I was going through a missionary journal today to find information on someone's baptism. My wife picked up the journal and found this poem I wrote while serving a mission in the Ukraine in April 1993. I was 19 at the time. The Final Tear Long ago, I dreamed a dream I thought I knew it all - it seemed. The road had been too hard, too long. And why my pains should I prolong? "I'll leave this path of pain and fear, and I will shed my final tear!" The laws, the labor too much to bear I left my friends, my home, and cares. To travel down a different path where life was good and I could laugh - No rules or laws to bind me down, And I rejoiced in what I'd "found". Time passed and life, it spiraled on With evenings' end and each new dawn. But somehow midst the breaking day, I found that on my cheek there lay A tear for days gone by, long past; The joys that I once knew now ash. That floats upon the lofty breeze Blown too and...
