So I was thinking about my drama and I remembered this incident from a few years ago. It made me chuckle to myself, so I thought I’d share:
Back then, my husband and I and 3 kids lived next door to my parents. I don’t consider it “out in the country” because we lived on a paved road, but it was 18 acres and on a well, not city water. So some of you all might consider that country.
I had just returned home from something breezy and fun.
My dad was knee deep in a muddy trench and water was spraying at him from a broken pipe like a fire hose.
The water finally slowed to a slow gush, and I walked closer. I forget what the exact problem was he had been trying to fix. In any case, there were 2 lines, a main trunk line bringing water from the well, and a spur line that was for just such a thing as adding a hydrant or adding a waterline to somewhere new. Not having been the one who laid the original lines, my dad called the man who did to double check which was the main and which was the spur line. The man told him backwards, so when dad cut what he thought was the spur, the geyser began. Now he had a whole new problem an addition to the one that had required digging the ditch in the first place.
So there dad was, up to his knees and elbows in mud, in a ditch he had dug, struggling against water spraying from a pipe that he, himself, had cut. He kind of leaned against the side of the ditch and looked over at me and said something like,
“I know Lehi tells us that there is opposition in all things. I have faith in that principle. I don’t need any more opposition to learn it.”
I think what he was trying to say was, “I think I’ve had enough opposition for today. I’d like to be done with opposition now.”
Sometimes when I have a particularly hard day, that memory of dad in the ditch will flash through my mind and I’ll smile to myself. And then I’ll remember how hard he always worked for our family, and that gives me the strength to cheerfully keep on keepin’ on.
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2Nephi 2:11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one;