Butterfly Wings

This week I went to a stress evaluation center at BYU called the Biofeedback lab. There they hook you up to whole bunch of monitors and measure your stress response in your heart rate, breathing, hand temperature, and muscle tension. Then they teach you to control that response through breathing, and other methods. I was practicing my breathing with a pacer, where you have to breathe along with a moving dot. I was actually getting a bit stressed about doing it right, and worried that I wasn't going to be ready to breathe out or in when the dot told me to. As I was worrying, I suddenly realized that I was being ridiculous. Sure, if I didn't breathe in when I needed to it was going to hurt, and if I didn't breathe out when I needed to, it was going to hurt, but I couldn't breathe in when I was breathing out, or out when I was breathing in. I physically could not do both at the same time, so there was not point in worrying about the next step until it was time to do it. ...

Trouble never ends. As humans we think that we can end problems just by fixing our current problems and then everything will be better. If we are single, we think that our life will be perfect if we were married. If we are busy, we think life would be better if we only had more time. But the problem is that just as soon as one problem leaves, a new one takes its place. We finish one homework assignment, another is waiting for us to do.  However, God wants it to be that way. We could not learn if that were not the case. This life is short, and there is a lot to learn. I learned this week how important it is to be meekly accept the difficulties in life, and embrace the messiness, because this is beauty in difficulties and trials that we will miss if we are always waiting for them to be over. Instead of constantly being discontented because life is not the way I wanted it to be, I want to embrace its craziness and dance in the storm. Each difficult and beautiful moment is to be...

One anxiety that has been difficult for me to kick has been about failure, specifically when it comes to schoolwork. I was homeschooled as a child, and so I never received grades until I got to college. It was a bit of an adjustment, but it wasn't too bad. The hard part was that I love my professors, and with some of my favorite professors I develop friendships. I then see my grades as a way of showing them I love their class, and that I appreciate them as teachers. It becomes difficult for me then, when I do poorly, or not as good as I would like to, because I feel like I have failed them. This translates into me thinking that when I have bad grades it means that I am a bad person. This past week was a experience to learning that what bad grades actually are is an opportunity to learn what I need to do better. If I don't fail, I don't learn. This week I got a paper back in my German class, one of my favorite classes, with a less than perfect grade. The grade was not bad,...