A couple of years ago, I sat listening to my husband’s great Aunt Betsy recount memories of her parents, Gaylen and Mary (Ross) Young. Betsy shared her father’s quiet sacrifice of walking or taking the bus the several miles to work each day so that her mother would have the use of the family car and she recalled with affection the tender care her mother gave their favorite sibling, Teddy, who was born with Downs Syndrome. Several grandchildren chimed in with stories as well and I noticed how many of the memories were ordinary events; a picnic at Liberty Park of tuna fish sandwiches, Grandma enjoying listening to her granddaughter play the piano, and a round of golf with Grandpa.
The memories described were not grand acts or large gestures, but the repeated acts of encouragement, love, thoughtfulness and time. As I listened I saw the small interactions, efforts, conversations and laughter that were building however imperceptibly, relationships, love and security. The phrase, “as dew distilling” came to my mind.
Several times in the Old Testament, the Lord refers to the “dew”. Dew is not a rainstorm, it is much more subtle than that, it is the water in the air that as the night cools, condenses in droplets on the ground. In Israel, the dew that “distilled” nightly, from air filled with ocean water, nourished and fed the plant life in the arid parts of the country. Its regularity, not its volume, brought the needed sustaining. We can long for and focus on big events, swift changes, and miraculous interventions but so often, the Lord works in the small details of daily life. In the book of Hosea the Lord describes His work, “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely…I will be as the dew unto Israel.” (Hosea 14:4-5) Like the common interactions of daily life that are soon forgotten, we may miss the “dew” of the Lord that quietly “heals [our] backsliding” and “loves [us] freely” nourishing and strengthening us. Every effort we make to study His word, to follow His path, to live as He lives will be met with the healing, loving, “dew” of heaven and almost imperceptibly, we will be “led in the more fertile parts of the wilderness” of our lives. (1 Nephi 16:16)