Changes.

One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately has been the importance of changes.  No, I am not talking about the classic song by Tupac Shakur which I happen to know all of the words to and can't help but sing every time I hear it, but rather actual changes that occur in our life and the reasons behind them.  Over the past few months I feel like I have had a lot of opportunities to make changes in my life which have helped me become a better person and continue to develop the character which will define me for the rest of my life.  

What I find particularly interesting in thinking back now on the changes that I have made and the reasons behind them is how a lot of what has happened has been because of things that I never would have wanted to happen had I been able to choose for myself.  I have become ever more aware of the importance of trials in the Lord's plan for each of us in learning and testing us to see if we will turn to him or from him when things get tough.  Learning to trust in the Lord and accept that you need to become what he would have you become is a subtle shift in mindset that has helped me greatly over the past few months.  It is not that I didn't trust in the Lord before or at least tried to.  However, learning to trust in him more and in turn become more worthy of his trust in return is one of the greatest lessons I think I have learned from my trials of not only the past few months but over the course of the last year.  It is interesting to me the different catalysts that spur change in our life.  I don't know if it is just that I never have responded to the challenges in my life in the same way that I have recently, or if it has been the specific challenges that have helped me make the changes that I have made and continue to make.  It seems to me that it would be a combination of the two.  I can't ever remember a time in my life where I have had to make such conscious decisions to stay on the right path and not let frustration, lack of faith, and doubt cloud my way.  Despite the challenges that I have felt recently, I have also seen that there are blessings that can come from the hard times.  

Blessings from trials come in many different ways and forms.  Personally, I feel like I have had more spiritual growth over the past few months than I have had in a good while before.  My relationship with the Lord has strengthened due to my need to rely more on him and his answers to try and understand what I should be learning from these situations.  I have also been motivated to change myself for the better by working harder in all aspects of my life.  Patience is also another one of the things that I continue to work on throughout my every day life, it also an area where I definitely still have room to improve.  All in all I feel greatly blessed to have been given the chance to learn and grow from my experiences and for the faith that the Lord has helped me have to make it through.  Changes happen for a lot of reasons and I think it is important to look for how we can respond to them with faith and a willingness to do what the Lord would have us do.  I know that only by responding to the difficult circumstances we face in our lives with humility will we be able to become what the Lord would have us become and qualify for the blessings that he has in store for us.  I continue to look forward to all of those blessings with hope. 11-28-10

Turkey Bowl.

One of the most cherished Thanksgiving traditions every year is the annual ward "Turkey Bowl".  A yearly church classic, Thanksgiving morning would not be complete without this early morning grudge match between the out of shape old men in the ward vs. the inexperienced awkwardness of the young men.  Sprinkle in a few missionaries and some of those girls that always seem to be better than most of the men on the field (though they still rarely get thrown to) and you have the recipe for a perfectly seasoned festive treat!  Of course another part of this great Thanksgiving tradition is for there to be cold and nasty weather for the game, regardless of how nice the weather is leading up to game day.  For instance, this year it was beautiful weather all week leading up to our annual Thursday morning clash with sunny weather in the mid 70's.  It was even very nice when I went to bed on Wednesday night before the game.  However while I was asleep the alleged "blizzard" that hit my friends and family up in Utah on Tuesday afternoon must have made its way to the park where we were holding our football game, because it was COLD.  Of course this only helped add to the experience and was one of the many observations I had throughout the game.  Here are a few others:

Getting the game started takes WAY longer than it needs to - This is ALWAYS the case at most any church sporting event, but is particularly true for the Turkey Bowl.  By the time you can get enough people to stop throwing the football, tying up their cleats, doing pregame warm-up stretches, etc. to listen and figure out how to divide the teams, you then have to choose field dimensions, put on your flags, decide how the game will be played (2 completions for a first down, 4 downs to score, etc.), it is generally at least a solid 30 - 45 minutes after when you planned on starting the game before you actually begin playing.  

You need to be friends with the Quarterback - If your goal in coming to play football on Thanksgiving morning is simply to get some light exercise in for the day before you stuff your face, then it doesn't really matter if you even know anyone else out on the field.  Both teams will be happy to let you run up and down the field to your hearts content, as long as you have NO expectation of ever really taking part in the offense or having a chance to see the ball.  However, if you have ANY aspirations whatsoever in actually getting to touch the ball for the few hours you will be out there in the cold playing football, you need to make friends with the quarterback as fast as possible.  This isn't the type of game where the QB will have time to look for multiple different receivers and see the inevitable 3 or 4 people that are wide open throughout the game.  Instead, this is the type of the game where the quarterback throws to his buddies all game long.  Even if they can't catch the ball and you can, don't expect to see the ball thrown your way unless you happen to run a route near one of the QB's friends on the team and it is a bad pass.  (Also, if by some miracle the quarterback DOES decide to throw you the ball, you had better make sure that you catch it no matter how terrible the pass is.  If you miss one they intended to throw to you, they now feel justified in never looking your way again.)  

No matter what you start off playing, the game almost always devolves into tackle - While most wards will start off with good intentions by playing flag or two hand touch, with the low quality of athlete that generally attends these games body control is not something that is very abundant.  So you have large out of shape men running at full speed (albeit still very slowly) into each other to try to pull a flag or two hand touch someone?  Essentially what you have is the perfect storm for someone to eventually get knocked down pretty roughly, which then escalates into more and more rough play by each side.  Eventually everyone decides to ditch the flags or two hand rule because they are not working anyway and a game of tackle football ensues.  To go along with this tackle football phenomenon is the fact that most Turkey Bowl games I have attended are generally about 13 on 13 with only 1 quarterback and 12 receivers running crossing routes which in and of itself leads to collisions all over the field.  What I am waiting to hear about is the first Turkey Bowl related death.  It will not surprise me when it happens, and while it will be tragic at least we can take solace in knowing they were killed in some sort of church related activity.  That should count for some blessings up in heaven right?  

While there are many more interesting observations that can be taken from this classic Thanksgiving tradition, I feel as if the above does it plenty of justice.  Besides, one of the critiques I have gotten on some of my posts to this point is that I tend to ramble on and the posts can become long.  I promised that I would work on that and will thus cut my thoughts off here.  Happy Thanksgiving!!!  11-25-10

Gratitude.

As I struggled sorting through the random assortment of thoughts I had on what I could write about next, the spirit of the season seemed to be an appropriate topic.  We had some great talks today in church on the topic of gratitude and it really helped me to reflect on my own personal state of gratitude, and how I can more consistently remember to be grateful for all of the blessings that I have been given.

I looked up the word 'gratitude' in the dictionary so that I could get a basic understanding of how it is defined by the world:

grat·i·tude

 /ˈgrætɪˌtud, -ˌtyud/ Show Spelled[grat-i-tood, -tyood]

–noun

the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful: He expressed his gratitude to everyone on the staff.

So gratitude is the quality of being grateful or thankful.  While I feel that is a quality that I possess on a fairly frequent basis, it is something that I know that I could much better at.  Mostly I think that I need to be better at really thinking about the things that I am grateful for and keeping them in the forefront of my mind.  It is often very easy for me to instead focus on things that I don't have and feel like I should, which leads to feelings of ingratitude and resentment.  Neither of those feelings lead to anything good at all, whereas gratitude leads us to happiness, peace, and contentment with the world around us and our place in it.  The obvious choice in this situation is to thus be grateful and show gratitude for what we have in order to be happy and enjoy our short existence here on earth.  Why is it then so hard (at least for me) to maintain this "attitude of gratitude" in order to have sustained happiness?  (I don't really like the phrase "attitude of gratitude" but I couldn't think of anything else to put in that spot.  The phrase just seems lame to me which is really my only basis for not liking it, and may be a contributing factor to my having a hard time maintaining gratefulness.)

I am not entirely sure why continuing in gratitude seems so difficult to me, but I think it tends to be a state of mind more than anything else.  In fact, when I think of the times that I am the most grateful in my life it comes down to basically two different scenarios which encompass the vast majority of the gratitude that I display.  My gratitude is as I stated earlier either a product of: 1. a grateful mindset that I come about by keeping my blessings in perspective and trusting in the Lord, or 2. from my being compelled to have gratitude for the things I have in my life when some of the blessings I normally enjoy are taken away from me.  (See my 'sick.' post from before for more on this scenario.)  The trick I think is how do we avoid the second scenario as much as we can by focusing on being better at the first scenario?  This seems to be one of the great challenges of life, at least for me.  Maintaining an upbeat and bubbly personality is not necessarily what I am known for, and for some reason I enjoy commiserating with people about different situations in life.  However, I need to remember that although this life will give EVERYONE ample opportunities to complain about something, we need to be happy with our lot and enjoy the moments we live in.  Something that could be considered unfortunate or unpleasant will happen every day, but being grateful for and searching out opportunities to give thanks and show gratitude for what we have on a day to day basis is how we can make it through.  I plan on working on this over the next little while and hope to make some progress to becoming more like the ever grateful people that I admire very much.  Should be a fun time, and I am GRATEFUL for the opportunity!  11-21-10

Sick.

Of all of the many blessings that I have in my life, I think that the blessing of health has to be one of the easiest to overlook.  It is not really something that you notice until it is gone, (hopefully only temporarily) and it is VERY easy to forget how miserable being sick is.   So I decided to write this post about being sick because it is something that I experienced for the first time in a while this morning while I was at church.  There were a lot of thoughts that came to me on sickness while I repeatedly got up through the first few hours of church to get some fresh air.  Most of them revolved around how miserable being violently sick on an empty stomach with a headache during sacrament meeting at 8:30 in the morning was, but there were a few other thoughts that are worth sharing as well.  I will share those thoughts below:

1.  Throwing up sucks -  especially when you are sick enough that you are doing it multiple times in a relatively short period of time.  There is just nothing quite as humbling as kneeling next to a toilet bowl just waiting for the next stomach convulsion to hopefully bring the relief you are looking for.  Throwing up also seems to be one of those things that I feel like you want to do in private.  Waiting for everyone currently in the restroom to leave while you try to hold your embarrassment off for a few more seconds is definitely not fun either.  I am not sure right now whether it is worse to get sick on a full stomach or an empty one, but I think they are both pretty terrible for different reasons.  Not something I will go into on here, but I think it suffices to simply say they both are very bad. 

2.  Sleep is necessary - if you want to avoid the pitfalls outlined above about being sick.  I have never been very good at getting enough sleep.  Lack of sleep however has never really been something that had a noticeable negative affect on me.  What I have noticed though is that there seems to be a fundamental change to the amount of sleep your body needs once you graduate from college and move on to your career.  When I was in school late nights either out with my friends, or up doing homework were the norm.  I had no problem going to bed late, getting up early, making it to class and feeling just fine.  Since I graduated from school and started a job though, I can barely function if I don't get 7+ hours of sleep.  I believe this was a determining factor in why I got sick today at church.  I woke up today after about 5 or 6 hours of sleep to make my 7:30am meetings and I had a headache.  That coupled with the lack of time to get myself anything to eat contributed to the first time I have really felt sick in a significant period of time.  I don't know how I am going to do another year of church at 8:30 in the morning, but that is a topic for another post. 

3.  Moms have magical healing powers - even when they don't do anything at all.  I arrived at my parents house from church early since I was feeling sick.  My mother was in the process of getting ready for church and was surprised to see that I was there.  I explained to her that I was sick and she talked to me for a few minutes about it and told me I needed to go lay down and take a nap.  She made sure that I had taken some medicine for my headache and instructed me to get some sleep.  That was it.  Nothing crazy or miraculous, no special recipes or remedies, but I felt better.  I think just talking to a mom about feeling sick helps in the healing process.  Which brings me to my next discovery about sickness today. 

4.  Being sick by yourself would be terrible - because you need someone to commiserate with you about the sickness to begin the healing process I believe.  I know that there is probably no medical evidence behind that crazy assertion, but I just can't imagine how much it would stink to be sick by yourself and not have anyone to talk to about it.  When you are at home you hopefully have a parent (preferably a Mom) to talk to, at school your roommates will have to make do, once you are married you have a spouse that will help take care of you.  I am a firm believer after today that being sick and not having anyone who cares at all would make any sickness much more difficult to overcome.  Maybe that is why they always seem to want to get a hold of family members of people in hospitals to come visit or make aware of the situation.  Probably not the only reason for that, but maybe at least part of the reason. 

There are actually a few more discoveries I made about being sick today, but I feel like this is a good enough start for now.  Perhaps next time I get sick I can touch on those other areas and any new ones I realize.  Hopefully that won't be for a long time, because even though I was only sick for a little bit today it is not something I want to be repeating any time soon.  I will mention that I am going to strive to be a bit more aware and grateful for the health that I do have every day from now on.  I can't imagine what having a perpetual sickness would be like, but I feel for those that have to struggle with that.  My experience was nothing compared to what they have to deal with I am sure, but it served as a gentle reminder to me about the importance of taking care of my body and being grateful for the wonderful gift it is.  11-14-10

Welcome.

I don't really know what possessed me to start a blog.  I have never really thought that I had anything of consequent significance to say for anyone to have access to it in written form.  Generally my thoughts are my own and I share them with those I feel appreciate them or whose opinions I value.  Honestly I don't really know where I am going to go with this blog or what I am going to write about, but hopefully it will help the few who decide to read it get to know me better or stay caught up on my life.  There have been a lot of things I have thought about writing down lately and this should give me a good place to do that.  Looking forward to getting this started and hope that you enjoy the posts!  Happy Veterans Day!!!  11-11-2010