I’m laying in a hotel bed after just dropping my son off on a 2 year mission at the airport. It’s 5am and I’m needing to sleep. But how? So many thoughts are running through my head. Where did the time go? How will I learn to live without Austin? How will I go home and see the roads he and I ran on to train for our half marathon? How will I walk past his bedroom and keep from going inside and seeing all of his stuff still there without him? How will I eat his favorite foods and sit at the dinner table without crying saying that his chair is empty? I’m not exactly sure how to do this successfully, but I am going to try. Because truthfully, serving a mission and spreading the gospel is what I’ve been teaching him since the day he was born. This is what his primary teachers have been teaching him, this is what we taught him and family home evenings. And truth be known, this is what HE wants. I will miss him fiercely, but even through all the heartache and tears of letting him go, there’s no place I’d rather him be. I told him before he left (through tears) that it has been such a privilege being his mother. And it has been. A true gift.
Maybe, this is a bad analogy but it has comforted me to think that maybe this is just a tiny bit of what heavenly father felt like having to let his son, Jesus Christ suffer and come to the earth. Surely I can let my son go for two short years.
Finally, I want to share my favorite quote from Joseph Smith. And one that Austin shared in his farewell talk in church a few weeks ago.
“The Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done.”
God speed, Elder Chapman.
