Expanding the Vison

Our prophet, President Nelson, has said, "The adversary is increasing his attacks on faith and on families at an exponential rate. To survive spiritually we need counter strategies and proactive plans." If you have felt to search for reason, surety, evidence to support your belief in certain aspects of the gospel, it is no mystery why. Faith endows you with power and great wisdom but you have to take that step, that goes against your mind's "better judgement", into the realm of spirit, in order to ever truly know anything that is worth knowing. It has been said that Satan will put his greatest efforts where he knows he can do the greatest damage. What does that say then about your faith? Your faith is your greatest weapon and defense against him. He would have you feeling crazy to believe that it is important to participate in baptisms for the dead. He have you question your duty to God to keep the sabbath day holy, when others seem happy and do not. He want

I have felt, talked about, and overcome more stress and anxiety in the last couple days than I ever have. The way I chose to do so was with the Lord. I have gone through enough to realize that it is best to be in the center of a storm with the Lord than anywhere else without Him. I knew that to pass through troubling times I needed His light and love and also understanding. I started out with faith enough that everything would be okay, but that didn't stop me from worrying. I worried that everything would be okay, but maybe in a "Job" kind of way, meaning, I would lose everything but know in my heart that I would be okay. Even though this was a respectable thought, it is not what I want. I don't think anyone wants to feel that they have to lose it all just to feel God with them. I continued to pray for peace and reassurance that I would be okay. I asked not only for the spirit to dwell with me, but I asked that people in my life would reassure me. I told my Father t

This semester I am focusing on learning to believe.  I have chosen to believe that the Savior is waiting to teach me and now I am realizing that I have to learn how to believe that He is always there, that He loves me, and that I can trust Him. It is not an easy process. As difficult as it is to explain, it is even more complicated to understand. I don't always understand why I still feel anxiety about the future, if I believe He has a plan for me. Trials sometimes show me that my faith is much stronger in theory than in practice. Just the other night I could hardly sit still. I was worried, fearful, and at moments even angry because of a situation that I don't feel in control of and I am not sure how it is going to play out. I decided to pray because this has been working well for me lately. What I am starting to find is that prayer need be constant because the world around us is constant and so is the adversary. We shouldn't be troubled if we find ourselves praying fo

I used to think of liberation as a freedom from physical bondage. I pictured shackles or prison walls with no windows. I pictured slaves released or captives broken out by the hero. Only recently I have started to consider the implications of liberation in the mind, in the heart, and of the physical body. Liberation of the spirit itself. How would this liberation come? Through the Savior of course. While I feel like I understood this and certainly accepted the declaration that Jesus Christ is my personal savior and the savior of the world as truth, I did not understand how it would happen for me. Part of the reason a person might be in some form of captivity is because they are unaware. Sometimes, I felt that becoming aware was the liberation but then I would fall back into old patterns. The key that opened further understanding for me was humility. I have spent years thinking about humility and trying to understand how I could be both submissive and incredibly strong. How could I co

The end of my first semester is here and while I have learned so much I am also relearning lessons that I want to be through with. Organization has always been a weakness. Throughout my adult life I have gone through so much difficulty and regret as a result of not staying organized. I choose to write about this now because I can make this a turning point. The close of this semester will be the opening of a new one and with a new start I can be a new student and a new person. Business is about failing forward and getting up more times than you are knocked down. I recognize in myself this weakness that wants to be embarrassed of what  I lack and the embarrassment makes me feel like it is easier to ignore than to face head-on and try to fix it. I have to be the person who can find the weakness and fix it. I have to be strong enough to understand that I am weak and still believe in myself and my ability to overcome my weaknesses. The Lord says, if you come unto Him, He will show you you

I used to have a very different idea about jobs. I always thought that the kind of job I could get would somehow define me. I left a lot of jobs without giving two weeks of notice because I felt that I was better, inside. I didn't like my superiors and felt that I was more capable sometimes. I guess in some ways it is true, the type of job you can qualify for does resemble your discipline to some degree. Those who are willing to go to school are showing that discipline and their degrees are reflections of that. However, the job itself does not make me. Over the course of this semester we have read different stories of people who go from job to job and there seems to be no shame in that. That's how I saw it before. I felt like it was some kind of failure to move from one thing to the next. These different people instead do it because they are taking ownership of their lives and they are being responsible with how they use their time. I can see in their decisions that they are wo