When Life Gives You Lemons

We are all given "lemons" in life.  We all struggle with something.  Some have more struggles (lemons) than others.  Some have struggles that no one else can see.  Sometimes we have struggles that others refuse to even acknowledge.  They come in all sorts of ways, physical, financial, mental, familial, etc.  We can also have more struggles at certain times then at other times.  You might have 5 lemons you are currently dealing with, while someone else might have just 1 or 2.  No matter the shape, size or timing we all are given lemons.

We can all choose what to do with these lemons.  We can carry them around and hold resentment for the fact that they are ours to bear.  Some might choose to take the burden on by themselves, trying to eat the lemon no matter how much their face might pucker.  Still others might try to rid themselves of their lemons by trying to blame others, or even getting revenge.  

How are we suppose to turn them into lemonade when it can be so heavy just to have them in the first place?  

We add sugar!

When we add sugar to our lemons they become bearable, even desirable.  If lemons are a metaphor for our burdens and problems, then what is the sugar suppose to represent?  How do we make hard things ok, and bearable?

What sugar do you add to your life to make it bearable, to make it sweet?  The concept of things that apply to every person on the planet and yet differ from person to person fascinates me.  We all need to eat, but not the same things.  We all need down time, to take care of ourselves but there are myriad ways in which we can accomplish this.  

Some of the things that add sweetness to my life, that make my life bearable are: friends, downtime, my relationship with God, hiking, exercising, reading, writing.

Yes, life gives us lemons, but that doesn't mean it is suppose to be bitter, it doesn't mean we are suppose to hate everything about it.  We can do things to add sweetness and turn our lemons into joy.  What things help sweeten your life?

Variety is the Spice of Life

While I was sitting in church today I was thinking about my husband and children.  How blessed we are to have so many varieties of personalities and likes and dislikes in the world.  I went through each person and thought of what they have brought into my life and into the family.  John has brought a love of board games.  Because of this I have a lot more confidence when it comes to games in general, it has expanded my mind and strengthened my critical thinking.  

Jeremiah has brought a lot of laughter into our home.  That is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of his good qualities.  He also loves Kung Fu.  His love of Kung Fu has increased the amount of physical exercise we all get.  John has been taking Kung Fu for some months now and is doing really well at it and really enjoying it.

Caleb loves nature.  His love of and interest in nature has done a lot of things for our family.  First of all it gets us outside more often, which is good.  Second it has greatly increased out knowledge of the out doors.  We play a game where we have to guess the animal that someone has picked and this not only holds their interest during waiting times, but has taught us a lot about the animal kingdom and about individual animals.

James Henry loves science.  His favorite field seems to be physics (who doesn't love a good bouncy ball and all the reactions that one can create with it).  But he has a general interest in most sciences.  He loved the fireworks he saw on the fourth of July.  He immediately asked when we could buy some and set them off.  Well the next time would be New Years Eve and we have had a reminder up on the calendar ever since.  With his excitement over fireworks we wouldn't have purchased fireworks for New Years Eve and wouldn't have had such an enjoyable time setting off fireworks with friends that night.  The best was seeing his excitement over watching them- he was in heaven!

Families, friends, even acquaintances can all add so much to our lives.  I am grateful for my family and the joy they have brought to my life, but also for the knowledge and exposure to things that otherwise wouldn't have happened.  It is a blessing to have a variety of people in our lives.  

Mind Space

     I was wiping down the kitchen table and noticed one of the chairs needed to be wiped down as well.  I ended up attacking all of the chairs with gusto.  As I cleaned, I thought how it's interesting that when something is dirty the dirt is noticeable.  You see the dirt and might think about it for a minute.  I'm sure the amount of time and attention we give the dirt probably varies from person to person.  On the other hand though when something is clean we don't really spend much time noticing the clean state of it.  Our mind is freed up from thinking about dirt, to maybe thinking about the thing itself.  Or in this context of kitchen chairs, maybe we think about the people sitting at the table with us, or the food on the table or whatever it may be.  At any rate we aren't thinking about the dirt, because it's not there.

    Now think of your life and prayer.  When we are dirty, have need to repent, our mind is filled with thoughts of the sin.  Once the dirt is wiped clean and we have repented, our minds are freed up to be able to ponder other things.  Your mind won't be weighed down with the need to repent.  Your mind space is freed up and you are able to progress, the spirit has more room to communicate with you and you can receive inspiration for whatever it is you need your mind to do.  

Moroni 7:45

45 And ^acharity suffereth long, and is ^bkind, and ^cenvieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily ^dprovoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

I found myself on my knees tonight praying good and long for a change of heart.  Praying not to have harsh feelings towards another, and after praying I thought that I needed to ponderize again.  I immediately thought of Moroni 7: 45.  I hope it does the trick.  Carrying around hard feelings towards others makes it hard for the spirit to work in our lives.  It puts us on the path away from the Lord.  It can make us a little more angry and easily provoked as the scripture says.  It can desensitize us towards spiritual things.  

Sometimes a change of the heart is immediate sometimes it is slow in coming and is a gradual change over time.  However my change comes I do at least have faith and hope that it will.  I need this thing.

Ponderizing

My family said they wanted to make a blog where we could share our ponderizing experiences, since no one was posting on it except me, I decided to start sharing my experiences on my own blog...

This week I have been ponderizing the story of the good samaritan.  It is in Luke 10:30-37.  I also looked up an ensign article from some years back that explains all the symbolism in that story.  Wow, is there a lot of symbolism in that story!!  And it's all very beautiful!  It's like the whole story of man in just 7 verses of scripture.

I had an interesting experience with Caleb this week.  He struggles with school and specifically with reading.  Yesterday his book was a bit of step up from what he normally does.  He is ready to move on to the next level of reading.  When we were about half way through the book he turned the page and there were a lot more words on that page then he has ever read on any one page.  It kind of blew his mind and over whelmed him so much that he couldn't really see how he would be able to accomplish reading that whole page.  When Caleb gets overwhelmed it looks a lot like a 2 year old fit.  That is something we are working on, but through the course of trying to get him to see that he could read that page, there were no new things on there for him, they were all things that he would be able to figure out.

At one point he said "The only way to get me to stop crying is to do x, y, and z"  at that moment I had a big realization.  I said "Caleb, my goal is not to get you to stop crying"  and when I said that I realized what my goal as a mother should be.  I continued "My goal is to teach you that you can do this hard thing and help you learn to over come things that seem like they are too big and too hard.  My goal is to help you see that even though there is something before you that seems insurmountable, you can break it down into pieces and when you do that you will be able to accomplish this big thing one tiny piece at a time."  I continued to try and build up his confidence for awhile and he stopped the fit and started to read.

Things like this are not the norm, but they are becoming more and more common as I keep the scriptures constantly presently in my mind, and focus on the Savior more every day.

 Keep ponderizing!!

The Connection or Am I The Only One Seeing This?

I was horrified, awestruck, dumbfounded.  I was 20 years old and watching on T.V. as the unthinkable began to unfold for the families of the students at a high school in Colorado.  A gunman had entered the high school and opened fire!  This is the first I remember this ever happening, maybe it was dramatized by the news, maybe I have forgotten other incidents over the years, for whatever reason this one stuck with me.  The name Columbine will always mean "school shooting" to me.  It will always bring to my remembrance a feeling of disgust and of sadness.  The original sadness for the students involved and the suffering families, and now the sadness of a nation under attack.

Maybe not just a nation for such things are not limited to America.  The most innocent in any part of the world- the children are being attacked at a place of vulnerability.  Education is being attacked and the desire to attend school to better your life, whether its primary school, or secondary, you are no longer safe to do so.  This would imply that you once were safe to do so, this is not the case for everyone and it is not as much the case as I once thought. After a quick internet search I landed on this page:   A History of School Shootings in America.  I will be the first person to be critical of wikipedia, and the validity of its information, so please feel free to correct any of the shootings posted in the link above.  This post's focus is more on what is happening to bring about so many shootings since Columbine.

So what is happening?  Lets take a look...

I did a search on You Tube for children's cartoons.  I clicked on the first one that came up.  It is a 54 minute compilation of Disney cartoons.  I only watched the first 5 mintues and I had what I needed to prove my point.  Here is a link to chip n' dale on You Tube.  Let's look at what is taught in the short 5 minute cartoon of Donald Duck and Chip n' Dale.  The first thing I noticed was entitlement.  Donald Duck steals a bundle of nuts from the chipmunks and then is immediately angry when they take them back.  He is entitled to those nuts!!  He rightfully stole them!!  Then Chip n' Dale teach the same concept of entitlement when Santa shows up and offers a large nut to one and a small nut to the other, a fight promptly ensues between the 2 of them over the bigger gift.  They both feel entitled to something that was suppose to be a gift, suppose to make them happy on Christmas.  Christmas, a day of love, a day to celebrate our Lord and Savior, and they spend it bickering over a present from Santa.  Then as if entitlement weren't enough, they make the fight between the 2 chipmunks and Donald Duck bigger and better, with a full on war scene!  This scene is complete with barricades, rapid gun fire, canon fire, and an ambulance.

So here in the first 5 minutes of this cartoon children are being taught entitlement, violence in order to get back what you stole, and that war and/or fighting is ok, even funny.  Do you see any connection between this and the violence we see in our culture today?

Chip n' Dale is an old cartoon.  The cartoons that are being created today are even worse.  They teach children that they should whine about things like school, and undermine authority figures.  The very places children should turn when they need help, they are being taught not to trust.  Do you see any connections between this and things like teenagers being emotionally unstable?  Parents and teachers are not portrayed as people that can be trusted.  So who do children have to rely on?  When a child feels like they have no one, that is recipe for problems down the road, big problems.  Problems that can take a life time to over come.

Lord, Is It I?

I just read President Uchtdorf's talk from the Oct. 2014 General Conference.  It is hard for me to separate out my thoughts from the healthy to the unhealthy.  President Uchdorf is saying that if we don't step back and evaluate and honestly take stock of our good qualities as well as our bad, then we will be deceiving ourselves.  He says:

 "But being able to see ourselves clearly is essential to our spiritual growth and well-being. If our weaknesses and shortcomings remain obscured in the shadows, then the redeeming power of the Savior cannot heal them and make them strengths.¹² Ironically, our blindness toward our human weaknesses will also make us blind to the divine potential that our Father yearns to nurture within each of us."

I am reminded of an experiment that I did in college (go Aggies) wherein I tried to only have positive thoughts towards people that I passed while walking through campus.  It is natural to notice a person's physical appearance and make judgement calls based on what we see.  These judgement calls are based on our own biases and likes and dislikes, making it natural for many of our thoughts to be negative, because we are all different.  Different clothing likes, hairstyle, physical makeup of our bodies.  That is the worst one of all: to judge someone based on the size/shape/color of their body, something that is completely out of their control. 

In college I wondered what would happen to myself if I only let myself have positive thoughts about the people that I passed.  The main thought being they are a child of God.  Wow!  How my perspective changed.  All the outward physical things I could notice no longer mattered.  The longer the experiment went on, as with anything we do for a length of time, I began to do this naturally, without thought or effort.  Then I noticed that my heart began to change towards the people I encountered.  I began to wonder, instead, about their well being or what might be happening in their life.  Do they need a friend?  Are they having a bad day?  Are they healthy and happy? 

How does this apply to President Uchtdorf's teachings?  Well his teaching applies to me in this way, because if I am to take an honest look at my life there are some people in it that I need to use this experiment on in its concentrated form.  In other words every time I think about them I need to think of the good and dispel as quickly as possible any negative thoughts, even if I think they are true.