Biffing It

First day of classes on BYU campus and I want to get the semester off to a good start. I wake up at 7:00, trot down the stairs of my apartment complex, unlock my bike from its post, swing my leg over its frame, and head off down the street. Brisk air, legs pumping, wheels turning fast. Freedom. Approaching the intersection at 800 N and University, I go to get on the sidewalk to avoid the confusion I always feel as a cyclist pretending to be a motorized vehicle. My bike hits the lip of pavement separating the sidewalk from the road, my bike starts to wobble, and . . .

I biff it. Biff it good. My bike slips, I try hopelessly to keep it upright, I think desperately, “I’m not even wearing a helmet,” and bam! I hit the pavement. A fellow cyclist riding by on the other side of the street sees my demise and shouts out, “Are you okay?” Having not fully assessed my situation myself, all I can do is shout back a shaky “Yes?” and the cyclist rides on. I stand up and examine myself. Left elbow: bleeding. Quite a bit. Right knee: scraped, but not bleeding yet. It could have been much worse.

I walk my bike back home, elbow dripping blood, handlebars twisted out of alignment with my front tire. I walk into my apartment and show my roommate my battle wound, expecting her to laugh with me at the irony of a college senior who rides her bike almost every day for the sheer joy of it and hasn’t crashed it in at least ten years losing control over something as small as a one-inch difference in surface level. How does that even happen?

But she didn’t laugh. She exclaimed: “Oh my goodness! Are you okay? Did you hit your head? Is your bike all right?” And I thought, “What the heck? That crash was so pathetic, I thought the world would laugh at it along with me.”

But they didn’t. No one did. My parents, my siblings, friends, roommates, ward members. They all responded with genuine concern that carried no trace of amusement.

Why? How could they not laugh at the irony of someone my age, as experienced with bike riding as I am, crashing so easily?

But it seemed instead that they grasped the tragedy of someone – no matter the age or experience level – slamming to the ground at such a speed when not wearing even a helmet as protective gear.

And as I pondered their reactions, and how they differed from mine, I thought of the Savior and how His response to when I mess up so often differs from mine.

Because sometimes even at my experienced age, there comes a day when I unexpectedly fall. Days when the same situation I’ve dealt with over and over again and gotten really good at handling in a Christlike/professional/confident/whatever-adjective-you-want way rears its angry head yet again, and I think, “I’ve got this,” but somehow . . . I biff it. I biff it good.

And I know I’m not the only one. We all have experiences where something small throws us completely off. We lose our temper, we say something rude, we say the wrong thing, we don’t say anything at all, we know what we should do and we don’t do it – whatever it is, we do it wrong, and we can’t believe that at our age, with our level of experience, we could mess up so bad.

I’ve been there. On the mission, standing at the doorstep and someone answers. It’s my turn to do the door approach, and I freeze and words stumble out in a random order that vaguely makes sense but also vaguely makes it sound like I’m completely terrified. Or while teaching, and I think, “How do I begin a lesson without it feeling awkward?” and then five minutes later I realize that I jumped straight into the lesson without giving How to Begin Teaching even a passing thought. Because even though I’ve been doing the same thing over and over again for the past year of my life, sometimes my mind goes blank and . . . I biff it. Biff it good.

Or now, back to civilian life, and I think: How do I make friends? How do I make small talk? How do I motivate myself to do homework when I have no desire to do it? I thought I had this all figured out before the mission, but now things have changed – I’ve changed – and the things that worked for me before don’t always work for me now. And over and over again I wonder: How do I this without falling?

And while I’m slowly figuring it out, there are still those times when I hesitate and I stumble and . . . I biff it. Biff it good. Little things that I thought I had already figured out throw me off, and I feel my confidence in myself being slammed to the ground, feel it as it starts to bleed. And it’s not a comedy, and it’s not a tragedy, it’s pathetic and stupid and frustrating and I have no patience for it. Me, at my age, with my level of experience and hard work, acting like I’m still a college freshman? Please. Surely I can do better than that.

But then I had my experience with crashing my bike the first day of classes, and the reactions of my parents and siblings and friends surprised me. And maybe this is because I often compare my Father in Heaven’s love with the love I feel from all those Christlike souls around me, but suddenly I understood: Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ never view my falls as humorous or annoying. They view them as a tragedy. Not a tragedy, exactly, because there’s always the hope of a happy ending, and of course pain is an integral, needed part of life, but I know that when I don’t perform as well as I wish I had, they feel my pain. They feel my disappointment in myself – but they are not disappointed in me. They cry with me because they love me and they understand that, as a mortal being, I will fall. For reasons that I do not understand, I will crash that bike, and I will biff it. I will biff it good. And they are infinitely more concerned with how I am doing than with the crash. Am I okay? Is my heart all right? Did I hit any unprotected part of my soul? And I can just picture them hugging me, like a mother embracing her child who has just experienced her first scraped knee, and I know that they don’t judge me for not being perfect at something I thought I had perfected long ago.

And slowly I am learning to view my falls in the same way. Not as a comedy, not as an illustration of how pathetic I can be, but as something that hurts my soul of infinite worth, something deserving of a hug and a kiss to make it better, an incident when I have permission to feel the pain of crashing and still feel concern for myself and my well-being. Because more important than my circumstances is the way I respond to them, and only as I treat myself with love can I view those around me with the same depth of emotion. And isn't that what the gospel is all about? About seeing those around us as a whole being and being concerned, not with their weaknesses and imperfections, but with their emotions and their needs and how to help them know their worth and their potential and how they can work to achieve it? 

That involves loving them as they fall. Not judging them, not thinking less of them, not arrogantly wondering how in the world they could manage to fail at something so simple, but seeing them at their center and wanting them to find joy. And to feel that way towards others, we must first start with feeling that way towards ourselves. 

I See a Light! Part II

(To recap) If the light is the source of everything worthwhile, then why do we so often stray?

There are two categories of reasons that come readily to my mind: distractions and doubt. I will talk about each of them separately, although they do often tend to overlap.

A distraction can be anything that causes us to take our eyes off of the light that is the Savior of the world. These things can include: political ideologies that we have a different opinion on than do the prophets and apostles (or even just our fellow members at church), deep doctrine that doesn’t make sense to us, church history that we can’t reconcile with what the scriptures teach us, imperfect Priesthood leaders whom we don’t understand why they were put in positions of power and authority . . . I could go on. A lot goes on in the church, and sometimes people use things they don’t understand – or make no effort to understand – as a reason to leave. The thing is, though, none of these concerns that I mentioned are the light. They are merely specks on the horizon. Sometimes as we look towards the light, and especially as we’re looking from a far-off distance, it’s easy to see these distractions and hard to tell that they are not included in the light. But the closer we get to the light the more the light illuminates the things around it, and the easier it is to see and understand how these different issues fit into the context of an imperfect world and imperfect people made by a perfect God with a perfect plan. The important thing to remember is that these specks on the horizon are nowhere near as big or all-encompassing as the light, and ultimately they change nothing about the reality of a loving Savior. These issues do not define the Savior; rather, the light of the Savior helps us define them through the viewpoint of eternity. Who knows what the horizon that Sailor headed towards looked like? She could easily have been distracted by the sound of barking dogs coming from the direction she was headed, or by burnt-out trees or other ugly scenery on the way to her light – but it wasn’t the scenery she was headed for. It was the light that gave her hope, and she was not about to let anything keep her from reaching that source of healing she had chosen to believe lay at the end of her journey. The moment she reached the light, the harshness of the horizon faded in significance to the peace that came from knowing that she had found her source of healing.

The second category of reasons why we stray from the light is doubts. We doubt that we’ll ever be good enough, we doubt that Heavenly Father has enough love to forgive us, we doubt that the harshness of the journey will be worth it, we don’t understand why we’ve been given such a difficult trial to deal with. We doubt ourselves or we doubt our Savior (and I think those two doubts are one and the same). We doubt that peace, joy, love, healing can be ours – and so we don’t even try for it. 

But when we do this, we let spiritual (and sometimes physical) wounds keep us from our journey to the only one who has the power to heal our wounds. Other sources can patch us up, make us feel better – but they can’t replace scabs with perfect skin. Only the Savior can do that – and He does it with spiritual wounds as well. He replaces despair with hope, confusion with understanding, fear with faith and love, anger and bitterness with love and forgiveness. He helps us see us and the world around us the way that He sees them. It’s a higher perspective, and it is Truth and Beauty defined.

These promised blessings don’t come fully overnight. The sun comes up over several hours’ time, and the changing of a soul is an even more powerful miracle than that. It takes repetition, much like building muscle. It takes day after day after day of repeating the same basic things over and over and over again, and as we do so we feel our strength and joy increasing. Sailor had to put one foot in front of the other over and over and over again and never stop, no matter what. None of us will ever be completely done with our journey to the light until we are united with the light completely – and that won’t happen until resurrection and judgment and our assignment into the kingdom whose glory our own soul best reflects.

Offering Love and Freedom

This morning I read an article linked to on my Facebook page that really made me think. It was written by an ex-Mormon who described the way he was treated as he left the church, and how he has been treated since. It seemed to me that that main point of the article was to call out church members for not practicing what they preach, for shaming and judging and labeling those who choose to leave the church rather than showing them Christ-like love, understanding, compassion, room to make their own decisions, even if those decisions seem to us to be a mistake.

This writer has a point. Do we assume that we know what people who believe and act differently from us are feeling, are thinking, where their life is headed? Because we don’t. We barely even know what we’re feeling, what we’re thinking, where our life is headed. All of us are trying to live our lives to the best of our knowledge. And because knowledge comes from life experience and everybody’s experiences are unique, the knowledge that we gain in this live will always be different than the knowledge of those around us. And so we build our individual lives, brick of hard-earned knowledge upon brick of even harder-earned knowledge, and we look at the structures other people are building and we think, “What in the world are they thinking to be building something like that?” Well, maybe they’re thinking the same thing about the structure that we’re building, and as we mislabel each other’s structures and try to get everyone’s structure to look exactly like ours we’re overlooking one important point: None of us are even using the same bricks. Your structure will never look the same as mine, much as mine will never look the same as yours. You can try, but that kind of a structure will always fail. No matter how similar we may seem on the outside, there are always miniscule differences in our building bricks that become more and more apparent the more we get to know each other.

And maybe one reason we assume things about these people who see the world so differently than we do is because we’re scared. Differences in our makeup as compared to other people scare us. Not always, and not everyone, but often. Maybe especially in the Mormon world. If someone else believes strongly that what I believe with all my heart is false – what happens if they’re right? What does it say about how I’m living my life, about how I’ve always lived my life, about this foundation that I’ve spent years and countless years building deep into the ground to give myself something to be anchored to so that when hard times come I won’t be knocked down with the wind of uncertainty? What happens if they’re right. . . and I’m wrong?

Psychologically speaking, this is a valid concern. Other beliefs threaten ours. We can’t both be right. Either they’re wrong, or the whole basis for how I pattern my life is. That’s a scary thought. So we get defensive. We have to be right because if we’re not, there goes everything that validates our existence. So the obvious conclusion is that we are right – and they’re wrong. Completely, 100% wrong. Anything in what they have to say that sparks of truth threatens everything we’ve always believed – and that’s a terrifying feeling.

We don’t have to be this way. You don’t have to be this way. Because maybe both of you are right. Maybe their experiences are valid. Maybe if you had had the same experiences, you’d feel the same way. And maybe not. There’s no way of knowing. All you do know is the experiences you have had. The experiences where God has answered your prayers with a feeling of intense comfort, or reassurance, or peace, or maybe even a though that you know was not your own. The experiences where you’re reading the scriptures, and suddenly you know that your Savior is right there with you, telling you the same things He’s telling the people in the scriptures. And on and on and on. Those experiences are real. Someone else not understanding them will never make them invalid. All it means is that that person is not you, and therefore can never fully understand what you have gone through in your life. The only person who can ever do that is the Savior Himself. And that person standing there, presenting a differing viewpoint of life and religion, threatening your beliefs? That person is not Jesus – which also mean that he/she does not, by definition cannot, understand the universe in its entirety. Why not? Because they did not create it in its entirety under the direction of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

This also implies something else interesting: with all the things that have been revealed through the Restoration of the Gospel, we still don’t know everything there is to know. Why not? Mainly from a lack of personal experience. I don’t know what it’s like to be gay. I don’t know what it’s like to be a male member of the Mormon church who, for whatever reason, is not able to serve a full-time mission. I don’t know what it’s like to have cancer or to come from a rough family background. So how can I understand people like them unless I take the time to listen to them, to really understand who they are, and why? And without understanding them, how can I possibly begin to understand why they do the things they do?

So maybe people who leave the church really are happier outside it than in. Maybe it’s because the people around them misunderstand the Atonement and the purpose for the organization of the church to the point that it makes it difficult for these individuals to understand it. Maybe they’re sick of being judged. Maybe they don’t understand everything they’ve discovered about church history. Maybe they’ve read too many anti-Mormon articles. Whatever it is, how do we know that if we were in their shoes, we wouldn’t also see the appeal of leaving? All that telling them that they need to repent does is further alienate them. That is not love. Love is making sure they are 100% certain that they can spend time with you without you thinking you’re better than them because you’ve made choices that are more righteous. Everyone needs a place where they feel safe from judgment. That is the only way anyone will ever trust. They can know your beliefs without feeling judged because they don’t share them, just as we want to spend time with people whose beliefs are different than ours without feeling judged because we don’t share their (possibly more “politically correct”) beliefs.

All I’m asking for is understanding and freedom. Love and agency. Two central principles of the gospel. So many times I’ve wanted to go back to my mission and genuinely get to know the people who weren’t interested in what I had to teach. They were good people, and I was curious about their points of view and why they saw life that way – what did they have to add to they way I view the gospel? I couldn’t have done that while on the mission – but I can do it now. My point of view is not always correct. I am not God, I did not create this universe, this world, the people in it, and, like everyone else, my experience on this earth is limited. I’m still learning. Other experiences from other people’s backgrounds help me gain a more God-like perspective. Even if those people are not entirely correct in their viewpoint, something they say will help me gain a better understanding of humanity, of actions and consequences, of the part each of us has to play in this world. There is always something to learn from the people around us, whether or not they share our beliefs, and we can only learn it we stop judging them for long enough to listen.

Why Write About My Experiences

My laptop may be dying, but still I cannot suppress the urge to write. The Spirit and my own emotions have been on my case every day since I walked off that plane bringing me home from my mission and back to my family, and I can no longer keep the words inside from spilling out.

I need to write about my experiences on the mission. Why, I’m not so sure. For my sake, for the sake of others, for my own attempt to make sense of a year-and-a-half packed full of events, people, emotions, life.

Missions are hard. Mine was unique. Here on BYU campus, being a recently returned sister missionary makes me a stereotype, and I am finding it difficult to find my own voice in the Mormon Bubble, especially at this university, and even in my own ward. I often feel like I blend in, like I’m background, like there’s nothing to make me stand out, and if there is, it’s probably apostate. For the record, here is how I feel about my mission: I’m relieved to be home and beyond grateful that I went. It was stressful, it was emotionally draining, and through the whole thing God was shaping my experience to meet my specific needs, to fulfill certain promises made to me years and years ago, to help me become someone I have been trying to become all along. I learned hope, I learned peace, I learned to rely on my Savior and the Plan of Salvation in a way I had never learned to before. I learned to trust others to love me even when I’m weak – and not just love me, but to respect me as a strong individual as well, as paradoxical as that sounds (it still seems like a paradox to me). I learned to be miserable day after day after day – and to still keep on going anyway. I learned to work when there seemed no point. I learned to recognize when people were lying, or undiagnosed schizophrenics, or had just been on drugs for way too many years. I learned, through how others treated us (both good and bad), how to graciously turn down an invitation to learn more about someone else’s religion.

I’m not entirely sure what this next string of posts will bring. I write what flows and hope that it’s enough. I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of topics, a lot of stories that I may share or may in the end label as “too personal” and merely allude to. Whatever comes out, know that it was my mission, this is my life, and God knows we’re all unique. I write because God told me to, and in the hope that the Spirit will translate whatever I have to say into whatever you need to hear. Overall, I guess my posts can be summed up with what one of my English professors recently said, “It’s not a brag. I’m just telling you what God has helped me to accomplish.”

I See a Light! Part I

I gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting last week, and I had so much fun preparing for it that I thought I'd share some of my insights from it here on my blog. The idea behind it and the story about Sailor come from a talk by Elder L. Whitney Clayton in last October's General Conference. I'm splitting this up into two parts because it's really long (#Miriamlikestohearherselftype)

There is a story told of a mother and a father travelling with their daughter across the country in a private airplane. Looking forward to spending time together as a family, they played games, they shared jokes and stories and riddles, they tried to sleep as day turned into night. And unexpectedly they found themselves gripping their armrests in terror as the plane suddenly veered downward and they realized the pilot had lost control and they were in danger of losing their lives. As the plane smashed into the ground and the dust and debris cleared, the only survivor struggled out from the wreckage: the daughter, Sailor, age seven. Leaving behind the shattered remnants of the plane, along with the bodies of her parents, Sailor started walking. In 38 degree weather, wearing a ripped-up t-shirt and shorts, with one shoe lost and numerous scratches all over her body, this brave young girl walked through the dark night towards a light she saw in the far-off distance. She walked up and down hills, through briar patches, whatever it took to get to that light. When she got there, she discovered that the light belonged to a house, and the house belonged to a middle-aged man. This compassionate man took one look at her and sprinted towards his phone. He called an ambulance, he called whomever he could think of so that this little girl could get the medical attention she needed. Sailor’s refusal to stay where she was and wallow in despair enabled her to get the help necessary for her survival. When her whole life came crashing down around her, she walked toward the only light she could see, and thus saved her own life from going up in flames.

Spiritually speaking, our lives are like Sailor’s journey. There’s darkness, there’s coldness, there’s confusion and isolation, maybe we feel ill-prepared to cope with the specific challenges that are given us, maybe we have no idea where to go to get the help that we need – maybe we’re not even sure what it is that we need. Sometimes we feel too tired and worn-out to keep going. But we can’t just stay there besides the pain and hope to thrive. We have to get up and move. And where we head towards is just as important as the fact that we are moving in the first place. Sailor didn’t have to head towards the light; she could have set off in a myriad other directions. Would she have found the help she needed? Maybe, but it would have taken her much longer, and in the meantime she would have used up valuable energy that her body and emotions needed to help her heal.

Sailor had a middle-aged man to help her find healing. We have something even better: our Savior, the Son of God. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the Savior and His Atonement (including the Resurrection) truly is the center of the restored gospel, but as we study the scriptures and the words of modern-day prophets it becomes more and more clear that this is what the prophets from Adam to Thomas S. Monsen have always based their personal testimonies on. Whatever we talk about in the church, the Savior is always at the center of everything we believe. Our light is the Savior. And while it is possible to find good in other places, I personally prefer to go straight to the source. The Savior isn’t just one way to find good; He is the source of all good (see Moroni 7:16, 22). I want the purity that comes from drinking from the source. I want joy and peace and understanding undiluted, and the more I head towards the light the more of it I find.

But, like everyone else out there, I have yet to master perfection at anything, including staying on that light-filled path. If the light is the source of everything worthwhile, then why do we so often stray?

Room to Make Mistakes

To be honest, the mission was hard.

To be honest, I’m overjoyed to be back.

To be honest, I don’t know if I could do something like that again.

To be honest, while I want to always serve my Savior with all my heart, sometimes I want to do it in my own way, at my own pace.

Sometimes my way is not the mission’s way. Not my district leader’s way. Not my companion’s way. It’s never against Heavenly Father’s way – but it also never forces me to be someone I’m not.

The thing with the mission field is that you’re constantly surrounded by people who expect you to act a certain way. Be a certain person. From random people you tract into who are not afraid of speaking their opinion of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, to mission leaders who it sometimes seems are merely there to remind you how low your numbers are or the many aspects of being a missionary that you haven’t quite perfected yet, to companions whom you can never quite convince of the strengths that do exist deep down inside you – always always it seems that there is someone who is not quite satisfied with all your physically emotionally mentally demanding efforts.

And sometimes you worry that that someone is God Himself. Are you sure you’re doing your best? You notice all the problems in this area, this teaching situation, this companionship – why haven’t you fixed them yet? Why can’t you do things right? And always always you feel the pressure, the infinitely high expectations, emanating from your district leader your fellow district members the ward members – from everyone – everyone, including yourself.

I could give specific examples of missionaries that I love and respect putting what I thought was unfair pressure on me to be someone I’m not – but I won’t, because that would be me putting pressure on them to be perfect missionaries, perfect leaders, and I don’t expect that from them. At least, not anymore. You see, on the mission I realized: Everyone needs to know that they have room to make mistakes, permission to speak even when they’re not sure that what they have to say will come out perfectly, permission to act like someone different than the stereotype, permission to still be in the middle of the learning and growing process. There were transfers where I felt that if I sneezed wrong in front of an investigator, my companion would be on my case – and I’ve forgiven those companions since then because I understand that they too were experiencing intense growing pains. But during those transfers, I had no room to breathe, no room to cry, no room to be myself – because who I am is so far from perfection. When I’m myself, I make mistake after mistake and sometimes, with a lot of unconditional love from others and even more determination from myself, gradually I begin to make fewer and fewer mistakes, until mistakes are the exception rather than the norm. That’s where we all want to be. But none of us start out that way. And to be able to progress, we need to know that it’s okay to make mistakes along the way. When we’re constantly being reminded that what we’re doing is so far from perfection, discouragement sets in. We freeze up. What’s the point of going on if what I do is never good enough anyway?

While we do need to know what we’re doing wrong in order to make it better, we also need to know that we can mess up and still be loved. Mistakes are vital part of life. They’re an essential part of Heavenly Father’s plan for us. He gave us agency and the Light of Christ but no practical experience of how to use those two tools. And then he made us all unique, so that what works for one person may not work for another. Of course he doesn’t expect us to go through life without making a few mistakes along the way! Exploring, seeing what works and what doesn’t, learning from experience and knowing that it’s okay that you don’t have everything figured out right away, this is what makes life rewarding. This is what leads to growth. Each of us needs permission to be imperfect, and we need to give each other that same permission as well. Otherwise, self-esteem plummets and it’s hard to convince yourself to do something new. You’ll probably fail at it anyway, so what’s the point? When we have unrealistic expectations for others, then instead of helping them grow, we’re cutting them down, hindering their growth. We need to look at people the way the Savior does – look into their hearts, see their strengths, what makes them them, and work from there to encourage them to f

flourish in a way that’s true to them.  

And we need to treat ourselves the same way. Don’t have as many baptismal dates as the next companionship over? As good of grades as your classmate? As many dates as your roommate? As spotless a house as your next-door neighbor? How hard are you trying, how far are you progressing? Those things matter more to Heavenly Father than the outward results. The Savior’s life, from the outside, looked a failure: born in a stable, raised a simple carpenter, hated and mocked and eventually killed even though He claimed to be a God – He did not come to earth to impress the world with His power, but to teach us forgiveness and healing and love. To teach us that, just as He never does anything to impress us but merely to show us of His love, so to we need never do anything to impress Him, but merely to convince Him that He can be as sure of our love as we are sure of His. If Heavenly Father wanted us to make perfect choices all the time, He would have gone with Satan’s plan. But He believes in freedom, and with that freedom comes mercy and patience and room for experimentation and growth. And I am grateful for a church and a gospel that emphasizes sincerity and love and growth over anything else this world has to offer.

Pre-Mission Worries

I feel drained. Not enough sleep last night, and I’m trying too hard today to . . . to be the person that everyone else wants to see. I want to be liked, to be admired, and I don’t understand how that works if I’m not who other people expect me to be.

I need a long bike ride along a tree-lined path, the trail curving along with the stream heading out to sea, taking my anxieties with it.

I need a quiet place, away from buildings and people, a place where it’s just me and nature, a place to be and rediscover who I want to be; who I am; who pure, no-influence-from-anything-or-anyone-else Miriam is.

I need to sit and let nature and the Spirit heal my broken expectations, the broken ideals of perfection I once had. Let it heal my heart and my mind and leave me feeling whole.

I need to stop trying to be perfect. Will the world collapse if, heaven forbid, I slip up? More importantly, will my life collapse? Will my support system of friends and family and random acquaintances who for some reason (their devotion to Christ?) seem to love me just for being me –will they leave me in a flurry of righteous indignation upon learning that I, strong tough devoted goody-two-shoes Utah Mormon girl that I am, am not perfect? If I’m not funny enough? If I’m not nice enough? If I’m too shy?

Strange musings for someone who will soon – in twelve days! – leave on a mission to preach God’s love and forgiveness to “a strange people in a strange land.”

Because what does it matter that I’m imperfect if this life is a growing process, if I was never expected to become perfect overnight, if my Savior has already atoned for my sins?

What does it matter what other people think if I know that my God loves me?

What does it matter if I know that my blood can be washed clean through the Savior?

"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."

As Jesus told the Pharisees:

“They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick/But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

I was never expected to be perfect.

And yet . . .

And yet the anxiety persists. It’s a disease of the mind, I know, but doesn’t faith also have to do with the mind? Can I drive this demon out, or will it always be there when I start in a new place, when I’m about to start in a new place, when I’m stressed or things aren’t going how I think they should?

Will these insecurities always attack when I most need my confidence?

Through the Savior we find healing, but where is mine?

As I type that, I know the answer. My healing has come through the tender mercies of the Lord, through loving parents who have spent so much time listening to me talk – listening to me cry – always, miracle of miracles, being home to answer the phone when I needed it most – and researching foods and techniques and natural remedies that help with stress and anxiety, paying for my counseling and my medication, telling me that they love me, that they will always love me, that I am a good person even when I’m not so sure.

It has come through friends who have also listened to me cry, who have acted as counselors for me, who have, quite literally, saved my life (I hope you know who you are); through home teachers (and their roommates) who always responded immediately to my requests for a blessing, who listened to me explain what was making my life so difficult and dark, who cared, who asked pointed questions and expected an honest answer.

It has come from roommates who listened when I said that sometimes the anxiety was so bad I wanted to hurt myself and responded, not with revulsion, but with love and concern.

It has come from the progress I have seen myself make throughout this past year, from the strength I know I have shown and will show again, from my stubborn, determined spirit that every day I thank God for because I am convinced I would not have made it through the worst of my anxiety without it.

It has come through not thinking I would ever be able to serve a mission because of my unpredictable anxiety to, eight months after having my call rejected, realizing that the timing was now right and God was giving me permission to try for it again.

It has come through receiving my call to serve and realizing: this is real, this is really happening, and realizing that it is good that I did not go when I first wanted to, realizing that I needed this time to mature and grow and deepen my desire to serve the Lord and his people. And now here I am, about to set out, and while I don’t know how my anxiety will be, I know that God has reassured me a myriad times since I first submitted my papers that going on a mission is what I need to be doing now.

So no, my healing is not complete, but I know that things will be okay. They will also be hard, I might scream and cry and ask God why (heck, who am I kidding? I will do all those things) – but it will be okay. Why? Because God loves me, my family, my wonderful supporting eternal family, loves me, because I am stubborn and determined and I will not give up.

Because my family and my God and my friends, so many wonderful friends, believe in me. More than that, they believe in what God can do for me and through me.

So yes, I still have my insecurities. Yes, some days – most days – I still doubt myself. But God has promised me that everything will work out, and that I do believe.

This mission will not bring me down, like a sapling in the wind. I will not let the storminess of mission life lay me flat. Bring me to my knees, yes, then raise me up higher than I have ever been before.

I am determined, and God is on my side.

*All images stolen from Google images