Thoughtful Friday.... Early

(Photo editing app - Rhonna Designs)

100 Happy Days - 10%

Last month we had a Relief Society activity on being happy - on looking after our mental health. One of the speakers talked about "Learned Happiness" or "Learned Optimism" which is the idea that happiness or joy is something we can learn to cultivate.

The "100HappyDays" project is all about getting people sign up to find something to be happy about every day for 100days, take a photo and post it on social media #100HappyDays. I signed up for it because I like the idea of recording moments of happiness - it sounded fun - and I plan to compile the photos in a book as a sort of photographic gratitude journal to complement my written one. I am a great believer in gratitude and happiness!

Here are some of the happy moments in the past 10 days.

Doing family history research - finding out about my roots....

Little Possum's fashion sense and funny faces despite being sick. She is always cheerful this little one of mine.

I 

I love dark chocolate. I love pistachios. I love marzipan. A combo of all 3? Perfect!

I love this word.....   so useful.

My accidental garden. Grew from where we buried the bunny poop.....

Aaaaah. A browse in a bookshop. Bliss.

Little Possum's sock monkey Toto that she made herself.

A letter from my aunt sharing childhood memories, family information and a beautiful photo of my great aunt who died before I was born.

Going to the temple. Can't top that for a source of joy and peace.

And... that is a secret to happiness...  We can make our own happiness and feel joy by doing the things that will lead us to the temple. Learning to see the happy moments in a day is closely aligned with seeing the Lord's hand in our lives, to being grateful. The more I learn to look for it, the more I will find.

"Be of good cheer" is an admonition often repeated in the scriptures. It is so much more than telling us to "cheer up". It is a reminder of whom our source of happiness is:

"These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world"

John 16:33

"Wherefore, be of good cheer, and do not fear, for I the Lord am with you, and will stand by you; and ye shall bear record of me, even Jesus Christ, that I am the Son of the living God, that I was, that I am, and that I am to come."

Doctrine and Covenants 68:6

A birthday message

Today would have been my mother's 75th birthday and I wish I could wish her a happy birthday.

Grief is a strange thing. Over the past 9 years it has been like the waves on the beach. Sometimes the occasional gentle wave and other times like a freak tidal wave crashing over me. 

I still catch myself thinking about picking up the phone and calling her to tell her something. Then I remember.

But, I am grateful for my faith and testimony of the plan of salvation which lets me know that all is as it should be. She had completed her earthly mission and it was her time to return. Her life had been one filled with trials, more physical and emotional pain than anyone would imagine because she never complained.

At the end she said she was ready to go 

"I have had a good life"

She knew the secret of gratitude.

Today I will celebrate her life here on earth. I will celebrate this wonderful woman who taught me about patience, about enduring trials of every kind with a faithful heart and cheerful demeanour. She taught me the value of a good sense of humour and of looking outward to others and forward with hope.

 Although she was small in stature, she was a spiritual giant.

She had soft and gentle hands and a gentle manner, and I grieve for my children who have missed out on her hugs and her fruitbuns. They have to settle for my memories of her for now.

She was diagnosed with cancer in the same week that we moved out to Australia, 

these photos were taken on our last visit to her before we left and although they were snappy snaps, they are treasures.

 I love this last one of Bestemor with our Little Possum. 

She must have wondered about seeing her grow up.

I hope that my mother gets to look in on us occasionally. I hope I am making her proud.

I will see her again, of that I am sure. In the meantime I shall continue to miss her but cherishing wonderful memories.

names and faces

During the Christmas break I have been sorting through a treasure trove of photographs. I have inherited photo albums and piles of photos from both sides of the family since I have no cousins on either side. As I have said before, I seem to have become the curator of my family's history.

On my mother's side photos were neatly placed in albums, and photographs were labelled with names:

By studying my pedigree chart I have been able to place these people and put faces to the names in my family. As I take their names to the temple I feel I know who they are and I feel a connection with them. These people give me roots and a sense of belonging as I forge the links between generations.

On my father's side however, the photographs do not provide me with any clues at all about who they are.

They could be family members or friends, possibly even suitors? I have been frustrated with the lack of organisation or even a little note on the back of the photo until I realised something....

 "Hello, Kettle.... My name is "Pot" and you're black...."

My own recent photo collection is extensive. I never did get around to beautifully crafted scrapbooks or photoalbums after the children were born. There are photos in albums that are not labelled or dated... and piles of photographs in a box. Then there are the multiple digital albums....

 I am not so different to my g grandparents. Maybe they did not anticipate that a couple of generations on someone would want to know who they were and be interested in their lives. Maybe they assumed that the information would be passed on?

I try to give my children roots and connect them to their ancestors by telling them the stories I was told when I was a child adding stories from my own childhood. My new year's resolution is to go one step (or 5) further by working on my personal history, and to organise all our photos into albums whether hardcopy or digital so that my children and their children will be able to put names to faces.

pitching my tent

Late September/early October means a lot of tent pitching goes on in our family. During the 2 week term break, Little Possum and MOTH go to the annual district scout camp and Turtle goes to stake YM camp. Tents, sleeping bags, camp fires and camp cooking, insect bites and a ton of activities.

First weekend of October we pitch our tents again, albeit a little more figuratively. We gather for General Conference to hear the word of the Lord through His servants, the prophet and apostles. Just like the people did in Mosiah 2:5-6. Every family pitched their tents with the door facing the temple and king Benjamin in order to hear his words. 

General Conference is a spiritual feast - and the better prepared I am, the better the feast. "No ordinary blessing" president Uchtdorf called it in the article by the same name in Ensign Sep 2011. The introduction is my favourite. A member was telling his neighbour about general conference and listening to a modern day prophet and apostles. The neighbour was impressed and wanted to know what the prophet had said at the last general conference. The member couldn't remember and the neighbour said:

 “You mean to tell me that God speaks to man in our day and you can’t remember what He said?”. 

 I laughed when I read that....  then asked myself whether I would've been able to give a succinct answer.....   I couldn't.

This last GC there were 2 statements about GC that struck me:

GC is a spiritual feast, but it's not supposed to be a quick hit like a giant spiritual chocolate bar. It's supposed to be more slow release.... something I return to again and again. Study, learn, act.....

I have always written notes at conference, notes from the talks and notes of impressions I receive. This time I thought I would do a little better, so in my handbound journal (can you hear that? The sound of me tooting my own horn) I wrote notes, but left spare pages at the end of each talk so that I could go back to the talks later and have room for more notes as I study them in depth. 

As soon as the talks were available to print out, I printed out each talk to tape into my conference journal.

 I tell you - the biggest discovery I have ever made is that I can choose to print out the talk "booklet-style" which means I can print out a whole talk on one sheet of paper. I copy and paste the talk into Word first. Then I may have to reduce the size of the text and tweak the spacing (the talk needs to fit on 4 pages). And .... Print.  How cool is that?!

The result is my own personal General Conference study journal. 

Using it - well that will be me pitching my tent regularly.

Smores optional.

Gratitude

Little Possum made me a cartoon once.... I don't know where it went to, maybe in one of my journals? It featured a superhero called "Gratidude". Said 'Thank you' a lot..... awesome. Gratitude would be a great superpower. Although....... when I think of 'gratitude' I think of other words like
'humility', 'faith', 'submissive', 'meek'....   not words that seem to fit with the image of a superhero.

A little over a year ago, in preparation for a lesson on Gratitude to the Young Women (12-17 year old girls at church), the YW presidency started keeping gratitude journals. The challenge was to write down at least 3 things each day that we were grateful for, blessings that we had noticed, ways that we had noticed the Lord's hand in our day.

This has been such a blessing to me. I have missed a few days, and there were a couple of days where all I could think of was how grateful the day was at an end.  (I'm sure on those days I could have found something had I looked harder!). There are many times when I have expressed gratitude for the challenge of keeping this journal because it made me sit down and review my day, and it made me more aware during the day because I was looking more actively for things that I could write about in the evening.

When I've read back in the journal I noticed patterns emerging. I noticed that the periods where I had missed days were also days I could recognise as a spiritual trough, a period where I had not studied the scriptures daily or prayed as earnestly (some days, not at all) as I should. Humility and faith bring gratitude which brings humility and faith.

I noticed that the periods where I had been diligent in noticing blessings and had given thanks for them were times where I had been blessed with an increased awareness of the promptings of the Spirit in general. These were also days when I was generally more patient, more kind and contented. (My kids like those days!)

Lastly I noticed that the things I expressed gratitude for ranged widely.... from 'chocolate' to eternal principles and blessings. I figured I should give thanks for all things! But lately I have thought a little more about the phrase "all things".

D&C 59:7 "Thou shalt thank the Lord thy God in all things",
D&C 78:19 "And he who receiveth  all things with thankfulness shall be made glorious"

I have thought about the pioneers. I have thought about the blessings that come from adversity. I have thought about the ability to find things to be grateful for in times of adversity and the importance of being grateful for the adversity itself. It is in our extremities we come to know God. Although my recent injury affects my extremity (har-de-ha), the challenging days I have now can hardly be described as an extremity........ but I am still grateful for the time for reflection it has given me! A blessing indeed.

My goal is to be able to always be grateful in the midst of a trial, and not just after it is over. 

 "To express gratitude is gracious and honourable,

To enact gratitude is generous and noble,

but to live with gratitude ever in our hearts is to touch heaven"

President Thomas S Monson

For our FHE tonight everyone was given 5 minutes to write down a blessing or something they are grateful for.... one for every letter of the alphabet. (Q, X and Z were tricky.....)

Psalms 118:24

"This is the day which the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it"

 

Time

We have a wonderful Relief Society presidency in our ward, their love and concern for the sisters is amazing. The latest emphasis is to help us in our Visiting Teaching. The principle is simple - We need to love our sisters more, and we develop that love by getting to know each other. As we come to know each other we will care for each other more. To help us, they will issue us a challenge every month. For October the challenge is to ask our sisters

 "If you had an afternoon to yourself, how would you spend it?"

I love this question. Our sisters are at different stages in their lives, but they are all busy women. I am sure that an afternoon all to themselves would be lovely! But there is a deeper question there which I have pondered myself.

5 weeks ago I injured my ankle, and then developed a blood clot in my calf which set recovery back a little. I have spent a lot of time confined to the sofa which (as per the kids) became "Mummy Command Centre" or "Mummy HQ". I had my phone, iPad, laptop, scriptures, journal, stationery, books, woolbasket and more all around me. I have to admit I spent a lot of time floating aimlessly between email, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other social media until one day I sat pondering the issue of "time". I had been thinking about adversity and trials, reflecting on Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail and the Lord's admonition to "endure well" (D&C 121:7-8).

Enduring vs enduring well. 

The thought struck me that I was not enduring well. I was certainly cheerful and filled with faith in my recovery, but I was not enduring well. I was passing time. I was not actively seeking to learn from my time of relative adversity.

I realised that trials or tests of faith can come in many forms, and that one of the biggest tests I was facing was simply in how I spend my time during this period where I had no specific demands for it/me. I couldn't do cooking, cleaning, school run, work, shopping or any of the other many tasks that would normally occupy my day. My time was completely unstructured and at my disposal during the day. So, how was I choosing to spend it? The question went right to the core, to my priorities. I saw that there were still lessons for me to learn and truths to ponder. There were things that I could do to serve, to lift, to love even from my sofa. There is nothing inherently wrong with spending time on social media, but if I am reaching out for entertainment before reaching out to the Lord or to others, then my priorities could do with a little tweaking. 

" We are responsible for our own actions and accountable to God for what we choose to do with our lives. Life is God’s gift to us, and what we do with it is our gift to Him". - Elaine Cannon "Agency and Accountability" GC Oct 1983