Life: I Dare You to be Better. I Doubt You Could Be!

I know you have all heard this before... but, life is so awesome!!! Wow, everyday I wonder just how on earth Heavenly Father can bless us so much.  We think we know what it is to love someone, love our family, our friends... but then I look at my own life and the lives of my family members and friends, and I realize that I only comprehend a small fraction of what love really is according to Heavenly Father and our Savior.

I have a wonderful friend that I'm so blessed to have! She and I get to talk a couple times every week, and it's so amazing to me just how Heavenly Father leads people into our lives that can teach us, and that we, in turn, can teach as well.  The Gospel is such an amazing thing! We really are the Lord's hands if we allow Him to guide us.  This lady, though, is so strong.  She's been through such incredible trials, and yet, is one of the most faithful, strong, confident, trusting women that I have ever met, and she is an inspiration to me.

I have yet another wonderful friend that I'm so lucky to have in my life! I love her so much.  She, too, has been through some mighty hard (and I mean seriously hefty) and she is, and has been, such a trooper! So faithful, so diligent, so loving, so patient... everything you would hope someone would be, she has been that, and a million more things! I admire her so much more than she will probably ever know.

Like all of you, I have been through some pretty rough times, but I'm so, SO grateful for the gospel! Heavenly Father has blessed me so much with the most amazing, understanding, patient, loving, faithful family, the most incredible bishops, amazing home teachers and visiting teachers, an incredible ward, and I could go on and on about everything that I have to be thankful for, but it would fill up this page! I'm so grateful that I've been given the life I have been given, because it couldn't be more amazing, and I couldn't be more grateful for it.  More and more, I look at the crazy puzzle pieces of what I call life, the painful ones, the happy ones, the sad ones, the exciting ones, the big ones and little ones, and I wonder how Heavenly Father makes all the pieces fit together to create the most beautiful plan.  It really doesn't matter HOW He does it, but He DOES! Know why? Because He loves us.  He loves us more than we can begin to understand.

Love, that thing that we mere mortals only get a taste of! How can He loves us so much? I'm just so grateful that He does!

I heard something AWESOME from my Stake President at Institute last week.  In our stake, we were counseled to do different things, one of them being to "act, and not be acted upon."  The thing that I found so wonderful and interesting was the way the Stake President explained this to us.  There are things in life that we can completely control, things we can partially control, and things that we have little or no control over.

Complete control: Ourselves (actions, decisions, thoughts, attitude etc.)

Partial control: Others (influencing others decisions, actions, attitudes, etc.)
Little or no control: Time, weather, consequences etc.

The Stake President drew a small circle on the chalk board and told us that this circle represented what we had control over in our lives.  Then he drew a very large circle around that little circle and explained that the big circle represented what we can't control in our lives.  Sometimes, he said, we get down and sad and yada yada yada because we feel like we have no control over our lives.  This can be something as little as feeling like someone always "makes" you angry, or "makes" you sad, or whatever it is! You could be suffering a consequence because of some action, you could be feeling distanced from the Lord for whatever reason.  All of these things make the little circle smaller and smaller making it seem as though we have little or no control over our lives.  The trick is, he said, to do everything that YOU can to control your life.  The only thing you have control over is yourself! No one can "make" you do anything.  You choose to be happy, you choose to not get angry, you choose to go to the temple, you choose to go to church on Sunday, you choose to read your scriptures everyday, you choose to kneel for prayers so Heavenly Father can guide you.  All these choices are things that you control so that even when life seems ridiculous and hard and out of control, when you are doing all the best things that you can, then you are in control of your life.

Isn't that super neat? Now, I have to make sure I say that this was from my Stake President, not a General Authority, so I'm not prophesying here or anything, but I just wanted to share something that I thought was really neat and uplifting.

Life is so amazing!!