A Missing Piece of Me
For some months I’d experienced the feeling of missing something. It wasn’t a feeling of “I forgot something”, it was deeper. I thought long and hard about what it could be and came up with a plan; it was to find a hobby and try and see if that would help me feel at ease.
Discouragingly, whatever hobby I started I could never finish and that was hard to deal with. The missing feeling would return, and I knew what I was doing wasn’t going to fill the empty void. I tried to occupy my mind by thinking of something else I could do to keep myself busy, but the feeling was always there in the back of my mind.
I told my husband and we both struggled to understand it. Was it something I needed to do? Was it something that my children needed? I tried to make sense of it, but I just couldn’t figure out what I was missing. The confusion at times led me to tears; I didn’t know how to make this feeling go away.
One evening my bishop visited my husband and me at our home. Towards the end of his visit, I told him what I had been feeling for the past few months and was surprised at the answer. In the conversation, one thing my bishop quoted really stood out, “We are not earthly beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience.” (Attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher, 1881-1955.)
We discussed this and concluded that the missing feeling may never leave; earth is our temporal home, and we yearn for our spiritual home where we can be with our Heavenly Parents and our Saviour. I never thought about it that way before. Could it be that my spirit was missing my heavenly home? Was I missing my Heavenly Parents and my Saviour? Was that what I needed to hear? Is that what my Heavenly Father wanted me to know? I believe it was. To my absolute surprise the very next day, the missing feeling had disappeared!
We have busy lives and our minds are drawn to many things. I have two small children and am expecting a third, so my life gets pretty busy. But, at times we need to slow down and remember that we are all children of our Heavenly Father and we have a heavenly home.