(written on the 8th from notes taken previously)
🥰
🥰🥰
🥰🥰🥰
😁😁😁😁
Yay!!! 🥰🥰🥰
Ok, I’ll get back to that. 🙃
I was up early, slept well last night, got going early with answering questions for work, and doing my morning routine.
Went out to the rock pile to start breaking rocks, but each time I work on the garage build up, something just… doesn’t feel right?
I don’t claim anything spiritually on this, but I just feel a little restrained from working on it right now for some reason.
🤷
I’ll either find out why or I won’t. 🙃
Anyway, grab some breakfast, answered what few questions were coming in online. It was a slow day, work-wise, so I was glad that I spent so much time answering questions yesterday while they were available.
Spent a fair bit of time talking about how stuff, planning, etc.
Hans took me off property to reduce my cabin fever. 😆 Aside from the two trips up to Rapid city, I don’t think I’d left the property since I got here, so we headed into town, going to bomgaars, a grocery store, another grocery store, and then the water fill-up place. (Living where they do, there is no running water, and Wells are so blasted expensive to dig that nobody really has them. I think it’s like $60- to $75,000 to drill a well over here? Needing to go something like 600 plus feet down.
😶
[gulp]
We spent a good little while doing septic planning stuff. Unfortunately, I ended up wasting most of my time thinking I was being productive when I wasn’t. 😅
Oh well.
I helped Hans to do some septic measuring, and then he started digging some percolation test holes. I’m going to get the information packet to get my septic system installers license, so they don’t have to pay an installer to come out and do it.
We bought the septic tank today! 😊
And guess what?!?!?!
I had my temple recommend interview today with Cam, a member of my Arkansas Bishopric!!!
It was so awesome. Beautiful tears on both sides as I related my experience of the last handful of years and the miracles God is doing in my life now. I was on with him [Zoom meeting] for almost an hour, I think. 🥰
Great experience.
So great. 🥰🥰🥰
If scheduling works out, I should be able to have my interview with a member of the state presidency tomorrow. 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
I’m excited. 🥰
And then to top it off, I had an absolutely wonderful gospel conversation with Cory for another hour. 😊🥳🎉
I’m so happy. It’s so nice to feel light, both the massive reduction of weight off my shoulders (that never needed to be there anyway) and to feel full of eternal light.
I just feel… filled. 😊
Thank you, my dear Father and my wonderful Savior. 🥰🙏🥰
Spent a little while listening to the come follow me scriptures in preparation for church tomorrow, and ate dinner with Heather and Hans, once again a wonderful dinner. 😋
After dinner, I retired to Rover where I took journal notes for the day. What a beautiful day. 🥰
Gratitude:
- I’m so grateful to be at this spiritual place right now, especially after years of struggle. I’ve had my UPS and downs. I’ve come out of the darkness a few times in the last 6 years, but not for very long, and I don’t know if it’s ever been to this degree. Something feels different this time. 🥰
- I’m so grateful to have been able to have a temple recommended interview today. It was such a beautiful experience. Probably the best church interview I’ve ever had–ever.
- Not only was I able to have that wonderful Temple recommend interview today, when I opened my LDS tools app, the first thing I saw was an announcement that they’ve made temple recommends available digitally now, so I don’t even need to send the money to mail me my recommend!!! What an amazing day. 🥰
- I’m grateful to have been able to have an absolutely marvelous gospel conversation with Cory. He and I seem to be on very similar spiritual tracks right now (in terms of where we’re feeling led to focus our efforts right now), and I’m grateful that he’s been such a great example of faith to me while I’ve been in my dark times.
- I’m just… so happy. 🥰 I’m so grateful for the miracles that God is doing with my heart right now. I’ve had a fair number of deeply significant spiritual experiences in my life, and I have been blessed with perspectives that have changed my life in profound ways, and even with all that, God is doing something more inside of me than has ever happened before. And I’m both grateful and in awe to the point that I look at how he’s changed my heart, and I just find myself asking why? Don’t get me wrong: I’m profoundly grateful, but I don’t understand why he’s doing all this for me now. I’ve only just barely stopped lashing out at him in my pain and anger, and here he is just remaking my heart in ways that are softer and more full of light and faith and love than I’ve ever experienced before. It’s not the first time in my life that I have understood to the depths of my soul what it means to sing praises and glory to God, but it is still deeply moving to feel the depth of his love and to see how much he is doing for me. Glory to God. To the depths of my soul I sing his praise.
Success:
- I saw an area where I need to improve in my level of honesty, having gotten in the habit of sometimes telling “little white lies” to avoid irritation when working with customers or to avoid discomfort in situations where “it doesn’t hurt anyone,” and I get to “save face,” and I acknowledged it, and it’s now a part of my going forward goals to correct.
Improvement:
- I chose to accept a question only 10 minutes prior to my temple recommend interview, thinking I could finish it quickly before the start of the interview, and it ended up being a woman who was a talker and a worrier, so what could have been done in a handful of minutes stretched on for over 20, and it was really hard to be kind and understanding I’m my tone and language feeling in a hurry like I was because I was making Cam wait [though this could actually be a success because my tone of voice and language with the customer was actually really comforting and kind, despite my hurry and quiet frustration, so it was both a success and a failure at the same time. 🙃]. So I could have done better and not getting frustrated with the customer, and I shouldn’t have taken that question right before the interview. I was just thinking that it had been such a slow day of questions that I wanted to get whatever questions I could. But I’m doing fine, and there was no need.
My love to all of you! 🥰
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 