Sunday Reflections - Faith.

I sure have been a super bad blogger lately. I haven't really done any kid updates, I still have yet to put together the video footage from Will's 100 mile race, and since he also has no time to blog he said he would be putting his thoughts on the race into an audio journal and I would then transcribe it into a blog for everyone. But have we done that yet? Big fat nope.

Prestonism

I do have something cute to share with you that Preston said today though. I had to leave early this morning to attend a different ward to perform a musical number, and I came down stairs to find Preston playing the piano. He ran over to me and said "My cut my fingernails!". I though, wow, he cut his own fingernails? I looked at Will and he translated, "He said that he needed to cut his fingernails in order to play the piano, so he took your clippers and "cut" his nails and then went and played the piano."

Smart kid. What is even smarter, is it's probably been a good 2 months since I explained to Preston that we need to cut our fingernails before we play the piano. He has got an amazing memory. Sometimes it scares me - haha. And it also goes to show how much children really watch what their parents do - because I keep 2 pairs of clippers in my piano bench. He sees me clipping my nails sometimes before I practice the piano. Very keen that boy is!

Faith

Like I said, I attended a different ward today. My dad is the stake president and I was asked to perform a special musical number at this other ward's ward conference where he was speaking at.

Now I have heard my dad give a bajillion talks before, and they have all been fabulous. But I think this one today was meant especially just for me.

I don't know if I'm allowed to say anything about this just yet, but what the hay, I'm going to anyway. Some of you may know that we've been renting a home for the past 7 months that has been for sale. We are friends with the owners and it sort of worked out for both of our situations that we would rent the house while they would try to sell it. At the time of this agreement, Will was still looking for a job and so our future was very much up in the air.

Well, and then Will did find a job about a month ago, and he's been working at said job diligently every day for about 14 hours a day. Okay so part of that time is him commuting. He actually commutes between 4-5 hours a day. He carpools part of the way, and he takes the commuter bus part of the way. It's very time consuming. We hardly see him.

Well as the owners just recently lowered the price of their home that we've been renting, we knew it was a possibility that the home would sell. I just had no idea that it would sell so quickly. The past 2 weeks has been full of appointments with realtors coming to show the home almost every other day. It's been a huge stress on me because every time there is an appointment, I have to go over the house with a fine toothed comb and make sure it is spotless for the showing. With my two little tornadoes, it's a very very large task, let me tell ya.

So I just had a couple of weeks where I felt like all I did was clean. Every day. And then it seemed that the house would get messed up again within a few hours after the showing, so the next time someone called to come see the home I would have to do it all over again. I was really getting tired of the home invasion and just wishing that this would all be overwith soon.

Well I got my wish, because a few days ago someone put an offer on the house and the owners accepted it. And things went from "we might be here for several more months" to "we need to be out of here by Aug 31st".

And then it was like all the stress I was experiencing from not getting to do anything else in my life except for clean (or so it felt like), shifted to realizing that now we were going to have to find somewhere to move to really quickly, our budget for the new place (because we'll be moving to an area that is more expensive) won't get us what we currently have and so I'll need to lower my expectations when looking, and also realizing that we will have to pack up and move again rather quickly....again I just felt the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I realized, wow, maybe I'm just not ready for all this quite yet! As I browsed around on Craigslist last night, I got even more stressed as I realized that there really wasn't a whole lot available. My mind started to wonder if we were actually even going to be able to find something adequate in this short amount of time.

This totally has a lot to do with my personality because I'm a total planner. I prefer to have things planned out way ahead of schedule and everything really organized. And then I get a fixed expectation in my head of what is going on. Will, on the other hand, is a very last-minute guy. He doesn't ever really stress about things, and is totally fine living spontaneously and knows things will always work out. It's probably one of the reasons why I need him in my life to sort of balance out my crazy planner-side in me.

Well today, as my dad gave his talk, my ears kept perking up as he would tell the stories he had prepared and it just seemed like story after story, idea after idea, lesson after lesson - he must have written that talk just for me!

Stories on Faith

The first story he told, was actually given in General Conference by one of the Sisters in the general president of either the primary or RS, I can't remember. She told about her little 5 year old grandson, who had a type of cancer. And he needed to have a type of radiation treatment done and they normal sedate people during the radiation because you have to lie perfectly still. He didn't want to be sedated and assured the doctors that as long as he could hear his Dad's voice talking to him during the procedure, he would be able to lie perfectly still.

So he, just being a little 5 yr old boy, laid on his hospital table while they did the radiation treatment and over the intercom, he would hear his Dad's voice talking to him. He would tell him "Liam, I know that you can't see me but I'm here and everything is going to be all right." And amazingly, little Liam made it through 30 rounds of radiation treatments over a period of time, each time listening to his Dad's voice. The doctors were completely astounded that a little boy of this young of an age could do that.

It's very much like our Heavenly Father, even though we can't see Him, he is always there for us in our times of trial. And He knows that everything will be all right.

Another story my dad relayed, was about President Hinckley (it was Hinkley right?) when he used to work on the railroads. He would see these train engineers managing these huge steam engines all through the night and wondered how they could accomplish this - how could you do this hour after hour on these long trips. And then he realized it was through small incremeents of short trips. All through the dark night, the light on the front of the train would shine just enough to light the tracks about 500 feet ahead. That was all the train engineer could see - was 500 feet ahead. And once he reached that much of the track, he would see another 500 feet.

And it is like us in our lives, all we need to do is have enough faith to make it far enough to where we can see. We might not know what lies ahead for us, but we can make it far enough as it is lit on the tracks, and then the Lord lights up some more of the track. We are never truly left in the dark.

My dad also mentioned that we can CHOOSE faith. Why not choose faith? Why live in doubt and worry, when we can choose to have faith?

I know that we can't see where we will find a place to live, or what will happen. Sure it is going to be stressful, but I can choose to have faith that the Lord is going to lead us to where we need to be and that there will be blessings at the end of this. I shouldn't waste so much time worrying over things and just know that this is just a small phase, and we're onto the next and things will only go up from here.

I'm going to try to practice this in other areas of my life too. I need to learn to let things go more often and have faith in the Lord, and in people too. Sometimes I think I put too much on myself and I need to have faith that other people will pull through as well.

I'm grateful for little lessons like these and for the angels on earth that deliver them to us. My angel today just happened to be my Dad. I love you, Dad! Thank you for your talk today.