Something I mentioned several times in missionary letters and journal entries from college was that the past year had been my “best one yet” and how much I was looking forward to what the new year would bring. I wonder, where along the way did I lose that perspective and attitude, the tendency to see each year as just getting better and better?
It’s really made me think – WOULD I be able to say, right now, that last year was my “best one yet?” No question it was my hardest. The most painful. There have been times when I literally thought I might die from the depth of the pain and gut-wrenching despair I was experiencing in that moment, that surely my heart would simply stop. Could I truly and honestly classify this past year as my best one yet?
Except. As I ponder the events and lessons and changes that 2021 entailed, it does make me pause. In so many ways there is no question that this past year has been my best. I can look back and recognize how the excruciatingly painful process of “smelting” has refined me and our family, ways I feel I have changed for the better, how I continue to learn and grow (and yes, I still have a long way to go). We have been hurt and traumatized and are continuing to heal as we navigate this grief journey, but I can also see how we’ve grown closer as a family, how much more grateful we are, and that overall there is a greater feeling of peace and love in our home now (despite all the hard, which there has been plenty of).
And even in those years of college it wasn’t necessarily that my outward circumstances were easy. The summer after my freshman year I started experiencing some severe and frightening symptoms that caused me a lot of pain, sometimes making it physically impossible for me to work or do school or the other things I wanted to at that time. (Ironic that at one point doctors thought I might have leukemia, or a brain tumor. Or that in one of his letters Kenny said how proud he was of the way I was handling that trial and he didn’t think he could ever deal with being so sick as well. How wrong he was!) Those symptoms did not get resolved that year, and several of them are things I have continued to suffer and had to live with for the past 20+ years.
But as President Nelson has taught us, “the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives.” I know that is true. What we choose to focus on is powerful. Despite the fact that there is so much hard to get through, and low moments, and times of darkness. But that overall trajectory of our lives can continue to trend upwards, and our potential for growth is limitless when we invite Jesus Christ to help us along our path.
(And yes, those are awfully empty bookshelves in that picture. I am just now [finally!] getting things put back in place from Christmas. And man, I miss Kendall’s long arms for taking selfies!)
