Welcome to my Blog! I hope that you will be able to find the time to read my posts and comment as you feel prompted. Although I am doing this blog to fulfill an assignment at school, it is something I have wanted to do for a long time. It is my hope that it will help strengthen our family bonds and give us all things to think and ponder about.
I am studying the "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" for my religion class this semester. We are literally studying it line upon line, precept upon precept! What a great opportunity this is for me as I am already feeling a greater sense of the importance of marriage, and I am just 3 weeks into the class.
What has impressed me the most so far has been the role that the spirit and our divine nature plays in marriage. Although I was not a member of the church when your dad and I met, I can look back now and see the influence the spirit had in my life, guiding me to make choices that led to our meeting. I would like to share with you a few words I wrote in another essay about our first meeting:
So at age 20, I packed up and moved to a new city to start a new job working for my brother, a move that would change my life forever. Shortly after my arrival, my brother hired an estimator - a very good looking estimator. He had a disco ‘fro and a “Marlboro Man” moustache, a very hot commodity in 1978. But there was also something different about him; he had a light and a countenance I had not known before. When we were introduced, he shook my hand and an amazing thing happened: it seemed as though he did not see the emotionally crippled, insecure girl that I was, but saw instead the potential for strength and confidence that was lurking beneath the surface. Three weeks later we began dating and I found out that he was an inactive Mormon. And so it was that over coffee, cigarettes, and wine he taught me the gospel, and we were married 9 months later by the bishop in an LDS chapel.
As I have thought about this encounter years later, it is evident to me that in that first meeting there was a spiritual connection. This connection has endured over all of these years, helping us to continue on in spite of the hardships and difficulties we have encountered. If you will indulge me, I would like to include an example from the same essay that explains how that connection has helped me through the difficulties of my illness:
But Heavenly Father knows we must be tried in all things, and just about 7 years ago I was inflicted with a sudden and chronic mystery illness that completely floored me. My life as I knew it was over and I was devastated. The old voices bubbled up again, telling me I was nothing and I could not pull myself out of the deep well of despair. I began seeing a therapist who helped me make some headway with the depression I was experiencing. But something was missing from my efforts and I couldn’t push past my old enemies of doubt and insecurity.But then one day about a year ago my husband did something quite small in action but huge in results. I had helped him solve what was to me a minor problem with our accounting software. When I showed him what I had done, he said simply “You’re amazing!” I laughed and said something sarcastic, like “Oh yeah, I’m so amazing’. But he grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes and said “No, I really mean it. You are amazing.” Something about the way he said it reminded me of those early days when we had first met and I felt that he could see past my broken self and once again into my potential.He continued to tell me that I was amazing over the smallest of things. It kind of became our little joke: I was amazing when I constructed a spreadsheet or cooked dinner or bought him his favorite cookies from Trader Jo’s. But each time he said it, I could feel his sincerity and the meaning behind it. And very gradually, a light began to grow again within me and I started to believe him. Maybe I really was amazing.In the year since he first made that declaration, I have come to understand what it really means and it has helped me move past my roadblocks. I am amazing and it is because I am a daughter of God. I have a divine spirit, and when it is freed from the prisons I construct myself, I am pure light, an amazing reflection of our Creator. It is the same spirit that simmered deep inside of me and told me that I was worth more. It is the spirit that my husband recognized when he shook my hand the first time we met. Those prison walls are still a battle to tear down and new ones are always popping up. But I know what lies behind them: an amazing spirit, growing in power and stature. I am humbled and grateful that I have been blessed with an eternal companion who has the ability to see with spiritual eyes and remind me always of who I am. And I dare to tell myself every day that, yes, I am something of great worth - I am amazing.
I hope that each of you can recognize the influence of the spirit and can look upon each other through spiritual eyes, seeing your eternal companion the way that Heavenly Father sees them. It was not by chance that you each met your spouse. I believe that it was by the power of the spirit that you were drawn to one another and that your marriage is truly ordained by God.
I love you all and I am grateful everyday for the choice you each made to marry in the temple. Thank you for the powerful examples you are to me.
