Wow, what a day!
😶
I woke up feeling sick, a continuation of the symptoms switching from my head to my chest. That seems to be what’s going on, anyway.
I’m still not 100% convinced that it’s not just allergies from maybe mold inside the van from spilled food in the cooler that got moldy?
I got everything out of the cooler out of the van last week and sort of rinsed it off, but it still definitely smelled like mold inside the cooler, so maybe it’s still an issue?
I sprayed a bunch of Lysol in it just… because. 🙃
And maybe I actually am just… sick.
I think I’m sick and it’s just mild but long lasting.
Anyway, that’s not why I wrote “what a day!”
I wrote that because today was… a beautiful day, a spiritual breakthrough–even more so than the last couple of days.
I’m back. Stephen. The one with the soft heart, not the angry heart, the one with more love available to give, the one who’s hungry for the things of God and eternity. 🙂
And it feels…
Wonderful.
I’ve been happy. I’ve been excited. I’ve been filled with deep and powerful gratitude. I’ve felt the infinite love of God.
Today has been full of… light and peace and just… wow. I truly “stand all amazed.”
Truly, I’m humbled, grateful, and inspired by the magnitude of the events of these recent days.
There’s been so much pain and so much anger and so much darkness, and it’s lifted today.
And what a perfect day for it, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
After getting up this morning, I started chatting with Father again. It’s not natural for me right now as it once was. I’m out of the habit completely. Many times I’ve almost started praying, only to sort of just die off and not, I think?
Long gone are the days where prayer was nearly as natural as conversation with anyone I might run into.
And there’s still a bit of apprehension that I face, knowing that I’ve walked away from the light and into the dark so many times in the past, hesitant to do it again, hesitant because there’s a little part of me that’s afraid that I might not be able to hold on to the light yet again and will choose to walk back toward the darkness.
And of course all the other doubts that come from having the mind that I have. 🙃
But I prayed a little bit, and then I found a BYU speech from Elder Scott entitled “To the Lonely and Misunderstood.” I was hoping to find one of the BYU speeches from Elder Scott that I used to listen to on a regular basis back in 2010-ish, I think, so I could share it with someone close to me who’s going through a really really rough time.
Anyway, I found the address, and I listened to it, and I shared it with that person.
I’m grateful for recorded messages from those whom I consider to be inspired by God and the things that they share and teach.
I chatted a little bit more with The Big Guy upstairs. I also pulled out some ammunition to compare with Richard’s of the same brand to see if having been stored in humidity for a time in Arkansas caused any damage, as the rounds that I pulled out of one of the boxes looked pretty… not good–a Gap being between the brass and the bullet itself.
Apparently, that’s normal for that particular brand of ammunition, so that was good. Hopefully that means that it won’t give anyone I sell it to issues.🤞 And of course I’ll let them know about the humidity either way.
I went back again and tried to find that document that my friend Brittani and I made years ago to help us remember the spiritual experiences that helped build and shape our individual testimonies.
No luck. It’s like it’s vanished, or maybe she was the one who created it originally, and so maybe it’s just saved in her files and isn’t shared with me.
It’s not a big deal. It would just be nice to have that list as a starting point to make sure there isn’t anything that I’ve forgotten that I made note of there but no longer remember.
Gosh it’s been such a beautiful day. 😊
The flood of returning light has made everything so bright! And the returning of my spiritual motivation has been powerful and moving.
Oh! And for the first time in I don’t even know how many years, I got to see my niece Ivi!!!
Good golly she’s a woman now.
😶
We chatted for maybe a good 30 minutes. So great to catch up with her. She seems like his she’s in such a great place, astounding in some ways in comparison to where many of her peers are (she’s only 18).
She’s a full-blown cowgirl, up hours before dawn to go up into the mountains and round up cattle and take care of horse herds and all sorts of other stuff.
So cool.
So good to see her, and so good to see the beautiful relationship she and my brother are building.
Makes the heart happy. 😊
So… I went to church today. 🙃 First time in… over a year, I think? I didn’t have the motivation to try and dig out a white shirt and tie, but I wore dress shoes and the wedding pants again and a clean, new polo shirt.
I rode with Richard’s step son Jack, who needed an adult with him to be able to drive to church, so I obliged.
Chatted for a little while with Richard and an interesting lady who’d just come back from Switzerland. Seemed like a great lady who probably has lots of fun stories (she has no home and apparently travels quite a bit?).
As the meeting started, being in the church felt both normal and a little awkward, and though I felt to go, I think there was a part of me that didn’t want to be there.
I was grateful that it was only going to be an hour-long service for Easter. 😅
The meeting started off like any other sacrament meeting, opening song, opening prayer, and then the administration of the sacrament.
I had wondered if I should partake, having not even been to church and having not kept covenants that I’ve made, but my heart is turned toward God, and I’m humbled and sincere, and I felt completely fine partaking of the sacrament because my turning toward God has no justification for my poor choices and sins in the past, just pure desire to overcome every last speck of pride in my heart and have the Lord replace it with his pure and perfect love.
After the sacrament, I think of somebody might have spoken a little bit, but what I remember most were two musical numbers.
President Thomas S. Monson, a previous prophet/president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared a story a couple times at least that I heard of passing the sacrament and seeing an older gentleman with tears in his eyes as he partook of the emblems that represent the body and blood of the Savior and his sacrifice for us.
I remember hearing that story and perhaps similar stories and wanting to feel the gratitude and whatever other feelings were part of the kind of experience that would leave me in tears while partaking of the sacrament.
Well, today it happened. Not during the sacrament itself, but during the musical numbers. The tears began to roll, and so powerful was the gratitude and love that I felt that my body even began to shake as the tears came more forcefully.
I felt deep gratitude for being able to be in this place of light and peace and joy when scarcely days ago I was battling darkness, darkness that I’ve been fighting off but mostly living in for about a year now since the last time I was living in the light.
In my mind’s eye, I saw the Savior and I felt that brilliantly perfect and consuming love.
And the tears just flowed.
And I am grateful.
Despite my own joys, there were also some hard things, I felt sorrow, not for myself, but for someone close to me who’s going through a really hard time.
Light and joy and sorrow…
After church, I headed over to MillCreek. I was going to meet my friend Robyn for a walk in Sugarhouse Park, and since she wasn’t quite ready to meet me there yet, I decided to stop by Cory’s mom’s place first, but it turned out to not be a good day for him either, so I drove from Herriman over to SugarHouse Park to wait for Robyn.
The drive over there was interesting.
Having all that light back in my heart and mind shown a spotlight on that little niggling part of me that always uses his phone while he’s driving. 😅
Deep down, I believe in being obedient to the laws of the land, and that’s one that I shirk, always wanting to be as productive as possible, to utilize my time to maximum efficacy.
But it’s illegal to text and drive in Utah, and I would assume it’s probably also illegal to search the internet and whatnot while driving, so I found myself back in that familiar place of feeling antsy and jonesing to use my phone while driving.
I started experimenting with the new Gemini AI that Google has on their phones now, and I found that the functional capacity of the voice commands has improved significantly, or perhaps I just didn’t fully know what it was capable of before, but I was able to use my voice to find and pause and resume a BYU speech. And I was able to send text messages simply with voice commands and whatnot.
Definitely still very hard not to just grab my phone and look at stuff.
Also, as per usual when I returned to the light, I return to those things that were important to me, like letting go of those things that may not be inherently bad but that fill up the space of time in my life that I would rather devote to different pursuits.
So once again, the movies, the tv, the political stuff, the news, the YouTube stuff… And perhaps most challenging, sports news. 🙃
It’s not that any of that is wrong to participate in. Not at all. Movies, TV etc, I’ve been inspired in beautiful ways, youtube, political stuff, sports stuff, it can easily have a positive place, but it’s not what the deepest parts of my soul hunger for. It’s not the butter in the honey that I long for. It might be good, it might even sometimes be better, but for me, I’ve never found it to be best.
That’s not to say that there won’t be times where it is best, and when those times come, then I will find myself enjoying whatever it is that feels best at that time, but those will be the overwhelming minority of experiences, and I hope the overwhelming majority will be experiences of light and love and service and all that good stuff.
Anyway, I’m getting tired, and there’s so much more in this day to talk about. 🙃
It wasn’t until the second pass through the massive loop that goes around sugarhouse Park but I found a place that I wanted to stop at–along the creek, of course. 🙃
I parked the van, emptied my pee bottle in the bathroom toilet, used the bathroom myself, and then spent the next two hours, or so, chatting with my sister Heather about beautiful gospel things. We had texted back and forth a bit during church, as she was trying to help me recall some of the wonderful spiritual things we had talked about yesterday.
We continue to talk, and the beautiful spiritual experiences and insights and light just flowed.
I have missed this so much.
It boggles my mind why I would let myself turn from this light, this magnificent light, toward the darkness and choose anger and resentment and bitterness, and hang on to it because I feel like I’ve been wronged.
Oh how grateful I am to have a God who loves so perfectly and continuously, such that the light of his love radiates warmth that surrounds you the moment you step out of the shadows and darkness into the marvelous light.
[contented sigh 😊]
After chatting with my sister Heather, my sister Rebecca called me. 😊
I had opened my phone to send her a message just to check in and realized that she had sent me a message, a really important one way back in January that I’d never responded to, so I had spent a little while composing messages to her in response to her message from way back in January, and then she called not too long after I finished talking to my sister heather.
So what did I do? I talked with Rebecca for nearly 2 and 1/2 hours. 🙃
Great stuff. Talked about life, past, present, and even planned a little bit for the future. After I visit my dad and stepmom in nevada, I’m just going to go ahead and do the same loop that I’ve done the last 2 years. It’ll just be early this year.
So after visiting my dad and stepmom in nevada, I’ll go and visit Rebecca in California and then if they’re available, my sister Letitia and her family in southern Washington and my sister Leslie and her family in Northern Washington.
And then I’ll probably sneak off to Canada for….a good little while? 🙃
I’ve got bear spray. 😎
As I have a traveling companion, or an eternal companion 🙃 to go with the bear spray, but… beggars can’t be choosers. 🙃
Anyway, so the trip is taking shape, and we’ll see how it goes from here.
Super great to talk to Rebecca.
After several hours of talking to my siblings but not having my friend Robyn reply to my messages or show up, I finally did get a reply from her, and the poor woman was fighting with a migraine.
No fun.
Definitely not a fan of migraines.
I’d also sent a couple of messages to Cory and not gotten a reply, so I was a bit concerned for him, so after I finished chatting with my sisters, I drove over to Cory’s mom’s place, but I never got an answer from him.
I hope everything’s okay.
Being back in the light again, it’s amazing how quickly my heart begins to think about all the other people, family and friends whom I haven’t seen or spoken with for a while. It becomes so natural once again to reach out to see how they are doing.
I love living in the light again.
Not sure what to do from there, it being fairly late, the sun down, and wanting to make sure I spend some more time with my oldest brother and his new wife before I leave town for the foreseeable future, I decided to point Rover’s nose South so that I was in Utah County, so I could be quicker to swing by and visit my brother and new sister-in-law.
So I ended up driving to the Walmart Supercenter in Pleasant Grove and just parking in the parking lot. I figured I would work on my journal entry for the day. I also thought it might be nice to call my mom and chat with her.
She’s been traveling, only just yesterday getting home, missing what apparently was a tornado by maybe 30 minutes on her drive home from the Tulsa airport after Frontier Airlines grounded all their planes in denver, and she ended up having to take a flight with another airline.
Anyway, I called my mom and we ended up talking for another 2 hours+. 🙃
Though she generally reads my blog posts, she hadn’t caught up with all the traveling, so she wasn’t aware of what’s been going on the last few days with the acceleration of my spiritual reclamation.
I know she’s happy to see me happy again.
And I’m grateful for her love, and I’m grateful to be happy again. 😊
There’s still a part of me that’s nervous, but there’s a lot of light crowding out the darkness that I know still wants to try to squeeze its way back in.
From the Walmart Supercenter in PG, I headed south on State Street and parked Rover in the parking lot of the Maverick on 8th North in Orem just a block or two east of State street.
And that’s where I am right now, a little after 1:00 in the morning, finally finishing up this post. 🙃
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful for The marvelous light.
- I’m grateful for the flood of insights that are coming, both the reminders of previously received but forgotten insights, as well as brand new insights.
- I’m grateful for the infinite love and in exhaustible patience of my heavenly father
- I’m grateful that sugar House Park has a beautiful Creek that runs through it
- I’m grateful for the red squirrels running around the trees and eating the food that the curious and excited little kids were throwing for them.
- I’m grateful that the kids were curious and gentle.
- I’m grateful to be strengthening my relationship with my siblings
- Did I say I’m grateful for the light? 🙃
- I’m grateful for the peace that is beginning to fill me.
- I’m grateful to have been reminded today and to have been willing to take notes of the insights given by the Lord to me today.
- So much to be grateful for. If only it weren’t after one in the morning, and I weren’t tired. 😅 I feel like I don’t want to end this post without writing down the insights received. But those are probably best shared separately anyway.
- I’m grateful for the gift of a shifted perspective. I didn’t just return to the light. I returned to a light that included with it a gift of a change in my perspective. I returned with eyes to see that we’re different than how I used to see even when I was in the light before. I’ll likely write about that in a separate post. I’ve taken some notes to help me remember.
Success:
- I turned, and I’m facing the Lord.
Improvement:
- You know, it was a really good day today. I don’t think I’m even going to try to think about something that I could have done better today. I just want to be grateful for the love of God, his patience, and the gift of light I once again enjoy.
Love to all of you.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 