Come What May and Love It

This Easter season, there has been a trend going around with the hashtag "#BecauseofHim". I didn't want to follow the rest of the crowd, but as I started reflecting, I wanted to write a blog post about my thoughts. So here it goes... Because of Him... I get to study at this great university that is centered around the Spirit. It is amazing the kind of people you meet and experiences you get to have when it is centered around Jesus Christ. Because of Him... I have the most amazing friends in the whole world. I got to meet them through common beliefs and an understanding of Jesus Christ. Because of Him... I get to stay with these crazy people FOREVER. They are stuck with me whether they like it or not. Jesus died and was resurrected so that we may live again. We can be with our families forever. This is something I have grown to appreciate more and more as I have not lived in the same state as my family for three years. Because of Him... I am here. He helped me ...

Life is busy. If you haven’t figured that out by now, you are probably in for a rude awakening. I am really starting to realize how impossible it is to fit everything in. It is especially hard as a young, single college student.   There is school. There is homework. There is work. There are church callings. There is scripture study and prayers. On top of all that, you want to try to have an ounce of a social life. It is hard! Sometimes life can be overwhelming. Sometimes, I feel so split in all these different directions. I feel like it is impossible to get it all done. I wake up in the morning and I have to attend 4 hours of class. Then I need to go to work. Once I come home, it doesn’t stop there. I have homework to complete, projects to work on, emails to send, students to contact, and people to visit. I try to get all these things done quickly so I can get a couple of hours to chill with my boyfriend before going to bed at a decent hour and waking up to start it over again....

Being me- I needed to write a blog post about my accident. It helps me to understand everything that has happened. After everything that has happened in the last 24 hours, I feel like writing this blog post will bring be some sort of closure. I am so so so incredibly blessed. Words cannot event express the humility I feel right now. It was really bad. I was sitting at a stoplight in Orem ( Here is the Google Map of where it was ). I didn't even see it coming. Suddenly a car slams into me at full speed. They had lost control. This caused me to slam into the truck in front of me. I remember those 2 seconds felt like 5 minutes. I don't remember seeing my life flash before my eyes. I don't remember thinking about what was happening. All I remember is hearing myself say "You're okay. You're okay. You're okay." These words are what helped me stay calm for so long. Smoke started coming into my car and I knew I needed to get out. Some random guy-- I stil...

*NOTE: I apologize for this post. I have been feeling really sentimental and this post just came out of all that. It is so interesting how your whole life can be altered by one decision. I was talking to some good friends. We were randomly just talking about how I became friends with his whole apartment in August. I had not really thought about when we became friends because I thought it was a completely different moment. Then he told me about when he felt that we had first interacted on a non-superficial level and how it really changed everything else. Let me rewind...It was the day before school started in August. I went over to a family dinner. I got stung by a wasp for the first time in my life (it was a very traumatic experience).  Then I texted the boy I liked at the time and asked if he wanted to watch a movie that night. He ended up being busy, and I ended up going home from the family get-together kind of sad. I had promised myself that I would get out...

To those of you who heard my testimony today, I apologize that I am repeating myself. This is an experience I just needed to write down for myself. Let's rewind to Monday night. I hadn't been feeling all that great. I had only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before. I just was ready to go to bed. I told myself that I would come home from FHE and go to sleep. I was in my pajamas by 8:30- crazy for a college student, right? One of my friends dropped in for a visit. After she left, I had one of those moments where I just felt completely alone. I went to my room and prayed when a few simple words came to my mind. "Heavenly Father, Are you really there? And do you hear and answer every child's prayer?" These two lines from the children's primary song were stuck in my mind. In the moment, it is easy to doubt that Heavenly Father answers our prayers. How can He really hear every single prayer around the world? How can He answer every single one? It just ...

I have been very open about my past depression. I have told people about my struggles, but I always make sure that I talk in the past tense. I need to be honest. It is not just in the past. Did I go through hard things back in High School? Yes. Have things gotten easier? No. Some days are harder than others. And I have had my share of bad days in the last year. In fact, last semester was probably the worst I have been in a long time. Anyway- a few nights ago got really bad really fast. I was feeling alone and in the dark. I sat in my car and just cried because of the rush of emotion and dark thoughts filling my head.  I decided to look up a talk by one of my amazing professors, Brad Wilcox. In this address, he talks about grace. I really love the talk and would encourage you all to read it . One thing he said was "So grace is not a booster engine that kicks in once our fuel supply is exhausted. Rather, it is our constant energy source. It is not the light at...

Yesterday, I took a group to go Hospital singing. We were having a rough time on the second floor. We were being told 'no' or 'not today' by every person. I was feeling sick to my stomach. Here I had gotten 15 people to give up their precious time on a Sunday afternoon and we weren't even able to do what we came to do! We got to sing to one person on the second floor. Then, I felt like we needed to go to the third floor. Realize that I have been going hospital singing for eight months now almost every Sunday. I had never been to the third floor before. But yesterday, we needed to go there. My goodness. It is indescribable the events that went down on that third floor. I am going to try to write them down for my own sake, but I will not do them justice. First we visited Lynn. He was an old man sitting in a dark room. I don't even remember what songs we sang, but afterward we just started talking to him. He had such a strong testimony. One person asked ...