Chapter IV: A heart beneath a stone.

It's strange, and sort of perfect how Heavenly Father leads you to find answers to your own questioning prayers. Sometimes he leads you to other people who teach you, sometimes he leads you to scripture, and sometimes he leads you to books. The important, sweet part is that he leads. I suppose this week, I'm most grateful for that.

I remember laying on my parents couch one summer night when I was sixteen. I was reading Les Mis until the early hours of the morning. And I remember exactly how I felt when I read this passage and I've never forgot the words. It's my favorite passage from the entire brilliant book.

I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.


It took my breath away.

Years later, with a changed, older heart, another passage left me breathless.

Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.


I've always struggled with leaving behind things sweet and good, including best friends, even when we're meant to move on. I think a familiar thought in my heart has always been how emphatically true it is that we lived before we came here. And that we've been placed exactly where we are meant to be placed.

I've always known it. I've always known that even through adoption, I've been placed among a few who have always been important to me, even before this life. I believe that. I know it in my heart to be true. And it feels eternal when I think about what a small fraction of our existence we're living here now. We know it's the most important fraction, as our decisions here shape it all, but really and truly it's just the beginning.

How sweet it is to think that those few, familiar souls we come to purely love here on earth were sort of made just for us, and that we were (and are) led to each other in this incredible, intricate, and intimately personal plan Heavenly Father has in store for us. No matter how we drift across this vast wide world, it's so not the end. There's such divine perfection in that.

Some have one soulmate. I think I have a few.