Purify by Fire

Well this week I had a few inspiring moments. Actually, it's been an accumulation of a lot of inspiring moments, and I feel like I need to write some of it down before I forget how much I have felt inspired.

 First off, I feel like lately I have been a little frustrated with the way a few things in my life have been going. The combination of stress, injury, and disappointment have kind of been rocking my world. I know I joke about this a lot, but sometimes I really do wonder why bad things happen to good people. Sometimes it really seems like you are doing your best, but things just don't seem to work out how you want it to. Well thanks to several friends, who probably have no idea the impact they have had on me, I have been able to think about things from a little better perspective. I will start off by quoting a friend of mine who I became pen pals with about a year ago.

"I believe that a huge part of this life is struggle. That's how we grow as people. When God has us struggle to figure out what he wants us to do so we can be happy, it's his way of helping us effectively learn. It's no different with his church. These past few months I have been thinking a lot about this principle. I love how Joseph Smith had problems, and how the church continues to struggle to figure out what God wants. It's empowering to me. Look at all the good he and the church has done despite mistakes! It helps me know that I can do good even when I screw up. Imperfect people running God's church is part of his rad plan!"

I love how he says God lets us struggle so we can figure out what he wants us to do to find happiness and to learn. We aren't supposed to be perfect and things aren't supposed to go perfectly in our life. There are going to be hard things, but it's the process that makes us who we are. I love the idea that struggling to do the right thing and still making mistakes on our way is totally fine. I know that I, personally, tend to be a perfectionist, and I feel like I constantly have to remind myself that there is no need for me to be so hard on myself.

I was hanging out with another friend, who I just met a couple weeks ago, and was talking to her about writing a letter of intent to grad programs. We are both applying to grad school this year, and we were swapping feelings and ideas about the letter of intent. She is an artist and ended up telling a group of us about her spiritual awakening, if you will. She had a phase where she was trying to capture the soul in a picture. She said that she really struggled with getting what she wanted, and found that it really brought her down into a depression of sorts. She said that when she was at her lowest point was when she was able to do her best work. It was at this point that she realized it's not about capturing the soul in a picture, it's about the journey and finding your soul as you struggle through hard things. Having her tell us something so personal and something so relatable gave me chills.

 I loved her perspective and that she felt so passionately about it. It's so interesting to me how so many of us have similar feelings and go through similar situations, but we express them differently or understand them differently, based on our experience and ways of thinking. As alone as we often feel, we're actually not alone at all. As we struggle through hard things and take that journey to find our soul, we become stronger, better people for it.

 And that is the beauty of God's rad plan. Conquering the refiner's fire to become better people.