Mom's Letters: Haiti: Returning to Church

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Haiti: Returning to Church

I got the coolest email about the LDS church members in Haiti today. Despite being homeless and surrounded by devestation, these people have gathered each week in their best Sunday clothes (washed in water not good enough to drink) and find peace in knowing that they are children of a loving Heavenly Father. What a blessing it is to have a knowledge Jesus Christ and His gospel! To know that God created us and has a plan of happiness for us. To know that, as we endure to the end, we will be able to live eternally with Him and our family members again - it takes away the sting of death and tragedy. It gives us reason to smile, even when the world around us comes crumbling down. I love these pictures - I love seeing these Haitian people SMILING!

The Port-au-prince ward members

The Port-au-prince ward primary children

2 comments:

Wendy said...: It's always a good reminder of all the blessings that we do have despite tragedies that WILL come. It's only a sign of things to come and that if you remain faithful, we too, will be saved. Thanks for the post!; February 17, 2010 at 3:32 PM
Jeff and Andraya said...: Hillstead, Found your blog through our mission website. Looks like you're doing very well and have a beautiful family. Hard to believe a decade has passed since our time in Mongolia...wonderful times. All the best,
Jeff Bailey; February 24, 2010 at 9:07 AM

Mom's Favorite Quotes

I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived." — Marjorie Pay Hinckley

"The biggest mistake I made [as a parent] is the one that most of us make....I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of [my three children] sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages six, four, and one. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less."

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Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Haiti: Returning to Church

2 comments: