Well, since JANUARY!! Lots has happened. I could go into the painstaking details of the past 9 months, but instead I'll just tell you the highlights. First off, I passed all of my spring semester courses with flying colours, bringing my GPA back up to 3.5. As I was trying to decide whether to go home to Ottawa for the summer, everything fell into place in Lethbridge to allow me to go home. I.e. I couldn't find a job in Lethbridge, I had one offered me back in Ottawa, and someone even offered to sublet my room for the summer so I didn't even need to pay rent! So, I went back to Ottawa and, yes, Subway.
Over the summer I attended a number of YSA (young single adult) conferences. I went to Palmyra twice, (once for a conference, once for the pageant) and Toronto. In Toronto I got to meet Sheri Dew and listen to a number of amazing speakers, including David Ulrich and Elder David Murray of the seventy. The topic of that conference was "Great Expectations", the title of a famous book by Charles Dickens. I'm not lying when I say that this conference changed my life.
Every talk I heard, every feeling I had, and almost every workshop I attended spoke the same things to my mind. The same questions kept emerging and I was forced to really think about them. Brother Ulrich spoke about finding meaning in you life, finding quiet moments of delight, and thinking about and working towards who you want to become and what you want to accomplish. Sister Dew spoke about our own personal mission. She mirrored what Brother Ulrich had said and expanded on it (even though they didn't collaborate and she didn't hear his talk at all). She said that we need to be clear about who we are, we need to learn about the Atonement, and we need to learn how to receive personal revelation.
These talks caused me to question what it is that gives me joy, and expanding on that, what I need to do to accomplish my life mission. For me, I think I discovered part of my life's mission through thinking about these things. What gives me the most joy is also, coincidentally, what I feel my life mission is. It is just trying to fit them all into my life that has been my struggle since that conference.
However, since that conference, my perspective on life has changed greatly. I have been happier in the last month and a half than I have been in years. A lot of that has to do with letting go of the past, and focusing on the future and what I can do to become a contributing member of society. I feel that everything I am doing in my life now is helping to prepare me for greater things later on.
I've even noticed a difference in the way people react towards me since I've found this "happy place". I've had more people introduced themselves to me in class, more people want to talk to me at church and school, and people being genuinely happy to see me and want to talk to me. I feel like the joy that I feel on the inside is somehow radiating on the outside as well, and people notice.
I hope that you can take from this, that doing an intense inward survey of what makes you feel the most joy, and what gives you "quiet moments of delight", will cause you to realize that those things are many, and cause you to seek them out. Perhaps once you do, you will be in a similar situation as me.
Until next time,
-J
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