Where did May go?

Image found here.

As I sit here just hours away from the first of June, I once again wonder how time passes so quickly. Sometimes it terrifies me.

Yesterday I sat in church hand in hand with my beautiful little sister. We haven't been very close in the last few years. Our differences and our pride kept us from being as close as we ought to have been. But in the last year both of our hearts have been softened. We have realized what a treasure sisterhood is and how much we both need one another. We pledged to work on our relationship this summer, and with the help of Jesus Christ, our hearts are knit together once more. As we sat in church with our hands clasped, I felt like a Frida Kahlo painting; the gospel has united our hearts once more. How grateful I am for the love of Jesus Christ that melts the ice from our hearts, freeing them to blossom once more. And how grateful I am to have an amazing, inspirational sister who is willing to open her heart to me.

I've experienced great healing, progression and joy in my stay at home, and now I am getting really nervous about the upcoming changes. I'm nervous to leave my family and return to BYU, nervous that I won't get to do everything I want to in my last 3 weeks at home, nervous that my brother will miss me. And then come the fears about the rest of my future - fear that I may never get to be an EFY counselor, fear at the thought of graduating in 2 years and saying goodbye to the university I love so dearly, fear of trying to find a job and the great unknown that comes after all that. I guess I just don't deal well with change at all. Even as a child I couldn't jump into the swimming pool; I drove my cousins crazy with my snail-like descent into the water, insisting that I needed the time to adjust. And I still do.

I think I fear change because it comes right when I've adjusted from the last curve ball God has thrown me and come to recognize the abundance God has given me. When change approaches, I wonder if the future can hold anything as wonderful as I what I already have.

Thank goodness for living prophets who remind me to have faith.

Last night, when the fears and anxiety started to surround me, I put on one of my favorite BYU Devotionals, "Remember Lot's Wife" by Jeffrey R. Holland. And even though he gave the address 18 months ago and I've already listened to it dozens of times, last night his words were just what I needed. He said:

I plead with you not to dwell on days now gone, nor to yearn vainly for yesterdays, however good those yesterdays may have been....Faith is always pointed toward the future. Faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives. So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say that she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she already had. Apparently she thought—fatally, as it turned out—that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as those moments she was leaving behind....

Some of you [are] having thoughts such as these: Is there any future for me? What does a new year or a new semester or a new major or a new romance hold for me? Will I be safe? Will life be sound? Can I trust in the Lord and in the future? Or would it be better to look back, to go back, to go home?

To all such of every generation, I call out, “Remember Lot’s wife.” Faith is for the future. Faith builds on the past but never longs to stay there. Faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ truly is the “high priest of good things to come.”
I know that there is much good in my future. Whenever changes come, they are because God wants me to learn and experience new things. He will help me be ready and help me adjust. If I keep His commandments, I will be able to find peace and happiness no matter where He takes me.
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. -Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." -Mark 9:24