What It Means To Me

Adjusting Views will be my journal to help me catalog the events of my life this year. Though it may be of no concern to anyone what happens to me regularly (I lead a pretty uneventful life), it will help me keep track of my progress this year.

I realized, in 2013, some important things about myself. I was becoming a person I did not like and I was not living the life I had imagined for myself. This is not to say I started the year off that way nor that I did not have some good times during that year. However, as the year passed away and school became harder, I changed. I grew to feel like I was betrayed. I did what I could in the way of keeping the commandments and doing what my Heavenly
Father has asked of me, but by the end of the year my trials were only harder.

After a few road bumps, I have been able to sit back and make some interesting discoveries about myself.

• I have an intense desire to travel throughout my life.
• I have a low self-worth.
• I am hypocritical.
• I have trials that will last for my whole life. 

At the end of 2013, I could not believe that I had not been rewarded with having my trials gone away. I was not any happier at the end of the year than I was at the beginning. Some counseling from my bishop and a psychiatrist led me to scour my gospel library app and lds.org for some videos or scriptures that could help me with my feeling of betrayal and my lack of faith.

One particular video spoke about the atonement of how it can take our pain away, not just pain and sorrow from our own sins, but of the pain caused by someone else's sins. For me, though, I needed something more. I knew the pain I harbored would not go away fully. Then that is when I started to wonder why my Heavenly Father could not take this pain away if it plagued me so much. I had been praying and the word endure kept coming to mind. It was not until I went to dinner with a friend and talking to her about the word that I realized what Heavenly Father was trying to tell me.

And then I went to church today and a counselor in my stake presidency read a scripture that completed the message Heavenly Father was trying to give me. It reads: "Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life." (2 Nephi 31:20)

So, my unique trials may never go away, but if I endure it out and press forward, I will be rewarded.

I am adjusting my views this year of my life, my situation, and the world around me so that I can become closer to Christ and my Heavenly Father. I leave you with two quotes from two of my favorite leaders of the Church.

"It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how your life's story will develop." - President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

"Hope on. Journey on."- Elder Jeffrey R. Holland