Let me first start out with a brief, but heartfelt "THANK YOU" to every one of you readers out there (yes, even you folks in Germany, Sweden, South Korea, and China who check in regularly! This blog has gone international. Woohoo!). Anyway, there are loads of reading materials to surface skim out in blog land, but for those of you that have been taking the time to stop by, how very kind of you. Truly!
I may not be posting earth-shattering things like "Top 10 Reasons Why You're Going to Die From GMO Foods" or "Cutest Pictures of Beer-bellied Men and Their Cats," but you're taking the time to digest my musings and your feedback both publicly, but mostly privately, has been touching and amazing. Thank you. Your generous response keeps me motivated to keep sharing my thoughts and stories that have taken on an unintentional spiritual direction and I'm okay with that. We need more of it in our day.
And now back to your regularly scheduled adventure...
And now back to your regularly scheduled adventure...
Out of the mouth of my wee 7 year old babe came a gem
of understanding recently that has quietly put a smile on my face all week. She has hit the very normal stage of
childhood in which pretty much everything scary lives under the bed or inside of
the closet. She has absolutely despised
going up to her room at night unaccompanied.
Most nights, as the two of us kneel at her bedside, she prays for help to stop having bad dreams. Much to her dismay, the very next day she reports that those nightmares have still come and breaths out a sigh of frustration.
Babe: “Mom, the nightmares won’t go away. I keep praying, but they haven’t stopped. ”
Me: “I’m sorry. Keep trying. Don’t give up.”
Repeat this conversation 5-7 days a week for endless weeks and then you get the idea.
After several weeks of her asking in prayer for her nightmares to go away, something finally changed.
As frustrated as she's been and as much as I've felt sorry for her inability to get past this, what this small childhood hardship has done is create the perfect opportunity for her to learn a very powerful lesson.
Babe: “Mom, I didn’t
have nightmares last night.”
Me: “Really? Wow!
What happened?” (And then I have the nerve to have a private sidebar convo. with God in my head asking what the heck took so darn long for her to finally get some help. I haven't been struck dead for these sorts of impatient conversations with God--not yet, but I'm sure He's kind enough to find it amusing and not so much as irritating as I would. He is a much more patient parent than I.)
Babe: “I was praying for my bad dreams to go away and then something told me that I should ask for help on how to deal with them instead. So, I prayed for ideas instead and one came. I needed to think of something happy before I fell asleep and then again if I woke up in the night and it worked! I helped myself deal with my bad dreams.”
So profound!
This wee babe just learned that prayer isn’t necessarily a tool for automatically taking away all our troubles, but often a means for petitioning for help in coping with them. She sweetly and trustingly relied on help from a loving Father in Heaven and did what He asked. Her prayers were answered, though in a different way than she had initially intended, when she was willing to trust and act on what she received.
There are certainly times in which, if we ask, God will take away the hurdle. In Wee Babe’s case, I remember a recent time in which her chronic ear infections had made it so that she was losing her word articulation and enunciation at an alarming rate (and missing a whole lot of days of school and nights of sleep). Her speech had regressed significantly because she hadn't been able to hear well over a long period of time. Visions of having to learn sign language began dancing in my head. I was troubled by this.
Like the normal mom that I am, I freaked out. Then I took her to a pediatrician, to a specialist, and then freaked out some more. What finally made the difference was in recognizing
this as an opportunity to bring my little family together and in unity
ask God to show His stuff.
Aren't all of life's hardships designed for this very purpose?--To help us work, grow, and then gently, and at times not so gently, remind us to rely on God? (*Psst* I'll let you in on a little secret. What I just shared really IS the very reason that we have hurdles to tackle. Take a good look at your current hard stuff. What are you learning and who/what are you relying on to get through it?)
Aren't all of life's hardships designed for this very purpose?--To help us work, grow, and then gently, and at times not so gently, remind us to rely on God? (*Psst* I'll let you in on a little secret. What I just shared really IS the very reason that we have hurdles to tackle. Take a good look at your current hard stuff. What are you learning and who/what are you relying on to get through it?)
We prayed, fasted and sure enough, a short time later this little girl was made well and her speech and hearing improved dramatically. Her illness and struggle became a means for strengthening our faith.
We grew out of her small ordeal. My oldest daughter referenced this example repeatedly last year as an example of a time when her faith had grown. Who knew that I would have actually been grateful to have had someone that I loved go through a hard thing, but afterwards, I was! We had actually been blessed by it!
But there are often times when we see those life hurdles to clear and God is not planning on removing them--at least not any time soon.
Nope, He’s going to let them sit there. He may even let them grow bigger and bigger until you just plain can't see a way around them anymore. Now what?
In the Latter-Day Saint religion, we are perceived as practicing a lot of "thou shall not's" in the form of don't smoke, don't drink, don't do drugs, etc. Granted science has taught us that these things are bad for our bodies, but have you ever considered just why addictions in general are bad for you? Let's also throw in anything else that may become habitually excessive like eating, shopping, and other obsessions into the mix for a moment. You need to ask yourself why you're doing these things in the first place. After a real honest conversation, you'll find that they are usually used as a means for coping or escaping.
God does not want you to turn to those things as a means of coping because the whole idea of allowing life's hurdles to be there in the first place has been designed as a way of getting YOU to turn to HIM instead.
Why do we have to become so reliant on Him? Man, I struggled with this concept for a while to varying degrees. I am fiercely independent and did not enjoy having to ask for help from others for a long time. I hated it. It made me feel weak, inadequate, and guilty. Life turned up the heat and those hurdles kept showing up smack in the middle of my lane until I finally found ones so huge that I had no choice but to come to a complete stop. I could in no humanly way get around them on my own.
So, I ran a lot to deal with the pain. I would go as far as saying that for a time, I had a bit of a running addiction. I admit that I also spent money that I should not have in order to have some quick pick me ups from time to time. We're not talking crazy shopping sprees and hoarding boxes upon boxes of new shoes under the bed, but just enough of a pattern that I realized it was not doing me any favors in the long run.
I also found myself sometimes absentmindedly relying on the kind words of others to help build my own self-worth (not that accepting/receiving compliments from others is bad, but when you rely on others instead of God for approval, you find yourself a prisoner of a subtle sort of addiction).
Now you know all of my dirty secrets! The great news is that I feel like I have a good handle on those old bad habits.
The risks that come with sharing such things publicly should be enough to make me want to keep such things to myself, but I find that so many, if not all of us, need a frank and honest reminder that each of us struggles in some way. If in sharing small bits of myself--the good, the bad, and the ugly realities--leads you to be kinder with yourself or motivated to make a good change, then I have accomplished something worthwhile here.
So, I'll ask again. Why does He (our Father in Heaven) want us to rely on Him? Because He knows us, our pasts and our futures better than we can know them ourselves. The misconception of the angry God of the Old Testament days is not an accurate portrayal. In all that I have seen, felt and experienced in my own short 37+ years is that I have a Father who is kinder, gentler, and more loving and more involved than anyone that I have ever known and I've known some of the very best people around.
Out of the mouth of babes, we are reminded in simple ways, like I witnessed in my own wee babe, that He wants us to rely on Him. It may not be always be in the ways that we would want and expect, but it's always, ALWAYS the way that we would want for ourselves if we could see the bigger picture and end product of our lives like He does right now.
Now get to work. Stop hoping for those hurdles to disappear. Roll those sleeves up and start building that trust in Him that you'll need in order to jump those hurdles, clear out the monsters under the bed, and start acting in faith like a wee babe.
In the Latter-Day Saint religion, we are perceived as practicing a lot of "thou shall not's" in the form of don't smoke, don't drink, don't do drugs, etc. Granted science has taught us that these things are bad for our bodies, but have you ever considered just why addictions in general are bad for you? Let's also throw in anything else that may become habitually excessive like eating, shopping, and other obsessions into the mix for a moment. You need to ask yourself why you're doing these things in the first place. After a real honest conversation, you'll find that they are usually used as a means for coping or escaping.
God does not want you to turn to those things as a means of coping because the whole idea of allowing life's hurdles to be there in the first place has been designed as a way of getting YOU to turn to HIM instead.
Why do we have to become so reliant on Him? Man, I struggled with this concept for a while to varying degrees. I am fiercely independent and did not enjoy having to ask for help from others for a long time. I hated it. It made me feel weak, inadequate, and guilty. Life turned up the heat and those hurdles kept showing up smack in the middle of my lane until I finally found ones so huge that I had no choice but to come to a complete stop. I could in no humanly way get around them on my own.
So, I ran a lot to deal with the pain. I would go as far as saying that for a time, I had a bit of a running addiction. I admit that I also spent money that I should not have in order to have some quick pick me ups from time to time. We're not talking crazy shopping sprees and hoarding boxes upon boxes of new shoes under the bed, but just enough of a pattern that I realized it was not doing me any favors in the long run.
I also found myself sometimes absentmindedly relying on the kind words of others to help build my own self-worth (not that accepting/receiving compliments from others is bad, but when you rely on others instead of God for approval, you find yourself a prisoner of a subtle sort of addiction).
Now you know all of my dirty secrets! The great news is that I feel like I have a good handle on those old bad habits.
The risks that come with sharing such things publicly should be enough to make me want to keep such things to myself, but I find that so many, if not all of us, need a frank and honest reminder that each of us struggles in some way. If in sharing small bits of myself--the good, the bad, and the ugly realities--leads you to be kinder with yourself or motivated to make a good change, then I have accomplished something worthwhile here.
So, I'll ask again. Why does He (our Father in Heaven) want us to rely on Him? Because He knows us, our pasts and our futures better than we can know them ourselves. The misconception of the angry God of the Old Testament days is not an accurate portrayal. In all that I have seen, felt and experienced in my own short 37+ years is that I have a Father who is kinder, gentler, and more loving and more involved than anyone that I have ever known and I've known some of the very best people around.
Out of the mouth of babes, we are reminded in simple ways, like I witnessed in my own wee babe, that He wants us to rely on Him. It may not be always be in the ways that we would want and expect, but it's always, ALWAYS the way that we would want for ourselves if we could see the bigger picture and end product of our lives like He does right now.
Now get to work. Stop hoping for those hurdles to disappear. Roll those sleeves up and start building that trust in Him that you'll need in order to jump those hurdles, clear out the monsters under the bed, and start acting in faith like a wee babe.
Off to another adventure. Until next time...
~Arianna
~Arianna
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