Wherever She Is
I fell in love in a linoleum-tiled classroom when I was thirteen years old.
The combination of crispness and grace, precision and flow enchanted me. I savored the logic and certainty of it all—so far removed from the constant change and chaos of everything else in my life. Though I hesitated to use my voice in every other room in that school building, I did not hesitate there. I spoke. And the words felt delicious in my mouth. They traced through my being and filled empty places I hadn’t even known were vacant. I would never be the same girl I was before I met Spanish.
I was strong in Spanish. Among its native speakers, I felt at home, and they welcomed me as I served them. The small ones at the South Middlesex Latino Emergency Services (SMILES) day care scattered around me with toys, babbling in their fledgling Spanglish. The bilingual first-graders at Brophy Elementary, especially one bright but hesitant little girl, a recent immigrant whose quiet aptitude reminded me so much of myself at her age. Almendra at Joaquin Elementary—so eager for praise and attention, so pleased to have her very own mentor. The families in the villages of La Mesa, Charco Verde, and Tepamal outside of Irapuato, Mexico, where my mother took me on a humanitarian expedition when I was nineteen. As we drove away from them in the back of a rusty truck, I resolved that I must never stop serving my Spanish-speaking brothers and sisters. I must be their advocate. Surely it was my life’s mission.
I have found my life's true mission many times since then, each time in an area that was different from the last. Yet every time, I have read the same paragraph in my patriarchal blessing and said to myself, See! It's a perfect fit. This is what I'm supposed to do with my life! Countless readings have seared the closing words of that paragraph into my brain: "Uplift and strengthen others. Search after those who are in need of the special care and tender touches that you can give them." Those words have been the glass slipper in my search for the path with just the right fit. Who knew I’d find a right fit in so many places?
My lack of a major occupied my thoughts for most of my freshman year at BYU, but the daunting task of picking just one overwhelmed me even more. I lost the Spanish momentum during my sophomore year at school. Perhaps it was all those fluent returned missionaries who illuminated my own naïveté. Spanish no longer called to me. Now what? That question consumed me until one crisp fall day when I found the answer. I rushed to the hallway where I knew I'd find my friend Reid waiting for me outside of class. I could barely contain my excitement as I gushed to him, "I know what I'm going to do with my life! I'm going to be a social worker!" Then I feverishly showed him the social work section of the course catalog and told him about the various prerequisites for applying to the program. I couldn't wait to get started in the coming semester. So, I declared social work my major … for that semester.
By the time I started my junior year at BYU, I had a new husband—my friend Reid—and a new major—English. How English was going to help me "uplift and strengthen others” with my "tender touches" I didn't know. If all else failed there was always education for education’s sake and reading and writing for the sheer joy of it, right?
Then there was my stint with law school. At some point during my senior year of college I was invited to a luncheon hosted by the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU. They were trying to recruit more women, so they served us gourmet chicken and cheesecake and wooed us with their advanced skills of persuasion. One former law student spoke of how she had forged her way through law school, even with an infant. When her baby accompanied her, she listened to class from the hallway using a baby monitor. She stood before us—polished, professional, intelligent, and a mother. I’d been feeling the tug of maternity myself. I didn't know when I'd have a child, but if this woman had managed to survive law school with a baby, maybe I could as well. I entered that luncheon with no desire whatsoever to become a lawyer, but I left it high on the excitement it had awakened in me.
Within a few months, I was taking a pre-law seminar, studying for the LSAT, and writing essays for law school applications. I was going to devote myself to the noble areas of the law profession—pro bono work or mediation. Everything in my life had been leading me to that point, of course. I was certain this was the very path my patriarch had foreseen. Then I got a call from the BYU Health Center with the results of a blood test: pregnant. I soon discovered that early pregnancy was not the ideal time to attempt law school exams and began instead to focus on my impending role as a mother. Toting a baby to law school was a juggling act I preferred not to tackle, even with the help of a baby monitor. Law school? Before long, I was looking back in wonder. Surely they had slipped something into that luncheon cheesecake.
After the empowering unmedicated births of my first- and later second-born, I wanted nothing more than to help other women achieve wonderful births themselves. I was going to become a doula, a trained provider of labor support. Doulas give encouragement, comfort, and suggestions for helping cope with the pain of labor. The words of my patriarchal blessing played over and over in my head. “Search after those who are in need of the special care and tender touches that you can give them.” Yes. Of course. This was my calling.
My childbirth frenzy erupted into an expanding birth book library, a natural birth advocacy blog, an opinion piece in a local newspaper, a presentation at a local library, and frequent rambling conversations with friends and family advocating educated birth choices. Later, I made plans to attend my sister-in-law's delivery, my first as a doula. Then I mourned with her as she miscarried, and she mourned with me as I subsequently miscarried myself. So I put my doula plans temporarily on hold. Attending births would really be more practical when my children were older.
One day I picked up a pamphlet by Marjorie Pay Hinckley called To Women: Is This What I Was Born to Do? The title resonated deeply with me. Inside, I read Sister Hinckley's words: "Our greatest quest is to live worthy to know what the Lord's will is regarding us—what we are meant to do."1 Yes! My soul nodded vigorously in agreement. Just tell me what I'm meant to do! Then she quoted from former Young Women general president Elaine Cannon: "A woman's significant role is that of being an influence wherever she is." Huh. That was a lot of help, I thought.
But good old adolescent idealism dies hard. I was going to fulfill my purpose, and I was going to do it on a grand scale. I would swing open a mighty door, step in, and dispense my “special care” to the masses. Isn’t a mission from God inherently laced with magnitude? I didn’t want to let Him down. My patriarchal blessing said nothing about searching for something grand, but that little detail had escaped my notice. Fortunately, the Holy Spirit is more persistent than I am. In the hours, days, and weeks after I read Sister Hinckley’s pamphlet, my frustration slowly gave way to revelation. Gently the Spirit pulled at my misplaced focal point, illuminating the nearness of my most effective circle of influence with flashes of phrases I had come to know well:
Small and simple.
Here a little, and there a little.
Opportunities right in our way.
Wherever you are.
So I have not devoted myself to serving the Hispanic population. I rarely speak Spanish anymore. But I was the visiting teacher of a Spanish-speaking single mother who needed a friend, and I did have a fun Spanish interchange with a young pregnant woman at the pool who seemed, unfortunately, shocked that a random white woman would speak to her. I did not become a social worker, an attorney, a doula, or any of the other positions I was certain were my one, true calling. But I have held and stroked the cold, aged hands of a blind and terminally ill man as he told me of his youth; made casseroles and pies for sick friends and new mothers; welcomed my struggling younger brother into my home; sat with my suddenly widowed friend as she folded and boxed her husband’s belongings; and tenderly wiped the tear-streaked cheeks of my two beautiful daughters.
There have been no downtrodden masses uplifted or strengthened by my efforts, but somehow, in all my searching (or perhaps despite it), I managed to touch a few souls here and there. And those moments grew out of my love for them—not from some quest for personal fulfillment. The Master does not focus on the how or the what. He simply savors the why and for whom. He told me long ago what I am meant to do—search after those who are in need of the special care and tender touches I can give them. Searching for the right opportunity wasn’t the real test. The question all along was, “Will she touch them wherever she is?”
Lani Axman received her BA in English (with an emphasis in editing) from Brigham Young University in April 2003. She now resides just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, where her life is filled with mothering her two daughters, teaching a preschool co-op one week a month, distributing and tracking Primary attendance rolls, blogging in too many virtual spaces, trying to grow food in the desert, cheering her husband as he pursues his running goals, and preparing for the home birth of their first son. She still hasn’t given up on that doula dream.
Notes 1. Marjorie Pay Hinckley, “Is This What I Was Born to Do?” (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 2004), 4-5.