My wife

Some people just get it.

That antecedent-less pronoun is intentionally ambiguous. "It" is the motivation to get out of bed. "It" is the reason to reach out to others. "It" is the true essence of life. "It" is everything big or important in this or any life. But "It" is also the minutia -- the perfunctory details of life. Every bit as much as "It"may shape the life decisions we make like with whom to associate, "It" reminds us to brush our teeth or fold the laundry. The anonymity afforded it by lower-case letters and convoluting sentence structures in no way diminishes its importance.

It is everything in this life that matters and everything that we so often fail to recognize.

I wish I were one of those who "got it." Perhaps my ambiguity was inadvertent. It could well be true that there is an easily articulable "It" which I don't know.

Somehow I doubt that.

I believe "It" (hereafter: it) cannot be expressed in very specific terms, nor can it be learned through study or explanation. It can only be learned through experience, attention and God's grace.

My wife gets it.

I have never met an individual whose head was screwed on so straight. As near as I can tell, ShaNae's priorities are perfect in every way. She excels in any endeavor she undertakes while refusing to take credit for any of it. She got 5 As and 1 A+ last quarter, didn't tell anyone about it and complains to me this term almost as much as she did last term about how she's going to fail. I remember one time when we were tidying up our apartment, she took down the nondescript light fixture from our bedroom ceiling and made sure to scrape the paint that had gotten on it even though the company wouldn't be in the bedroom and no one would have ever noticed or cared that the paint was there. 

Even that is small potatoes though. ShaNae is the greatest personification of charity that I have ever met. She will always be the first to look at things from another person's perspective. I have never know her to make a hasty or prejudicial judgment and she does not even allow people's ridiculous actions to throw a negative shadow on her perception of them as decent human beings. She truly sees that there is the potential for greatness -- indeed for perfection -- in each and every one of us.

ShaNae thinks about the implications of her actions for other people. She studies long and hard every day. But she doesn't do it so that she will get a good grade. She does it because she genuinely cares about knowing the information and believes that it will help her to help a patient some day. So while other students are doing what it takes to pass their classes or even what it does to get good grades, she is doing what it takes to best prepare herself to work as a nurse. You know how professors put all the chapters they're not going to cover on the syllabus under the first week of the course? She reads them all.

Often I find myself being inconsiderate without so much as noticing it. I may be saying something that seems pefectly reasonable to me, but it is my wife who invariably refuses to see things only from my own narrow perspective -- or even her own broad perspective. I remember a talk from one sacrament about charity that was very good. One of the sticking points with me was that real charity does not allow us to ignore other individuals' needs or perspectives. It demands that we view every situation from every affected child of God's perspective. And part of the reason I remember that point was because it failed to live up to that same standard. It was delievered in a bilingual ward where English talks were translated into the idioma de los dioses and the speaker neglected the courtesy of giving a few notes to the translator (no, it wasn't me so this isn't sour grapes) which is a common courtesy and helps simultaneous translation a LOT (especially if you give a list of scriptures since those are some of the toughest to translate). True charity is and must be an active pursuit. It demands that we aggressively remind ourselve that we are but one of our Heavenly Father's numberless (to us that is; numbered, named and known to Him) children and that he is no respecter of persons -- he loves each of His children equally regardless of their race, sex, profession, talents, passions, decisions, actions, or thoughts. ShaNae is my greatest and most constant exemplar of this kind of charity. She strives to make her empathy perfect that her charity may be made perfect.

Honey, I love you. (Since you are undoubtedly the only one who made it down this far, I feel safe addressing that directly to you.) Will you please be my wife forever? I really need someone to drag my butt to the Celestial Kingdom kicking (against the pricks) and screaming the whole way, and I can't think of a better person to do it than you.