arms or the fact that I could find a month-old calf, shaded up under some sagebrush, separated from its mother by three miles and several thousand acres of high desert country. Later, as I thought about my tiny, enlightened miracle, I was able to see the glimpses of the small everyday miracles in my life, whether it was a flat tire in the driveway instead of the freeway or the fact that the horses didn’t notice the gate I’d left open all night.
The next day, I caught another ray as I was cleaning up my mess of a desk. On the back of an envelope, I found a quote I’d scribbled, almost illegibly, months earlier, attributed to Oscar Hammerstein:
“It is a modern tragedy that despair has so many spokesmen and hope has so few.”
A tragedy indeed, but simultaneously, a miracle. It’s a miracle, too often unnoticed by the masses, that hope’s spokesmen, however few they may be, can ignore the darkness and chaos of a cynical world and offer the rays of light to all who choose to see them. Don’t let your search for pillars keep you from looking up at the rays.
