Saturday, April 24, 2010

The End of Semester Blues!!

Well, it's happened again. The end of semester is coming, as it always does, and I have the "end of semester blues". I'm crazy busy with projects and papers and finals coming up. However, this is not what has got me down. It's the fact that another chapter of my life is coming to a close. After this semester, I will be leaving Logan and Utah State behind. I'll most likely be doing my student teaching in Salt Lake. So that means that the chances of me returning to Logan are slim. I know what all of you are thinking. I always complain about Logan and being away from everyone and how glad I will be to move home. While it's true that I will be glad to be back in my favorite city again for the summer, I cant help but feel a little sad. I remember a time in my life when my heart had been shattered into a million pieces. I needed something to really hold on to. As i contemplated what to do, I decided that I would move down to UVU (in Orem). As much as I hate to admit this, it was mostly for a boy. I needed to get away from Salt Lake and away from memories and there was a guy that I liked down there that I had dated in the past and we had reconnected. I thought it was going to be the best thing for me. Luckily, Heavenly Father had other plans for me. One of my best friends Heather was going through a pretty bad break up too and she had decided to go to Utah State. She told me I should think about going. When I graduated high school, Utah State had been my first choice for college but since they didnt have a very good nursing program, I had to rule it out. Since my major had since changed, I checked into Utah State's Elementary Education program. I found out it was one of the top programs in the country! The very next day (I kid you not!!) I get a postcard from Utah State. I had never gotten anything from them in the mail. It read "Thinking of transferring here?" How did they know!? haha So i prayed and prayed about what I should do. Finally after weeks of agonizing about where I should go, the answer came clear as a bell. I needed to go to Utah State. My first semester at Utah State was rough. I remember nights when I would call my mom, sobbing, telling her how of I wanted to come home. My heart was still broken and it didn't feel like Logan was the glue that I had thought it would be that would fix it. About a month into my first semester at Utah State, I was in the midst of one of my many breakdowns and was talking to my mom on the phone. She said to me "I'm sick of this. You need to pull yourself together or you're coming home. You can come home and be miserable here for free." At the time, that was hard to hear. But I can't tell you how grateful I am for my mom's tough love!! I know that was hard for her, but she knew what was best for me. That was the beginning of the end. The end of the heartache and hurt. I knew my mom was right. So i started to get more involved. I grew to love my roommates and made amazing friends in my ward and in my classes. All the pain that I had brought with me from Salt Lake seemed to disappear. It was then that I knew that the Lord had been directing my path all along. He knew I needed to be in Logan. He knew what people to put into my life. And so, I began to heal and become the person that I am today. I am so much stronger and more confident in myself. Because of the influence of some of my friends at Utah State, I served a full-time mission. This was the best decision of my life and has forever changed me. I will never be the same and I will never be that same meek and defenseless girl that I was when I first arrived in Logan. And so, for this reason, I feel a little sad to leave this place. This is where I found myself. This is where my journey really began. Logan...you're been good to me. And I'll take the lessons that I learned here with me for the rest of my life.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

I finally felt like writing again!!

Well, here I am…back in the blogging community once again. I made this blog about a month ago and I am just now getting around the writing on it! I hope this isn’t any indication of how frequent of a blogger I’ll be. I really used to enjoy blogging before my mission. My mom was asking me the other day what the point of a blog is. I told her about how it helps me to stay caught up with people and know what’s going on in their lives. Her response? “Well, it’s no one’s’ business what you a doing!”. I laughed. Then I realized that there is a much larger reason why I used to enjoy blogging and that is that it was for me. It was something that I used to do when I was feeling like I had too many things going on in my head. It was a way that I could let some of the many thoughts floating around in my head spill out onto paper. It was a great way to clear my mind. Well today, I had a lot of things going on in my mind. The first thing I am thinking about is my mission. However, if I am being honest, this isn’t rare. I think about my mission every day of my life. Oh how I loved being a missionary and how I long to just shout the truthfulness of the gospel from the roof tops! I know how Alma felt when he declared “O that I were an angel and could have the wish of mine heart”. But today, the reason I am thinking about my mission is because I went to a missionary homecoming talk today. It stirred up so many feelings. As I listened to my friend speak of all the miracles that he experienced on his mission, I couldn’t help but remember all the miracles the Lord allowed me to be a part of when I was on my mission. I have also been thinking a lot about my future. This has been troubling me for some time now. I finally asked my dad to give me a blessing the other night because I was just looking for some peace. The blessing gave me a lot of direction! Now, I am certain of a few things. It is a good thing for me to finish my Elementary Education degree. It is a good thing for me to go to SUU in the fall. And finally it is a good thing to “become proficient in the Spanish Language”. How these three things all fit together, I don’t know. I have an uneasy feeling about what is in store for me. I think this is due to my inability to make decisions. I feel like even when I get answers to my prayers, I question those answers and talk my way around them until I’ve convinced myself that it never was an answer in the first place! I just hope I can figure out what it is the Lord wants me to do because that is really all that matters to me. Well hopefully all my of blog posts won’t be this serious. I just have felt in a somber mood the last little while and thought that if I were to express it, perhaps it might dispel it.