Thoughts on Sister Hinckley

“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 first time I read this quote I was in my mid-twenties. I thought it was a lovely sentiment, but I remembered thinking "I don't know... I wouldn't mind a good manicure and some good looking clothes and a nice car. And being okay with sticky on you? Can't I be a good person and not want sticky on my shirt?"

The long and short of it was, I didn't get it. Of course there is nothing wrong with a good manicure. But what I failed to grasp five or six years ago was the feeling that when you lose yourself in living life, specifically a life in service to God and others, all those other things become peripheral. I failed to understand that you find more joy in helping others than you ever could in solely taking care of yourself.

I just love every bit of the way Sister Hinckley worded that. It gives me a feeling of peace that yes, my van may at times look like a rolling garbage can. Yes, my laundry pile may never be completely conquered. Yes, I may wear the same pants three days in a row...but fulfillment isn't just found in the things the eye can see.

I am okay if some things get put aside so that I can write a family member, or watch a friend's child, or make a pot of soup for someone you care about who is sick or whatever it is. Those are the things that matter. Not a vision of perfection, but the reality of solid relationships. The reality of knowing that this one life we have to live was spent in the ways that really matter.