Our Relationship with our Father

Feb. 25^th, 2017

When I try to think of all the gospel-centered lessons I learned this week, there are almost too many to count. I definitely did not expect some of these things to occur, but overall, heavenly Father is always working to answer our prayers when we seek out the answers!

It kind of all started in Relief Society this past Sunday. I had made a comment about prayers and our relationship with Heavenly Father, and my visiting teacher decided to counter comment on that by saying that she was impressed with the way I prayed – like I was talking to Heavenly Father as a real person, and we were just having a conversation together. I was fascinated by this outlook, because I hadn’t really known that I prayed in a slightly different manner than most people, and I realized that I was super comfortable with Heavenly Father. This came to mean a lot the following day – I had to know my standing with God and how I felt about my own self-worth as I spoke to a friend in need about some of my coping mechanisms here on earth in a fallen state. And they all work because of my relationship with Heavenly Father. So this lead me to wonder…

…what should our relationship with Heavenly Father look like?

What a perfect time to wonder, as we skimmed over good King Benjamin’s words at the beginning of Mosiah in Book of Mormon this week. He does this cute thing where he tells the people that they are less than the dust of the earth in comparison to God, and that we’re nothing. He’s everything. My self-esteem as a child of God was called into question for a second, but this is where another lovely viewpoint of Benjamin comes into play, in Mosiah 4 – the knowledge of God’s goodness is what truly should make us feel like nothing and be happy about it. We need to “believe in Him and that He is” in order to truly start to align our plan with His. That seems really backwards to me, but it says that the people were so happy and pleased by his mercy. It’s making me wonder what other aspects of my relationship with God need to be developed. While I think it’s definitely a good thing to feel like Heavenly Father is truly my father that I can tell anything to, there’s something else that I learned I want to develop: a sense of awe and reverence; a reality of what God truly has done for me. This reminds me of something that I had almost completely forgotten about – on my mission, I had the chance to hear a Muslim pray, and I was blown away by the amount of awe and respect that this man had for God, while still talking to him like a person. There was a type of humility and understanding there that I just don’t quite possess yet. I want to treat Heavenly Father the way he deserves to be treated, and along the way, I’ll develop a stronger understanding of who and what He is. I hope that I can begin to apply what I have learned here, because as Benjamin begins his close, he says that if we believe these things, “see that ye do them.”

How Great Is our God?

Feb. 18^th, 2017

How great is our Heavenly Father?!

This week, so many miracles have occurred, and almost all of them have ties back to a times that I thought were slightly disastrous and frustrated my life. Little things pop into my head that I attribute to the spirit, and to me, the fact that heavenly Father cares about each of us so individually touches my heart. I just love him.

This week, I listened to a talk that meant a lot to me at the time it was given – President Henry B. Eyring’s talk, “Where two or three are gathered,” is from the April 2016 General Conference (give it a read or a listen-to!). It’s almost been a year since I was at that point in life, and looking at the things that lead me there, this talk was a turning point. I was curious to see just how exactly it had lead me to where I am now.

I realize that might not make a lot of sense, but It’s time to be very real here: I was in a very dark place almost a year ago, battling what felt like a losing battle with mental illness while on my mission. It lead to some major faith crises where I just felt like nothing and felt nothing. This talk led me to sob – Heavenly Father was everywhere, and while I was stuck doing what I could to draw nearer to him, I wasn’t feeling anything. I was my own worst enemy, attacking faith at every chance, while I was trying to preach to those around me the goodness of God! It was hard, but obviously a change needed to happen: and boy, did change come. I still struggled a lot with Heavenly Father, but at least I wasn’t completely abandoned as I strived to see the answers given to me. It’s still been a little difficult to find those answers, as I still work on recovering, but I couldn’t be more grateful for the ways I have changed and learned to recognize Heavenly Father’s hand in my life.

That leads me to fast forward to this point in life. On a seemingly unrelated note, I focused on the way that I prayed with Heavenly Father. I felt that my relationship wasn’t quite as strong as it should be, so I needed to step it up. I often lament that the medication I’m taking doesn’t allow me to feel things like the spirit, so I took a chance and followed the counsel of an apostle – I let my guard down a bit and gave Heavenly Father what I had through prayer. I just want to testify that He never abandons us, we just have to seek for Him. He and the Savior live, and they are doing all they can to ensure that we keep our ears pealed and our hearts open for the whisperings of the spirit. He will help us realize so much more about ourselves and about why the trials we go through help us grow. I’m only just starting to learn a few of those answers from what happened almost a year ago, but when we make the worship of Heavenly Father a central point in our lives, he takes what we have and runs with it.

So yes, He is very great indeed.

Link to Pres. Eyring's talk - https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2016/04/where-two-or-three-are-gathered?lang=eng

A Different Kind of Beautiful

Feb. 11, 2017

This week we had the lovely opportunity to study Isaiah. Honestly, my philosophy on Isaiah in the past was similar to what the late president Packer described the experience being like – to paraphrase, he says that just as you settle into the narrative of the Book of Mormon, you get to the writings of Isaiah, and honest to goodness, they’re boring and difficult to get through. And then he pleads us to keep moving on, hopefully gleaning occasional inspiration. Or, if you can only look at the words, just keep moving. I always felt comforted that an apostle of the Lord told me this, so I could just kind of…looked at the words. As was suggested. Because Isaiah was hard. Although, I did learn some pretty cool things about Isaiah this week in class though, which made him a lot more enjoyable to read. He was a Hebrew poet, and the conventions of his writing style makes it, well, make more sense. Honestly, you only really have to understand half of what’s happening because Hebrew poets are notorious for repeating analogies so that you get a better idea of it. That’s cool stuff right there.

However, I am not here to tell you about all the things I learned from Isaiah. To be frank, it’ll take a lot more than a few class periods to really gain a greater understanding of what the heck he’s saying. So, contrary to how I may have led you on, I had another interesting experience this week that somehow made another part of the gospel a reality for me.

As an art major, you have to experiment with a lot of different kinds of media, even if you have your own specialty. This semester, I’m fortunate enough to be in a 3D art class with a heavy emphasis on modern art (both of which I just don’t enjoy. At all). The crowning event of it all was having to fire a ceramic piece in the kiln – the odd geometric shapes I’d made had been glazed with a paint that somehow needed to be pulled out of the white-hot kiln and tossed into a barrel of flammable materials so that it would cool down in a manner where it wouldn’t explode. To some, that sounds fun, I’m sure, but this girl doesn’t need any more adult play-doh in her life for awhile. However, upon actually seeing the finished product, it turned into something kind of beautiful. While not my favorite thing, there was a certain beauty to it. In life, we aren’t always going to do the things we want or like to do. But sometimes those things serve a greater purpose – and to me this week, the greater purpose was appreciating a different kind of beauty. With both Isaiah and 3D art, I have my own personal struggles. That doesn’t mean that they are things that I should immediately discount. There’s layers to everything that will help us to understand how beautiful every individual truly is. And that’s part of our life here on earth – we grow and learn and understand people so that we can be more like the Savior, and it’s going to be a lifelong process!