All Things.

Dear Family Rhondeau,

A few weeks ago I learned a word that I promptly forgot because I never used it. That's how it works for me; if new vocabulary doesn't make it into reality conversation that very day I will learn the same word weeks later as if I've never ever seen it before in the first place. And so that is how it was with the word sepele. Meaning trivial, insignificant, unimportant. If you check the date on my language study journal, I learned that word more than seven weeks ago. But never used it until the moment presented itself, until it was ready to be made live, applied properly, situationally appropriate.

This is that moment. Because all these stories I've saved up, all these ideas and thoughts and jokes and anecdotes, they are sepele. I am in Solo and have been for four days but will go back to Malang tonight. I was Sister Atmi's companion while Sister Sumarno attended Leadership Training. It is hot like a drowning desert and we ride bikes and I am a little bit tan. At night we meet up with the elders for bamboo bowls of coconut-milk rice and tall sweating glasses of es jeruk. Elder Steele pretends he is one of those automated statues on the Pirates of the Carribean ride and we all laugh. Elder Effi tries to make me eat deep friend eel and I say no. In the mornings the sun rises right into the window frame and over onto the bed. I sleep like a cat and feel seven years old. Mostly, between all the girl -talk, electric fans, and pilly sheets, it's a beach vacation. I have been inexplicably happy in that floating kind of happiness, the happiness that lands on the roof of the next house, singing.

That same happiness that disappears when it wants to, like when you lose your favorite pen or your skirt gets caught in the cycle spokes or you open up your inbox to bad news. And so now it is just all . . . sepele. All of the above, though memorable and marvelous to each its own, pales in the knowledge of losing or lost. I am confused about what to say and how to say it.

Though last night, as I returned home from the warnet and knelt to pray—-for peace, for hope, for strength, for something—-a verse came to mind and has not left it. I guess that's just one of the many reasons to read and study and love the Word of God; it has a way of coming around just as you need it and never the way you thought it would. My experience last night was a combination of both those possibilities, since as I was praying about Grandpa the words of Nephi spoke to answer. It was chapter 11, verse 17, when the Spirit asks the young prophet if he knows the condescension of God and Nephi replies: And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.

I do not know the meaning of all things. I do not know the meaning of most things. I do not understand why that, if Grandpa has to go, he has to go now. But the solid, living, irrevocable facts are these: that I do know God lives, and I do know that He loves His children. He wants what's best for us and knows what's best for us. Things work out. They always do.

I love you. God loves you.
We are forever.
Kekal.

Sister E.