When You Think Everything is Falling Apart

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In 2013, I had the rug yanked from under me. Not for the first time, certainly not for the last, and not nearly as traumatically as what some people experience. But that’s where I learned what is probably often true no matter when or how we’re sent sprawling–that when it feels like everything is falling apart, sometimes it’s just God making sure things don’t fall apart worse later down the road.

Every classroom is peppered with students who pose a greater challenge than others. Mine seemed more generously endowed than usual that year, and I was floundering in situations and behaviors I didn’t know what to do with. Trying in all the wrong ways to reclaim the control constantly slipping through my fingers, and trying too hard to do it alone, I seemed forever to be at my worst. Every day felt like going to war.

Those poor kindergarteners. They weren’t all innocent lambs–I’m pretty sure I got a few of them at their worst, too. But I didn’t help bring out their best, and those already doing their best got drenched with emotional deluges they didn’t deserve.

I owe a lot to the unbounded willingness children have to forgive.

Signs That Things Were Falling Apart

My mom was heading into a round of chemotherapy for breast cancer at this time, and I’d like to say that excused, or at least explained, my chronic frazzled nerves.

But I was in a downward spiral well before cancer came into the picture. I know because when it did, I felt less trepidation about its potential repercussions than I did about facing another day in the classroom. And this after losing a substantial handful of prominent people in my life to cancer over the previous ten years, not the least of which was my dad. I knew the repercussions intimately.

What does that say when I dreaded a few struggling five-year-olds more than that disease?

I admit, maybe not quite as much as it appears to say. I suppose many who heard of my mom’s diagnosis, friends and relatives who’d lost those same prominent people from their lives, had a sinking feeling of, Please not again. But for me–and I wasn’t the only one–this was a completely different experience on a completely different road, and it just didn’t feel like something to be alarmed about.

So I wasn’t.

Still, alarming or not, cancer is a pretty big thing to trump, and the fact my stressed-teacher syndrome made the leap in a single bound to reign as the biggest problem in my life definitely said something.

The Final Falling Apart

Whatever our peace about how that cancer/chemo/radiation road would end, it did still have to be walked. And it did get pretty intense. And perhaps there came a point where some blame for my short fuse belonged at its feet. But only some. Mostly the dark cloud churning to a head above me was still entirely my own problem.

I’m not sure I can even put into words what that problem was. I just felt like the person who couldn’t handle anything. Who’d lost control of everything. Had nothing to offer anyone. Unless they wanted a basket case. I could be that.

I tried to comfort myself with all the things I taught my class about how God cares for us. All the encouragement I gave them to never give up. But, “All things work together for good,” and, “I think I can! I think I can! I think I can!” just didn’t cut it. None of what I tried to instill in them could I believe was true for me.

One evening, after taking a walk to clear my head and coming home defeated, I looked up at the appropriately stormy spring sky and asked God how he could love me when I acted like this. When I lost my temper so much, beat myself up so much, took it out on him so much. Fell so short. Was so inadequate.

No answer, which cemented the belief that he didn’t.

Sometimes it brings clarity to see your thoughts some place other than inside your head, so one night–it might have been that same night–I wrote my prayers.

And the dam broke.

What began as a deflated entreaty for help quickly escalated to capital letters and multitudinous exclamation marks as I screamed my frustrations onto the page. I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with them. If a ballpoint pen could start smoking, mine would have.

Finally, I spent it all. The debris of the ruptured dam settled, the dust cleared. It had all fallen apart, and I sat there in the rubble, literally rocking back and forth. Like a patient in a psychiatric ward. Staring vacantly at the sheets on my bed.

All the turmoil was gone. But so was everything else. No worry, no fear. But also no faith, and no peace. There was nothing.

I finally turned out the light. Lay there in the emptiness for a while. And then the story of the Salt Lake Temple foundation entered the echo chamber that was now my brain.

And with it came a flood of love.

The Foundation That Was Falling Apart

In 1862, nine years after breaking ground for the Salt Lake Temple, five years after completely burying its partially laid foundation due to threats of persecution, and shortly after exhuming it and recommencing work, cracks in the sandstone foundation forced a halt once again.

I always understood that Brigham Young ordered the whole foundation torn out at this point and rebuilt with granite, desiring to see the temple stand through the Millennium and knowing such a faulty foundation would never hold its weight. But when renovations exposed the foundation in the 1960s, there were actually two foundations. A 16-foot sandstone sub-foundation, and a 14-foot granite foundation.

So, I’m not clear on what exactly happened. Did they tear it all out and use sandstone again but change their method? The mortar caused the cracking, and there are accounts of cutting and fitting the stone the second time in such a way to avoid mortar altogether.

Or did they simply repair the foundation? Some accounts seem to suggest that.

I don’t know, but whatever the case, I think it’s safe to say those cracks required a massive amount of rework. A massive amount of what must have been incredibly discouraging rework. Almost ten years of hard labor down the drain.

But that temple took 40 years to build. Imagine watching that go down the drain when that faulty foundation failed.

Frustrating as it might feel, it is love, not punishment, wisdom, not malice, to fix a problem early and at the root. To tear a comparatively small something down before it causes the much more painful downfall of something much bigger.

That’s why God ripped out my cracked foundation. He loved me too much to let the house I built on it collapse.

The Crack in My Foundation

Joseph Smith said, “If we start right, it is easy to go right all the time; but if we start wrong, it is a hard matter to get right.”

Perhaps some of the faultiest foundations, and some of the hardest to repair, belong to people who thought they did start right. Because they’re not looking for cracks.

I wasn’t.

I was born into a religion and raised on its teachings–teachings I still believe in. They pointed me in the right direction. Back to God. To heaven. To eternal life. The restored gospel is true. It’s a solid foundation to build a life on.

And I thought I’d made a pretty good start.

But a foundation in the gospel of Jesus Christ must stand on the rock who is Jesus Christ, and amid all my church-going and testimony-gaining, I’d sort of skipped over him. There was never a time in my life I didn’t know who he was, so it was like that box got automatically checked at birth. Know about Jesus. Check. Okay, what’s next?

But I didn’t know him. What he did for me. What that meant for me. Or what it required from me.

So I didn’t know how to respond to the challenges in my life in a Christian way.

And I didn’t know how to extend myself the grace he did when I fell short.

If Everything Falls Apart, Build It Back Better

The Fourth Article of Faith says the first principle of the gospel is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s a reason for that. No other principle, ordinance, or law can stand without it.

Sometimes we put other principles first anyway. Or perhaps more accurately, we blow them up to such importance that even if they’re in their proper order, they push every necessary thing before it out of the way.

But no principle of the gospel can be lived in righteousness by someone who doesn’t know Jesus. Because if you don’t know Jesus, you can’t love as you’ve been loved. Forgive as you’ve been forgiven. Put others first the way he put you first. And that’s what the gospel is. Not just baptism and tithing and church and marriage and ordinances, but people. The worth of souls. Your soul, and everyone else’s.

Can you truly know the value of someone’s soul if you don’t know the value of your own? And how can you know what you’re worth if you don’t know Jesus died to save you? You. Even though you didn’t deserve it.

I’d been baptized. I paid tithing. I went to church. But I didn’t truly know what I, or my class of five-year-olds, was worth. Until I fell apart.

A new foundation has been laid since then. It’s still a work in progress. But plenty of storms have beat against it. And it’s held.

The one God tore out wouldn’t have.

And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build, they cannot fall.

Helaman 5:12

Thank you for reading. I hope something here has encouraged you in your journey today and that you’ll share it with others.

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