Abe's Intermission

Abe is home!

Only not for good.

(At least I don’t think! The whole world’s gone crazy and every day is some new and unexpected surprise [which is an odd thing to say when every day is also ... monotonously just the same].)

But no no. Not home for good. “The best part of your mission is still to come”. That’s what our stake president assured him (as he temporarily released him the other night).

And while last year at this exact same time (when Abe had just opened his call to El Salvador; and we were eagerly filling our minds with facts about population size, and crime, and volcanoes; and confidently catapulting our assumptions about his time there forward two years) our plans did not include this strange pause: a world-wide pandemic, a military-style quarantine, a complicated evacuation from El Salvador, and him returned to us — temporarily and in a state of complete limbo and waiting (when will he be called back out? where will he go?) — eight months in to his two year mission. ...

It also didn’t include some rather shocking happiness!

Sunday night as Mike and I waited for Abe (in our car, in an airport parking garage, with hundreds of other missionary parents [requirements necessitated by COVID-19]), I was excited and anxious. And I recognized the amazing novelty of what we were experiencing. (Every time another missionary would come out we’d hear honks and occasional cheers along with calls of “What mission are you coming from?”. And we got to witness parent after parent leap from their car to hug their missionary. How often has anyone been able to be a part of such a huge number joyful homecomings!?) But for the past week, we’d had such a roller-coaster of emotions (the shocking news that Abe would have to leave El Salvador 16 months earlier than expected, the worries about how he would take the news, the anxiety over his well-being in the isolated quarantine conditions he was in, the unknowns as they struggled to arrange paper-work and buses and flights to move our missionaries out, the questions about what was ahead) that it was hard for me to know what to feel.

Only then ... we saw Abe coming! There he was! Our oldest son! Our first child! The minute I threw my arms around him all the worries and unknowns were gone! And there was only happiness! It really isn’t exaggerating to say that it was one of the happiest moments of my life. It really was! I had not quite expected such joy. It felt as if, when he left, a hole had been blown through me, and that, as time had worn on, I’d just become accustomed to living with a gaping wound. So much so that I almost forgot it was there. Until suddenly it wasn’t! The hole filled back in! And only awe over how good it felt to NOT be walking around with a hole through me.

My sister was expecting her son home from his mission the following day. When I called her, excitedly telling her HOW HAPPY she was about to be — happier than she even could anticipate or imagine up; she joked that it might be like going to see a new movie that the reviews have played up so much that, once you see it yourself, it only seems mediocre. But I assured her (and she discovered for herself I was right) that that wasn’t possible. This was more the type of thing like having a baby. When everyone promises you it will be miraculous and you will love this unknown soul so completely. There’s no way to overplay it. Because there aren’t words or expressions to begin to tell the actual thing!

I kept thinking of that quote — was it Maxwell who said it? — about our reunions here only being a faint shadow of our heavenly reunions. And I kept thinking of all the craziness in the world. And the worries we faced. And loving that such joy could exist amidst all of those things.

Of course life moves forward. The kids are growing accustom to Abe here again — and, no longer feeling a need for “best behavior”, they are returning to their comfortable tantrum-throwing and squabbling. And the usual stresses of life are wriggling their way back in. And it won’t be easy for Abe or us not knowing how long he is here or what we can or can’t plan on. It’s strange feeling sort of thrust back a year in time. Abe has been off in another country. He has learned a million new things. He speaks an entire new language. He knows and loves people and places we’ve never seen. And yet ... we are kind of in the exact spot we were at this time last year! Waiting for Abe’s mission.

The difference though? All the things we were together for last year during this time — General Conference, Easter, the cabin. They were all lasts. And they all filled me with this strange rushing-forward sadness. But right now? They feel not like lasts but like little gifts! I had no idea, last year, when I was marking these last traditions, that I’d get to watch conference with him or see him eating Easter treats with all his siblings this year!

In Abe’s letter about leaving El Salvador and coming home he said “It [was] just sort of surreal to me that this normal world existed all along even when I had left it behind and lived in the jungle taking bucket showers and using mosquito nets.”

I’ve been thinking about that line. And his time away. And our reunion. And thinking about our Heavenly home. And how amazing that while we are here — figuratively taking bucket showers and using mosquito nets — that home still exists. And someday we will marvel that that familiar beloved place was there and waiting for us all along.