Joys and Sorrows

My oldest brother was taken home today to that God who gave him life. While I seek to come to terms with the profound lessons intrinsic to the experience of losing a sibling, how appropriate that tonight I would stumble onto a quotation I had not read in many years:

"We knew before we were born that we were coming to the earth for bodies and experience and that we would have joys and sorrows, ease and pain, comforts and hardships, health and sickness, successes and disappointments, and we knew also that after a period of life we would die. We accepted all these eventualities with a glad heart, eager to accept both the favorable and unfavorable. We eagerly accepted the chance to come earthward even though it might be for only a day or a year. Perhaps we were not so much concerned whether we should die of disease, of accident, or of senility. We were willing to take life as it came and as we might organize and control it, and this without murmur, complaint, or unreasonable demands"
--Kimball, Faith Precedes the Miracle, 106

May we all take life as it comes, "and this without murmur, complaint, or unreasonable demands." May we all see the big picture, reflecting in our actions the understanding that comes therefrom.