Tears & Tender Mercies Via Text

 I've always said that women generally live longer than men, b/c we cry more. Today was one of those days where I had to have a good and cleansing cry. Our morning was pretty normal with just getting up and getting ready for church. Sacrament meeting was great, Sunday School was good, but then Young Women's is when the build up to the tears began.

It was ward conference this week, so that meant the Stake leaders came to Young Women's. One of the Mia Maids was sitting up at the front of the room with the Laurel class presidency, so I asked her to please go sit down with the rest of the Young Women since she wasn't in the class presidency. She gave me major attitude and dirty looks, and that made me feel very upset. I was already stressed with having the stake leaders there. But, she eventually went and sat down next to one of the YW leaders and started crying. Great.

The Stake YW president taught the lesson about how the girls need to be "diligent learners." They shouldn't just show up on Sundays and expect us to spoon feed them the gospel. They need to be actively engaged, making comments, and being prepared to learn and contribute. The Spirit was really strong during the lesson, and I had this thought come into my mind ... "people are more important than programs." I knew that I needed to mend things with this young woman.

It was interesting that during the lesson the Stake YW president stopped several times to say she felt strongly impressed to share some things about the Holy Ghost that she had read in a book that morning. She talked about how the Holy Ghost can protect us. She talked about how we need to rely on the Spirit and His guidance if we're being physically, emotionally, or verbally attacked. It made me a little worried about who in our group needed to hear this, b/c I don't want any of my young women to be attacked or hurt in anyway. But, the Spirit in the room wasn't fearful or scary. It was just powerful.

After Young Women's we met w/ the Stake YW presidency for about 40 minutes. We talked about our YW program and how things are going. We talked about our plans for girls camp. It was a good meeting, but I could feel my stress levels rising w/ all the big events we have coming up, especially camp. After the meeting I drove to go pick up Autumn, who had gone home after church with the angel family in our ward that watches her for me all the time when I have meetings.

On the drive over, the tears just started flowing and they WOULD.NOT.STOP! There's a lot of things that made me cry, and they all just came to a head:

• The past few weeks I have just been feeling so inadequate and overwhelmed. 
• I'm tired of being single! It's been almost 9 years since my divorce. That's a long time to be alone without a companion. When will I finally find someone?????????????????
• I feel fat and frumpy.
• A lot of my weaknesses have come to the surface lately (see below)

I've been thinking about this talk from General Conference called, "What Lack I Yet?" It's sooooo good. Here's a few lines from the talk:

"As we travel along that strait and narrow path, the Spirit continually challenges us to be better and to climb higher. The Holy Ghost makes an ideal traveling companion. If we are humble and teachable, He will take us by the hand and lead us home.

However, we need to ask the Lord for directions along the way. We have to ask some difficult questions, like 'What do I need to change?' 'How can I improve?' 'What weakness needs strengthening?'"

I've been shown in painful detail some of my weaknesses. One of those is that I use my Type3 "push forward energy" to just take over and do things my way. It's so much easier and faster for me to do it instead of delegating it, having to follow up, and not having it done the way I would like it to be done. An example of this is girl's camp. I have it all planned out in my head, but I didn't include any of the young women or YW leaders in my planning. So, they don't feel involved or like they are being heard. They've been complaining b/c they heard another group was going to Nauvoo for their girls camp this year. I want to just cancel the whole thing if they're already complaining, b/c it is SO.MUCH.WORK! But instead of giving up we're going to use our activity time on Wednesday night to plan out New Beginnings and get ideas about camp.

Since I don't like to ask for help or delegate, I've been feeling very overwhelmed. I feel like I've been giving it my all, but then my all isn't good enough. I still don't have a YW secretary and it's been 7 months that I've been doing my calling plus all the things the secretary usually does.

There were a few tender mercies that happened when I got home. One of them was that my adviser texted me saying that she feels like she hasn't been much help lately and she asked what she could do to assist me. Talk about a direct answer to my prayer of feeling overwhelmed.

Then another tender mercy via text was one from one of the inactive Young Women I have been praying and thinking about for months. She texted to see if we could go out for frozen yogurt sometime this week and talk. I've been feeling like I needed to ask her to do something like that, but I kept ignoring that prompting b/c I didn't want to offend her or make her feel awkward. I guess since I'm a goober and didn't follow that prompting like I should have (another example of my weaknesses), the Lord had to have her reach out to me instead of the other way around.

Anyways, all these little things (not to mention big ones like worrying about if I'm doing a good enough job raising Autumn, etc) overwhelmed me and had to be released. I stopped a block away from where I needed to pick up Autumn, parked my car, and had a good, deep, sobbing, and cleansing cry.

Even though it's hard, I'm incredibly grateful that these weaknesses have been coming to the surface. It helps me to see where I can make improvements and be better. And when I think about these "hardships" I feel guilty for even feeling upset. There are so many others in this world who have way bigger problems. I am blessed beyond belief, and truly have nothing to be crying about in comparison to what others are going through. But, I cried it out and was able to move forward.