I'll be honest, I'm a little bit sad to see 2013 end. It was such a great year for me (minus a few key events, but whatev). Saying goodbye to my college days also feels like saying goodbye to my traveling days and my fun summers, so I'm having this pessimistic attitude toward 2014 (not to mention the rest of my life in general). I realize how silly that is, but it's there nonetheless. I also recognize this weird phobia I have that my awesome life is going to all of a sudden stop being awesome and that Heavenly Father is going to stop blessing and guiding me, but knowing that doesn't rid me of my irrational fears so easily.
Luckily, I was recently introduced to this talk by Elder Holland called "An High Priest of Good Things to Come." I'm sure you've seen the Mormon Message that derives from the talk--I think I've seen that one more than any other, but I was shocked to find that I'd never read the original talk. Fail. Elder Holland always knows how to put us in our place, doesn't he? In response to my pessimistic outlook: "Even as the Lord avoids sugary rhetoric, He rebukes faithlessness and He deplores pessimism." Yep. His main point was about looking to the future with faith and having hope in good things yet to come. "Every one of us has times when we need to know things will get better. Moroni spoke of it in the Book of Mormon as 'hope for a better world' (I'm calling it my "hope for a better year"). For emotional health and spiritual stamina, everyone needs to be able to look forward to some respite, to something pleasant and renewing and hopeful."
I think the bulk of my hesitancy-to-move-into-the-next-year attitude stems from the fact that I have nothing solid to look forward to anymore. My future is wide open. No upcoming events or trips or special occasions or anything. But the point that Elder Holland makes here is that because of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we can always have that hope of good things to come. So even if I don't see what's on the horizon of my life, I can confidently trust that there are indeed good things ahead.
As always, Christ is the perfect example of faith in the future: "Nothing could break His faith in His Father's plan or His Father's promises. Even in those darkest hours at Gethsemane and Calvary, He pressed on, continuing to trust in the very God whom He momentarily feared had forsaken Him. . . . Because Christ's eyes were unfailingly fixed on the future, He could endure all that was required of Him."
So I guess the lesson here is that I need to fix my eyes on the future, and trust that Heavenly Father has promised me lots of things that are yet to happen but will still really happen. I need to remember that "there is help and happiness ahead--a lot of it," and like Elder Holland, I need to remember to "thank my Father in Heaven for His goodness past, present, and future." He has been SO good to me. He is so good to me. And I know He'll continue to be good to me.
Alright. Faith in 2014. Ready, go. With that in mind, I was thinking about how one of my friends chooses one word at the end of each year to describes that year. As I was thinking about assigning words to years retroactively, I decided that this year I'd assign 2014 a word just as it was getting started, in part to help overcome my pessimism.
So I was reading through this scrapbooking magazine at work (gotta keep up-to-date with the competition, you know), and one of the pages was all about New Year's resolutions, but every resolution started with "I intend." I loved this little phrase she had written at the end: "Continuing the intention to live the length and width." I just love that. Maybe because it sounds so scriptural, I don't know. I really want to want to live my life, and to have it have a length and a width large enough to make it worthwhile. I want a life that I love. Don't get me wrong--I love my life already, but I just want to ensure that it stays that way. So with that as my inspiration, I sat down to think about the word that would help me have that kind of life.
In my brainstorming, I threw around words and phrases like "live it up" (obviously I got really creative here--not), "enough," "do it," "own it," "active," "abundantly" (I had to throw an adverb in there)... None of them seemed quite right. I thought more about it, tried to visualize what I wanted this year to be like, and finally settled on one that fit: create.
Now I'm not sure if I just chose that because I work for a scrapbook company and creating things is basically what that industry is all about, but I just love every connotation of it. I don't think awesome opportunities are going to fall in my lap anymore--at least not as often as they did in college. I'm going to have to create the life I want instead of waiting around for it to just happen. So this year, that's what I'm going to do:
Create friendships; create lasting relationships.
Create travel opportunities, even if they don't take me very far from home.
Create a more healthy body.
Create more interesting thoughts by reading more, writing more, and spending less time wasting time.
Create a budget. Yeah.
Create a more spiritual climate in my life, in my room, in my soul.
Create a life worth living. A life I'd choose to live.
After I chose my new word for 2014, I remembered this talk that President Uchtdorf gave a few years ago called "Happiness, Your Heritage." He talks about how the greatest happiness is God's happiness. Understanding God's happiness isn't exactly the most straightforward concept to grasp, however, since His ways are not our ways. But, as Pres. Uchtdorf points out, He is able to accomplish His goals of bringing to pass man's immortality and eternal life because of two things: He is a God of creation and compassion. "Creating and being compassionate are two objectives that contribute to our Heavenly Father's perfect happiness. Creating and being compassionate are two activities that we as His spirit children can and should emulate." So, I guess I need to add "be compassionate" to my list of goals. Seriously something I always need to work on.
He also gave some encouraging words on what exactly it means to create: "The bounds of creativity extend far beyond the limits of a canvas or a sheet of paper and do not require a brush, a pen, or the keys of a piano (which is good because I'm not really all that artistic). Creation means bringing into existence something that did not exist before--colorful gardens, harmonious homes, family memories, flowing laughter."
To go along with that, and not to get all P.S. I Love You on you or anything, but I love this idea about what it means to create something: "Just create something... new, and there it is, and it's you, out in the world, outside of you, and you can look at it, or hear it, or read it, or feel it, and you know a little more about you. A little bit more than anyone else does."
And of course, "The more you trust and rely upon the Spirit, the greater your capacity to create. That is your opportunity in this life and your destiny in the life to come."
So here's to creating a life I'd choose to live, even if it weren't my own. Here's to creating a belief that I can make my life just as fulfilling as I'd like it to be! Here's to creating 2014.
I hope it's a good one for you, too :)
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