One Touch With the Finger of His Love

 We spent the first two weeks of February in San Francisco, welcoming a brand new grandson to our family. Little William Wade Hollan entered the world on February 1, 2021. I looked at our daughter Jordan as the time approached. She was achey and exhausted, hadn't been sleeping well, and was just so ready to get the show on the road, so to speak. Labor and delivery, as all women know, was no cake walk either, but went relatively smoothly. There was inexpressible pain, and such taxing effort, and then suddenly, here is this new human that's forever a part of your life. And none of the symptoms of pregnancy remain. There's no heartburn, no nausea, whatever was bothering you is also swept away in that delivery. It's a miracle.

Talking to Jordan about this feat of nature reminded me of when I delivered her, a little over 26 years ago. It had been a really rough pregnancy. I was literally drinking water a teaspoon at a time in an effort to keep enough liquid down to prevent going to the hospital with hyperemesis and dehydration. Our brother and sister-in-law would stop by, and I would beg them: "If I EVER talk about having another baby, will you please remind me how hard this is?" Then, a few months later, after a relatively easy delivery, I held her in my arms, and said to my husband, "She's so sweet! Let's have another!" Just like that. 

In our reading of the Doctrine and Covenants two weeks ago I discovered the perfect line of scripture to go along with this conundrum of childbirth. We were studying two chapters of scripture, sections 12 and 13, about the restoration of the priesthood. In some supplemental readying at the end of Joseph Smith History there's a beautifully descriptive passage about the experience, written by Oliver Cowdery, who was Joseph Smith's scribe.

These were days never to be forgotten...

What joy! what wonder! what amazement!

I shall not attempt to paint to you the feelings of this heart, nor the majestic beauty and glory which surrounded us on this occasion;

Oliver then goes on to describe some of the persecution they had suffered, all the deceptions and falsehoods that exist in the world, then follows with this most beautiful sentence fragment...

--but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind.

There it is! That notion of the resultant joy making all the previous struggles completely worth it, to the point that the memory of the pain is swept away. He then concludes with this phrase that captures exactly how I feel:

I shall ever look upon this expression of the Savior’s goodness with wonder and thanksgiving...

If that doesn't describe the moment of becoming a grandmother perfectly, I don't know what does!