Be The Cloud

My son, serving amongst the Spanish speaking people in Phoenix, Arizona for the last two years, wrote this to me in his next-to-last letter home, “I just did what I was supposed to do, there's no possible way I could have convinced any of these people to support the church or to join it. It all belongs to the Savior.”

It reminded me of the briefest moment I had with my oldest daughter when she was five. We had stopped at a light and I heard her from the back seat say, “look, a rainbow”. The sky was mostly sunny, just bursts of large white fluffy clouds here and there, so I didn’t pay attention, but she was relentless, what children do best, and I finally made an effort to see where she was pointing. Sure enough, there was a rainbow. Not a huge one, just a bit of one reflecting off single cloud. That was all she needed, she just added her imagination to fill in the rest. All she needed was that cloud to be in the right place at the right time and one of the most magical phenomenon of childhood was hers.

So my son now understands what I call the “Cloud Principle”. On our own we can’t create a rainbow, but if we are in the right place at the right time, we can reflect the most magical thing of all-God’s love. I don't think there is any criteria for what kind of cloud we need to be, small, large, grumpy, fluffy, in my case pear shaped with a bit of chocolate on my chin. We just need to rise to the occasion and be the cloud.