Monday, February 15, 2010

Posting a Blog v Writing a Letter

Well.
There have been an unprecedented amount of things on my mind as of late. It's this phase I go through in life over and over again. The phase where my room gets messy and I fall behind in my journal and everything starts to feel a little chaotic.

But life goes on.
And as long as the scriptures get read, there's a temple trip in the near future, and the sacrament gets taken that week, there is peace shielding me from the chaos of this world.

...

I've been thinking a lot about

Faith

lately.. It seems to be a common theme in many of the trials I've been going through these past couple of months. It seems that every time things get hard, it comes back to whether or not my faith is strong enough to dispel my fear. Fear of change, mostly.

...

Luckily, the Lord prepares us for the future, assuming we let Him. If we look for them, He gives us little hints about things that are going to be hard that we need to get ready for. Things that we need to build our faith for.
In Ether 2:25, the Savior says: "Ye cannot cross this great deep save I prepare you against the waves of the sea, and the winds which have gone forth, and the floods which shall come." He will prepare us. There is no other way to safely navigate the waves, winds, and floods in the ocean of earthly life. Only through Him. Jeffrey R. Holland said "He knows the way because He is the way." He also said: "I know of no other way for us to succeed or to be safe amid life's many pitfalls and problems."

...

Example: A couple of weeks ago I realized that my best friend for forever and the rest of my life is going to leaving in less than a year. Granted, he will be turning his life over to the Lord for two years, a more-than-worthy cause, but the plain truth is that he is still leaving. "Best friends" are hard for me to come by, for whatever reason, I've seen many of them come and go. And each time I believed that surely this would be the one to actually stick around. Well he is one of the ones that actually HAS stuck around. For seven years, he's been around. There are times when we're close and times when we're not. Sometimes we didn't talk for months. Other times we talked every day. Sometimes we're more than friends, sometimes we're definitely just friends. But the thing that matters is that he's always been "around." Whether standing in the background, or the center of the brilliant foreground, he's been there. For that reason alone, he means a lot to me. So it hit me pretty hard when I was up late daydreaming about my future one night, and I thought "Hmm.. I might be engaged or even married before Alex gets home from his mission." Actually, it hit me real hard. And then the alternative crossed my mind. If he chose NOT to serve a mission, it would be ten MILLION times worse. That should have made me feel better, right? It didn't. At that point, it felt like a lose-lose situation. I sat down on my bedroom floor and cried out to my Father in Heaven.. "This sucks!"

And then that underlying theme of faith hit me AGAIN. Why am I so AFRAID of him leaving? I know that the Lord is in control and will take care of me. I know The Lord needs him more than I do. I know that the people wherever he's serving need him more than I do. And it's building my faith and testimony of those simple concepts that will make it okay for me to not have him "around." And the Lord has blessed me, by giving me a year's notice. He's given me LOTS of time to prepare so that when the time comes to say goodbye, my faith in His plan will kick my fear of losing a best friend right out to no man's land.

Believe me, I'm a weakling, and I need all the time I can get.

It's not by chance that I thought of the situation now, and not in a year when it actually happens. The Lord knows I need time to build myself up, to prepare. He has always helped me in this way. He knew I would be weak in high school when it comes to dating and boys. So in junior high, He had me thinking about dating standards that I needed to set for myself so that I would be prepared when the time came to face those temptations. Lately He has been preparing me for mommyhood by placing in me an almost fanatic desire that I never dreamed of for myself. This is how He makes weaknesses strong. He knew I would be weak in dating, so He prepared me with words of prophets full of suggestions on how to avoid temptation. And now, I can truly say that my dating standards are one of my biggest strengths.

Also, because I tried to have faith in this simple doctrine, I was blessed immeasurably in ways that I cannot put into words. Without a doubt, I can testify that what Moroni says in Ether 12:6 is TRUE. "Ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith." You must first be faithful, and then you will see blessings without end permeate your life.

[To read more of Jeffrey R. Hollands talk, go to: www.lds.org and search for "Broken Things to Mend" by Jeffrey R. Holland]