Sunday, February 3, 2019

You can be the miracle when you follow God's path for you.


I was recently asked to speak to my Alma mater; The BYU Ballroom Company, during an annual devotional they hold for their teams.  It was an honor to be asked to speak.  I prayed a lot about what would be the best message I could give.  I felt the spirit speak to me about how important it is to follow God’s individual path for us no matter how difficult.  And if we keep at it, then God can make our weaknesses into strengths and our fear into faith. This message became important to me since I felt the spirit gave it to me specifically.  I actually fell in love with the message so I wanted to share it.  Here it is:

When I think about college students, young adults and people in general I think about the many demands being placed on all of us.  When I was a BYU student; dancing, teaching, and competing on the BYU Ballroom Company and working to put myself through school, I felt busy and stressed most of the time.  The demands were huge.  But I look back on those days with fondness because it seems like life’s demands are continual and ever increasing. 

I know some of the demands of life we place on ourselves and some are placed on us and as those expectations grow we can feel like we don’t have enough resources to meet the demands.  We can even feel that what our Heavenly Father asks of us, like prayer, scripture reading, church attendance, etc. is a demand; just one more thing we have to do, when actually the things He asks of us are resources, and the key is understanding how to make them be the resources they are.

Elder Anderson spoke at an MTC devotional a few months ago and talked about the physical side of doing things vs. the spiritual side. He basically said, ‘We go to church, we read our scriptures, we pay our tithing, we kneel and pray, and we take the sacrament.  Those are the physical things we do.  But there is a spiritual element to these things that we can be oblivious to as we go through the motions of checking off our list of “to do’s”.  The spiritual side means instead of just going to church, we actually worship the Lord and want to show our love for Him by attending church.  We don’t just kneel and pray, but we speak, listen and give attention to the spirit’s voice and receive spiritual answers and knowledge as we pray. When we read our scriptures we pay attention, ask questions and seek for understanding.   We feel trust and happiness as we pay our tithing.  We don’t just take the sacrament, but we repent, re-set, express devotion to our savior, and receive His grace.’

If we don’t get past the physical side of doing things, we will continually see all the things the Lord asks us to do, as a burden; a demand.  We will continue to go through the physical motions and never get to the spiritual knowledge of what the Lord really wants us to feel, know and do.  What He asks of us is a resource, to enlarge and strengthen us.  Spiritual knowledge saves us and increases our abilities, but we have to do the spiritual work we sometimes unconsciously think of as physical demand; things we have to, “check off” so that we can please the Lord.  Getting to the spiritual element of the things we do fills and strengthens, enlightens and uplifts, but it requires more spiritual effort on our part.

I developed a relationship at an early age with my Heavenly Father.  I didn’t come from a great home life and so I often found myself on my knees seeking for comfort and understanding from deity.  I learned to listen to His voice, love Him and want to please Him as He became my peace; my home.  Right from the beginning of my life I didn’t ever just kneel and say words.  I needed Him and I found Him through prayer.

It was a great blessing to me to have a need created so young that I sought after God early.  But one of the side effects of this home life was fear.  I had a tremendous amount of fear as I grew up.  My Bio, list’s things that I have done that sound impressive but the reality was, was that I was so fearful pretty much all of the time. 

One thing that terrified me to the, “I’m out of my mind point,” was speaking.  I had social skills, I could be friendly and nice but I couldn’t speak about anything that was important to me.  When I was at girls camp and all the girls were bearing their testimonies, I never did, it was terrifying to me!  When I came to BYU and sat in testimony meeting, it was like God was trying to force me to speak; just pouring the spirit down on me.  I would feel the spirit so strongly I would shake and my heart would pound and my hands would sweat but I couldn’t do it.  I was so terrified.  Once when the tour team was on tour in China we had a long bus ride and Lee wanted to have a testimony meeting.  It’s the only time we ever did anything like that and I got so brave, I stood up and tried to speak.  Everything I said sounded awful, I balled and snot was running down my face.  I was so humiliated.  I swore I would never try to bear my testimony again.

But the real story actually starts when I was 17.  That was when I received my patriarchal blessing.  When I heard my blessing and later read it, I thought it was the wrong blessing.  I literally felt it was wrong, I could never be or do all the things it said, because I was opposite of almost everything it said.  One of those things was, “You will never want for words as you bear testimony of Jesus Christ.”  And then it said some other things I would be able to do because of that.

Absolutely never going to happen.  No way could I ever be that.

But God has a sense of humor and since pouring the spirit out on me wouldn’t make me speak, I started being called to serve as a relief society teacher in every student ward I moved too.  I knew whenever I moved to a new student ward I would be called to serve as a relief society teacher and I was.  When I got married, I thought I would never be a relief society teacher again, nope, called to be a relief society teacher.  Finally bought our first house and moved, called to be a relief society teacher.  I was a relief society teacher in 5 wards before I was ever called to do anything else, and then it was a constant rotation of primary teacher and young woman adviser after that.

Because of my relationship with my Heavenly Father I had a strong desire to do God’s will and fulfill my callings well, so I kept working at opening my mouth and he kept giving me those opportunities.  Haha, but I did find my voice and I overcame my fear of speaking eventually, thank goodness.  I realized God could help me be more than I was.

As I listened to the spirit and let it guide me, it lead me to making some hard decisions that changed the course of my life.

Dancing, choreographing, being a soloist, and teaching at BYU, was a dream and I felt so happy doing all of those things.  I had more dreams.  After graduating, I wanted to teach H.S. for a few years, go back and get my master’s and teach at a university.   This burned inside of me.  It was such a part of me.  Looking back I realize I got a lot of my self-esteem for accomplishing things and “looking good” according to the world’s eyes.  I think it’s especially easy to do that when you’re a dancer.  It’s all about looking good, getting a good part, being seen.   (In this day and age, it’s also very easy to live in that place of getting value from the world because of social media and how fast we can view and judge everyone’s lives, and our own lives in comparison.)  I didn’t know better or different, of how to get value, but God wanted me to be better than I was and lead me on the painful path down that road.

I was teaching H.S. when I had my first baby and I felt the whispering's of the spirit tell me to stay home and raise my children.  I was in a dilemma.  I knew God, I loved Him, I was always trying to listen and obey, I repented quickly when I did the wrong thing.  But I really wanted, to my very DNA, to dance, teach and choreograph on a University level.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done, I chose the Lord, quit my job and stayed home.  I pretty much hated it.  It was a refiner’s fire for me.  It took me about 10 years before I liked it and about 15 years for the Lord to change me enough to where I would choose it myself if He said I could do whatever I wanted.   But when the 15 years was done I knew there was nothing better that I could do with my life than raise my children well, and that mothering was the most valiant and valuable profession I could ever aspire too.

But God wasn’t done with me yet, there was more.   I was putting all my energies into serving in the church and serving my family. But secretly in my deep sub-conscious, I was still trying to get value from the world and hoped I could have some leadership calling in the church, or something.  But no, I was a teacher endlessly.  After 7 years in our first home, we built and moved into our dream home.  I was a primary teacher for 9 years out of the first 12 years we lived there.  I kind of became mad at God, at that point.  I remember crying, “Can’t I do anything else, can’t I ever be a leader or in charge of something:  Can’t I ever have something important to do?”  God told me, “No!”  I felt his words express, “You have to learn where your value comes from, and it’s not from any visual thing you do or accomplish.”

That led me to not just fine tuning in my life, but major dial changing.  I had to find out where true value comes, because I wasn’t going to get it from any big calling in the church, I wasn’t going to get it from any great career, and I was miserable trying too.  God would not allow me down that easy path.  I could not get value from the world at all, because I was nothing to the world.  I felt like my “current bush” wasn’t being pruned, it was being ripped out by the roots.  Talk about a refining fire.

It took two years.  It was miserable.  (Why does it take me years to learn life-changing things?)  Anyway, The Lord is patient and kind, and I came out of it with absolute knowledge that my value comes internally from who I am as a child of God.  It doesn’t matter what people think about you, say about you, or feel about you.  It only matters what God thinks and feels.  I knew it to my DNA, and I became very aware that I didn’t need to do anything sensational to be of worth. Of course, God having the sense of humor he does, called me to be the Young Women’s President, right when I felt great about not having a demanding calling. But I knew I only needed to please God and I knew I was of great worth to Him and so I was at peace.

I was also full of hope.  We didn’t have an easy life raising our children.  Everything didn’t happen perfectly because we were trying to serve God.  But we felt hopeful always that we could solve problems and move forward. But again God had a refiner’s fire in store. 

I have to admit when we were called to serve as Mission Presidents to WA.  I had a perfect plan of how it would be and what would happen with my children.  I had two children who were coming home from missions and I had the vision of our other three children serving missions while we served and it would be perfect.  They would all find great spouses and get married.  We would be financially blessed. Etc. etc.  It was going to be so perfect.

Pretty much none of that happened.  While we served all of our children struggled.  Only one more child went on a mission and he had a horrible experience with his physical health and a mission president that, he felt, didn’t seem to understand or care to help him.  He developed depression and anxiety and came home for a back surgery that ended up not working and then dealing with some severe anxiety that was debilitating.  He eventually left the church and turned on us for a few years and it was brutal.

We had another son who came to understand he was gay when he went through puberty and while living in WA decided to live that life style.  His life has been pretty much a nose dive since that decision.  That world has a lot of drugs and sex that surround it and he became addicted to meth, among other things.

These were two great young men, and all this happened while we served a mission. 

[In our eyes these two boys are still great.  We love them so much and getting them through the last few years has been another refining fire that has been life changing for me.  But through it all I have learned that God really does love us no matter what we do, because I love them no matter what they do.]

When we got home things didn’t get any better, as a matter of fact they got worse.  My mother was dying of cancer.  Our family couldn’t take care of her so that fell to me once I got home.  I cared for my mother for 3 weeks while she struggled to die.  It was sacred but amazingly hard.

I took over the care of my father who had Parkinson’s.  I got him into a new assisted living facility, took him to multiple doctor’s visits, dissolved their estate, rented out and managed his condo to pay for his expenses, and started to manage his medication daily.

Don got Parkinson’s disease, we had no job and our finances weren’t good and we needed to sale our home and move.

This all happened within about the first 6 weeks of being home and I learned that traumatic events can cause depression as I fell into a depression that changed me in ways I didn’t know what was happening to me.

As I struggled to understand God’s plan for our family and how so many things could go wrong when we were giving our all to the Lord, I heard God’s voice many times.  I admit I wasn’t perfectly trusting and believing at this time, but the voice told me over and over again to hold on and he would get me there.  That He knew what I needed more than I knew what I needed and I should trust him.  So I held on the best I could.

At this time I read a book by Neil A. Maxwell called “Not My Will, But Thine”, (The Christ like path of submission to God’s will).   He said something that hit me so hard, “Faith is strongest when it is without illusion”.  This speaks to my very heart and soul.  He says in these few words what I would try to say in volumes and still not speak very well about.  It seems to me my whole life is being wrapped around this principle.  “Faith is strongest when it is without illusion.”

It’s easy to have faith when prayers are answered, you can see blessings, things fall into place like you think they will.  Yes, I had trials and challenges, definitely.  But I faced them, worked on them, prayed for help, and got through them, and learned stuff along the way.  Elder Maxwell calls that kind of life, K-12, lessons and experiences.  In 1 Corinthians 10:13 it says, “We undergo afflictions such as are common to man”.  That was what I think I was living; afflictions that were common to man.  But Elder Maxwell says, “God will deliberately give us further lessons and experience which take us beyond the curriculum common to man and on into uncommon graduate studies or even post-doctoral discipleship.  These trials are often the most difficult to bear.”

I feel like that!  I am not in elementary school anymore. I know God wanted to get me past, “Faith, because it all works out perfectly”, to “Faith without illusion; that I know God, trust Him and Love Him when it all doesn’t work out perfectly.”

That is how I feel today.  I know God lives.  He does answer prayers.  We need to see the blessings he offers, even when it’s not the blessing we long for. He has a sacred honor to protect all of our free agency and he won’t take that away from anyone, but can we still see the work He is doing in our life, the blessings He is giving?  We must see His hand and recognize his voice even in tremendous pain and sorrow.  

His way is The Way.  Our way is just A way.  And our way will not get us to that place of divine potential we aspire too.  The decision’s I made all along the way to follow God changed me.  I saw things in my Patriarchal blessing being full filled and coming to pass the entire time.  I was amazed.  God really can make us more than what we can make of our self and our patriarchal blessings can come to pass.

But there was still one thing in that blessing that I could never really see happening.

Then I had my eyes opened.  Over the last 7 years God had been working on that too, and I hadn’t even recognized it.  We were called to serve as mission presidents and worked with huge numbers of missionaries while our mission was being split and then during the age change.  We figured we worked with 600-700 missionaries while we were on our mission.  And then watched them go out and work with hundreds of people influencing them for good.

When we came home we were called to serve as a Branch President at the MTC and have worked with hundreds of missionary’s in the last 3 ½ years and have watched them go out and work with hundreds of people.  We have been teaching mission prep to BYU students for 3 years and have taught hundreds of students who have then gone out and influenced hundreds of people for good. 
So, now as I read my blessing, I am amazed that it wasn’t wrong.  Every one of those things have come true.   That is such an amazing feeling, and worth every bit of self you have to give up to have.

At the time I thought I was making such hard, painful sacrifices.  But getting through all of that and being on the other side of it, I am gratefully aware that God’s plan is better.  What I wanted for my life would have never created the lesson’s I needed to get me past myself and onto something better.
I also recognize none of this could have happened for me without personal revelation.  Because as I look back I realize the pivotal moment for me wasn’t when I decided to give up my dream and stay home with my children, or accepting a teaching calling that terrified me, it was earlier than that.  It was when I was a BYU student and I heard the voice of the spirit say, “Do your visiting teaching every month no matter how busy you are. Full filling your calling is the best use of your time.”  And I did it, every month no matter how crazy busy I was.  It was also when I heard the voice of the spirit tell me to stay clean and worthy of the spirit as I dated, and I did.

Following God starts with the little things.  And if you do those things he will get you to the big refiner’s fires in your life that will change you deeply into what your patriarchal blessing says you can be. 

I think of all those stake conferences, zone conferences, mission conferences, women’s conferences, etc that I had to speak at on our mission, and all the sacrament meeting talks, new missionary training's, and Sunday afternoon training's at the MTC and all those mission prep classes we’ve taught and guess what?    I was never really nervous during any of that.  That is like a miracle.  I learned what God wanted me to know; I only need to please Him, and because of that, I never want for words as I bear testimony of Jesus Christ. 

My main message is:
Listen to the spirit, Obey that voice above all others, stay with Him no matter how hard life gets, and you will become more than you ever thought possible, but what God knows is possible. 



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