Butterfly Wings

For those of you who know me well, you know that last semester was difficult for me. When I stopped writing last semester, a girl had just committed suicide on BYU campus, and this greatly upset me. I have struggled with anxiety for a while, and I related to her too well. The last month or two have been ones of healing, and I have learned to see God's hand in my life more than ever before. I become a temple worker on Saturday afternoons, and started volunteering at a hospital. I learned to simplify, and how to just hang on when I having bad days. I prayed intensely, and have seen many miracles. As I was reading John 1 this morning, I realized that, like John, I also have something important to share. I have a personal witness of Christ. A testimony hard won through experience. I know that Christ is my Redeemer! As a consequence of being a constant worrier, I don't have very much that I am always certain of. Growing up, I had every question in the book about the gospel. I had ...

In my German class we have been learning about romanticism and the sublime. In romanticism, sublime means something that is beautiful, but terrifying and mysterious at the same time. It is the feeling you get when you are standing on a cliff peering over the edge. I feel like this is much the way life is sometimes. There is something sublime in the trials we go through, and something beautiful in the pain of a fallen world. This week I have come to understand and love the sublime as I have struggled. Most of you probably already know the specifics of the difficulties I have had this past week, and I don't want to belabor the point. I just know that I have begun to learn not to ask God why somethings is happening, but rather "How can I learn wisdom from this?" and "How do I accomplish the things that thou hast commanded me to do?" There are a lot of troubles going around in the world, and these are my trials and temptations to bear. God will help me, but He i...

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,...

The adjustment back to school has not been easy. I love most of my classes, but leaving my family and social support group for the third time this year has been difficult. It is easy to feel lost and overlooked in such a big school, especially because I am not in a major yet. I miss my family and my mission. I was beginning to feel like no one cared about me or anyone else who was struggling, but there was a lot this week that contradicted that fear. Last Sunday, Karina convinced me to go to ward prayer even though I was nervous about it. I was just standing there awkwardly, until I overheard two people next to me talking about Dungeons and Dragons. I joined in on the conversation, and ended up having a super long conversation with them. I made some new friends just because of where I was standing when I went to ward prayer. On Friday, I was leaving my German class, and I wasn't feeling the best. I was really worried about the next paper that was due on Monday, and I wante...

This week I have been focusing on trying to build relationships. I don't have a lot of close friends right now, and so I am trying to cultivate old relationships and build new ones. One thing I have realized as I have done this is that relationships require a lot of forgiveness on both sides. As imperfect people we hurt each other with varying degrees of severity every day. It is impossible to avoid, and the closer and more vulnerable we are with the person, the more we can hurt them and be hurt. As I was thinking about this, I realized that forgiveness is simply accepting the complexity of a human being. Forgiveness is the process of realizing that people are more than what they did to us, and giving them a chance to be better. This doesn't necessarily mean letting them back into our lives, though. It could simply mean not talking bad about them to a bunch of people, and letting go of the desire to get back at them.  It is allowing them to be imperfect just like we all need ...