gratitude, example #5

example #5. i worry so often about things.. where to live, what to do with my contracts, marriage, what i want to do with the rest of my life, internships, my body. and yet everything just seems to work out. and so i can't figure out if it's good to worry or if i should just not care bc things are going to work out anyway. and i think the answer is somewhere in between. and i don't know exactly how to describe it but someone gave me the wonderful and wise advice/counsel that helped me to see more clearly how i can find my own personal balance, though it's not formulaic, just a feeling when i'm doing it. so three years ago next month i had just entered the mtc (missionary training center) as a missionary for my church. i would be gone for the next eighteen months. and i had just taken the LSAT two weeks earlier and was anticipating my grade. 3 days after being in the mtc i got my score back. ugh (that's an ugh with sadness--i was sad). it was bad. and i cried. even though i'm not a crier. and of course bc i'm a worrier, i just worried. but LUCKILY, very very early on, SOMEHOW the lord blessed me t have this realization and go with it. i just felt not to worry, that things were going to work out and if i worried about it, it would be a waste, bc things were going to work out anyway. so i stopped worrying. i exercised my faith, trusted it, and heeded that feeling. and never looked back. and then what do you know? i'm in law school. i didn't come right after i came home, bc i ended up doing something that was right for that time--taking classes to prepare me for law school in the mpa program, working at the mtc in development with the new curriculum, and then as a teacher (to show me how much i love teaching!), and then to be in just an amazing relationship that meant so much to me. which i probably could NOT have done those things, well i definitely could not have done those things had i been in law school. and now i'm in law school. SO the point is that i got from that is i just started to think, i wonder what my mission would have been like had i spent the whole time worrying about law school. luckily god gave me a great imagination and i can really put myself in situations/hypos, and i just clearly saw how much i would've missed. so i am trying to apply that to my life right now and "to be happy in the season i am now in" (thank you elder holland for those words).

finding happiness :)

happiness is a little like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. if you go our deliberately to find it, you may have difficulty catching it. but if you will follow directions closely, you will not need to pursue it. it will overtake you and remain with you. -spencer w. kimball