Vonda

I bore my testimony this month. I don't do that often. I have a testimony, but I am usually not strongly motivated to get up there. This time I was.

As we get into the end of the year, it is common for me that the dead come more to mind. Perhaps it is because holidays are a time of remembrance, or that the life of the year is coming to a close, but often those who are gone will feel very present to me.

This year, starting about mid-November I think, I have not been able to stop thinking about Vonda. I felt like I needed to share my story there. I didn't know why I felt that, but not knowing why anything was a big part of the original story.

In my previous ward, part of my calling was creating the Relief Society newsletter, and part of that was the monthly birthdays of the sisters in the ward. When I first obtained the list and was going over it, I noticed about five women who were marked as letter contact only or phone contact only.

Well, this was going to be a letter, so it was legitimate contact, and an opportunity for contact. I felt like I should send the newsletter to everyone who had specified letter contact.

To not be too weird, I sent a note explaining what I was going to be doing that with the first newsletter, and then it pretty much just went into maintenance mode. If it was their birthday month (because I was tracking birthdays) I enclosed the letter in a birthday card, and I did use some Christmas cards in December, but it wasn't really a great effort.

When they changed our records to the current ward, that calling was ending, and I didn't know if the new person would keep it up. I thought I should send another note so there wasn't this abrupt ending. I sent a note to each of them explaining, and I included my contact information, because that seemed right to do. Having never heard back from anyone, it was unlikely that this was necessary, but again, it felt right.

I knew nothing about most of the names. One I knew was Laotian, and I felt a connection there, and one was Vonda. I had never met her, but I went to school with one of her sons, and I liked him. He was a really nice guy. I was happy to see that name, and it mattered to me that she was on that list.

A few weeks after sending the final notes, my phone rang, and it was a voice I didn't recognize on the other end. It was one of Vonda's sons (a different one) telling me that she had died. He told me that she had enjoyed the letters, and thought of me as a friend she never saw. I thanked him for letting me know, and expressed condolences, and then after hanging up I just fell apart.

I can't even fully tell you what the emotions were. I think there was grief and a sense of loss there, because under other circumstances maybe we could have been friends who saw each other. There were other things there too, including a sense of amazement at all the potential misses. If I hadn't sent that last note, or if I hadn't put a phone number in it, or if I hadn't sent the letters at all.

My first tendency would be to tell you that I never once knew what I was doing, but really it's more that I never knew why. There are probably still nuances that I miss on that. Mainly it reminded me that what I did mattered. It was not obvious that it mattered, but it did.

So I did not know why it was important to bear my testimony, but I did it, and several people have told me that it touched them. Maybe it was important for them. It feels important to write this post now, and I had something totally different that I was going to write for Christmas, but here it is, because it feels right.

We do not always know what matters or why, but I do believe in inspiration. I believe in the power of the Holy Ghost to tell us the things we couldn't know on our own, even if it may be only the bare basics necessary for what we need to do.

And most fervently if all, I believe that people matter. Our relationships matter, and how we treat them matters, because they matter. I matter. And you do too.