Ascend

Ascend to something higher, be better, try harder!

 Remember who you are and all that the Lord has in store!

     Summit 2013 started today and concludes tomorrow evening with a fireside by Brad Wilcox in the Tabernacle. After listening to the speakers today, I was blown away by the amazing spirit felt, and the things that I learned and was reminded of because of Heavenly Father's love for me and all his children.

      The past few months of my life have been challenging. Not the most challenging I have ever experienced, but full of change, uncertainty, responsibility and healing. As I got knee surgery done to reconstruct my ACL from being torn, I also found out I needed to move, and was asked to fill a calling that I was pretty skeptical about my ability to fulfill. With this all weighing down on me, life changing, me being left with stress and responsibility, I wasn't sure of how to handle it all. I started to feel depressed, inadequate, lonely, confused, frustrated and wasn't able to rely on any specific outlet that I had used in the past. I am healing from surgery, not able to do much physically, and feeling blocked in every attempt to express myself and relieve my burdens. Then after an early morning text message conversation with my bishop regarding things that needed to be done for the sisters in the ward, I opened up and expressed my concerns to my bishop about the burdens I was feeling. The next evening after a gospel class, my bishop and a friend in the ward gave me a blessing. I was able to receive answers to many prayers, feel confident in my abilities to fulfill this calling with the Lord's help, told ways to help others succeed and where to find joy in my time serving as Relief Society President. That day, things started to fit together better, my view on life, all that is going on, and my ability to handle it became more hopeful, faithful and confident.

     Today as I sat in the Summit devotionals, I was able to be more in tune with the spirit and learned SO much! It was pretty incredible!

     One of my favorite speakers was Matt Townsend. He talked about how it says in Doctrine and Covenants that the same socialites that exists now will exist after this life. He was a super hilarious man, but illustrated perfectly the difference between the stupid human things that we do and the hero moments we have in our lives that show us becoming more like God. I hate that Satan is attacking from every corner trying to get us to forget who we are! How do we allow him to sway our confidence, strength and knowledge of who we are and the power we have within us! 
     We are children of God! We are his. We are all brothers and sisters. The fight that we are fighting right now is against Satan and his influence. We are not fighting against our brothers and sisters on this earth with mortal bodies. We are are all fighting the same fight. Some may have strayed from the truth, and sinned like we all do, but we must not judge them and forget who they really are! We can hate the sin, but not the sinner! Our Father in Heaven and Savior are waiting for us to remember who we are, and realize our potential! They are waiting for us to rescue those that have forgotten! This is their work! We have that Hero spirit within us! We just have to cultivate it, and allow it to become the strength within our lives that can over power the natural man!
    Others spoke about how to truly be happy, or how we can be happy personally in our lives. We need to reflect on the good throughout the day, express gratitude to God for the things he blesses us with, learn form each experience whether good or bad, and evaluate our view on the struggles that we face in life. They spoke about being ourselves! Ourselves is a gift that God gave us... It is a special gift that has the ability to impact each person we come in contact with!
    Just so many hopeful and empowering messages! I loved it a lot!

    Also, they had a talent show where finalists from a talent competition performed. A bunch of people from our ward were in the show! We owned it! It was wonderful! Sitting with our ward, cheering our other ward members on as they performed, and interacting with each other was awesome! The Hunter 2nd YSA ward is incredible! We are like one big happy family! I love it so much! We have the most loving, supportive and faithful leaders. We have so many people in our ward that have experienced so many different things, and have been strengthened to help and lift others! I am in awe when I take a step back and realize the greatness of the people that surround me! I am honored to be able to serve them, serve with them and be served by them! I feel so blessed to have each and every one of those people in my life and am grateful for all that I have learned and will continue to learn from them! Super amazing ward!

    When the YSA stakes were initially created, I hated it! I didn't understand how it would work out the way that they hoped, and felt discouraged at first. Now though, after experiencing some great spiritual growth and seeing the miracles happen, I have a testimony of Heavenly Father's plan for the young Single Adults of his church. He has set us up to work, rescue and succeed! And because of the faithful members in our ward and in our stake, we will work, we will rescue and we will succeed in helping the Lord with his work!

Loved today and am excited for more goodness tomorrow!