Like a Dream

I've just finished an exchange with an Elder in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. Two days ago we were walking along the railroad tracks, talking about the tricks time plays when you're in the service of the Lord. Each one of the 24 months goes by just a little bit faster. When you get down to about six months the pace accelerates rapidly. I've just two months left.

It was a humid, hazy day, and perhaps the atmosphere contributed to my remembering a scripture in the Book of Mormon. The prophet Jacob is recounting the timelessness of his difficult but rewarding life—

I have written according to the best of my knowledge, by saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore we did mourn out our days.

Jacob speaks as one who has seen a lifetime of sorrow, sadness and tribulation. And while I cannot relate with wars and life in a wilderness, I think I'm starting to understand what he means when he says time passes like a dream. The last two years of my life—the last six months, especially—seem timeless, void of hours and minutes and filled with thousands of little lessons that have no beginning or end.

"Our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream"

I'm determined to measure the next two months not in days but in lessons and in love; not by the ticking of my watch but by the footsteps of my faith.

And then, when this dream is over I'll discover that it has only just begun. See, life isn't about starting and finishing. It isn't about arriving at a destination. It isn't about running mindlessly from one day to the next.

It is all about finding joy in the journey.

And it came to pass that we lived after the manner of happiness.

(2 Nephi 5:27)

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Come What May, and Love It, Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin
Finding Joy in the Journey, President Thomas S. Monson
Be Anxiously Engaged, Elder M. Russell Ballard