Part Three, Lessons from Polish Pottery and the Past

Part Three, where I mix Parts One and Two (you must read those first, or this post won't make sense), outside and inside:

I couldn’t find the bowls.  I opened every single one of those seventeen boxes and could not find the bowls.  The boxes are marked faithfully and not one said Polish bowls.  I kept looking anyway.  I must have been looking for a half an hour when I got down a box that was labeled “Plates.”  When I opened it and unwrapped some paper I found this:

      I sat on the floor and started bawling.  I mean a full-throttle cry.  My husband, D’Artagnan, came running down the stairs.  He saw me sitting amidst the strewn paper holding shards in my hand. 

“What is wrong?  Why are you crying?”

“My plate…” sniffle, sniffle, hack, hack  “…It’s broken….”

“It’s okay, you have more.”

“No.  Now I don’t have twelve.”  Cry, cry, snort, start to weave dangerously, “I…can’t…ever…replace…it.” 

“My dear, you are on the verge of a crying jag.  I’ve got to go to the Post Office.  I’ll see you soon.”   With that tender, sympathetic speech, my husband ran up the stairs and out the door, leaving me to sit amongst the shards. 

Now, dear Reader, I was home alone.  There wasn’t a soul around, so I let it out.  I bellowed, I howled, I let years of frustration of being packed in boxes and not having my “pretty things” around me come out.  I let the years of moving and sacrifices and my perceived losses out.  Yep, I had a crying jag.  All the while, I held tightly on to my broken plate pieces and bewailed the loss.

After riding the wave of broken plate grief, stacking up all the symbolism of that in my mind as I cried, I finally broke onto the shore of respite and calmed down.  I lay on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, and did as most people do who look up at ceilings after a good cry – I talked to God.

“What is wrong with me, Lord?  It’s only a broken plate.  When am I going to learn this lesson You keep trying to teach me…not to be attached to worldly things?  Please forgive me, help me to get it.  Why am I so upset over a broken plate?”

and you know what????

HE ANSWERED!

The Lord brought my mind back to the faith-promoting story of the Mormon women donating their finest china to the Kirtland Temple and my confusion over the story.  Then, He showed me a movie in my mind’s eye.  I saw a woman, calico dress, fair-hair pulled back, beads of sweat on her head, who was working in a small, hot space.  I knew that she had come from very far to America.  She was rinsing fine china, drying it, and putting it away on a side shelf.  It was so hot, her hands were slippery – she dropped the dish.  I saw the devastation on her face.  I saw her fall to the floor and cry and cry – just like me – as she picked up the pieces.  The next picture he showed me was her wrapping up the pieces lovingly in a linen and walking down a dirt street.  She dumped them behind a little building into a garbage heap.

The movie ended and then the Spirit spoke to me.  It explained that it didn’t matter if the Kirtland women’s china was donated willingly or taken from a garbage heap.  He explained to me that those women carried their fine china so carefully from their homelands.  They were packed cautiously, just like mine.  They knew they would never go back to that past life.  The Mormon women made sacrifices for Him.  They followed His call.  For them, the china represented a life they left behind and a new life they had chosen and hoped for.  Those plates would hold food for the people of Zion.  Whether they were broken shards from their travels or whole pieces, it did not matter.  The love for the dishes was still there.  He recognized that.  He recognized their sacrifice.  That love now caught the sunlight on the façade of the Kirtland temple. 

Did my plate get broken in its travels just so I could be ready to have this lesson taught to me?

I don’t know.

I do know that I picked up the hand-painted pieces, looked at them lovingly, wrapped them in their paper to carry them to the garbage, and wished for a temple they could grace the surface of.