Thieves and Locks

I was in San Francisco at the Conference on College Composition and Communication—the biggest conference on college writing. It's a good conference because it not only discusses theory, but it gives some good, hands-on direction as well.

The session that touched me was called “Writing of War, Writing of Peace.” They had six vets talk about their writing—they belong to a single writing group that has helped each of them publish their work. They talked on writing about incredibly difficult situations and experiences and how to work through issues. Then they read some of their work—very, very good. An additional individual presented who is a journalist who chronicled the experience of a young Sudanese boy soldier—his book has won major awards.

One of my favorite vets is Marine Sean McLain Brown from the Persian Gulf War who read two poems “Easter” and “White Flag.” In his talk he said that “everyone who has experienced trauma is a vet.” Below in the quotation box is Brown's "Easter.

While traveling and at nights, I read a fabulous book by the Australian Mark Zusak called The Book Thief. It’s one of those books that has had a profound impact on me. It’s the story of a single neighborhood in Germany during the rise of the Hitler’s Third Reich and World War II. It’s mostly the story of a nine-year-old girl throughout this time until she turns fifteen. She occasionally steals books.

The Book Thief is about how Hitler destroys people with words, yet this young girl steals the words back as she reads books with a young Jewish man hiding in their basement, with her German neighbors to calm them in bomb shelters during air raids, and with an angry mother who has lost her sons in the war. She writes her own beautiful story though the horrors of the world that surrounds her. The book’s narrator is Death, who isn’t unkind or frightening. Death is just exhausted, and he continues to watch Liesel as he crosses her life. It’s a very, very good read.

How do we make it through these troubling times we face in our lives? Prayer is a significant answer. Prayer and dependence on our Father gives us power. Elder Neal A. Maxwell has said prayer is like a combination lock—to have effective prayer, we need to get three tumblers to line up just right. The tumblers include faith, personal righteousness, and God’s will.

So although there are thieves out there who are trying to take what who hold precious, remember that there is the combination lock of prayer that can protect and restore us.

"Easter" by Sean McLain Brown
On Easter, the girls dressed up in white hats with pink chiffon ribbon, pretty dresses with daisies and sunflower,
and us boys with new patent leather shoes and freshly starched ironed shirts and off to church we would go
and after come home to look for our Easter baskets with the sun still shining and father and mother there on
the porch looking on and laughing. What good times. I hope God will bring me home so I can hunt for eggs
in the field behind our barn, listen to the low short whistles of screech owls as they dive after mice while fireflies
weave-and-bob like Lilliputian lanterns. But here there’s only the high pitched whine of sand flies in my ears, the
twenty-miles of switchbacks to hump before sundown and we have to make the northern hill and no one knows
why but when; it’s Easter and we don’t have any eggs but plenty of grenades and no white hats but Kevlar helmets,
and no starched shirts but flak jackets. But at night on the perimeter, when the rain clears and light from the moon
shines across a field, I listen for low short whistles and the skitter of field mice across my boots, and the
phosphorescent glow of tracer fire streak red and orange through frozen air, like spring bonfires with winter wood,
or Easter lying prone in the mud, marking time, with nothing to do but wait for the sun.