how anonymous does it...

i love anonymous. i think she's simply wonderful. i can't say too much about her because well, then she wouldn't be so anonymous! but i just love her. i think she's great and i look up to her in so many ways.

here's how anonymous does it...


Some time ago I endured a rather personal trial, one that I didn’t feel much like sharing with others, and since my own family still does not even know about it, I don’t think I should explain it in detail to the blogging world!

Suffice it to say that I was struggling. For months on end I cried myself to sleep, and all the while had no one to confide in. No one, that is, except my Heavenly Father. My relationship with Him got a bit more personal during those months. He had always been my God, my Eternal Father, but now became my Friend and Confidant. My prayers became less an act of routine and more a vital part of my day. I also found writing in a journal to be invaluable. Being able to write down everything that was going on gave me a sense of catharsis, as well as a medium for narrowing down issues and discovering solutions for smaller aspects of the problem. Some entries were Not Happy At All, and those were written down in a separate notebook that I could later throw away and forget entirely.

I realized, sometime during the course of this trial, that I had petered off in my gospel study. I still read the scriptures daily, but more briefly, less intently. And so I committed to 30 minutes a day of gospel study: scriptures, conference talks, the Ensign, Relief Society Manuals—anything that I felt could help me focus on the gospel of Jesus Christ. I also felt impressed to begin listening to one conference talk (or devotional address, CES broadcast, or Women’s conference lecture) a week, and was surprised how much those uplifted and strengthened me.

Exercise, humor, and working to develop talents were additional factors that did not remove my trial from me, but which certainly helped make the experience more pleasant!

One last thing that helped me was getting outside myself. Focusing too much on my own troubles made them seem so much worse. It helped a lot to look outward and serve others. And most often that meant small acts of service—just little things done for friends and family members that perhaps made their day a bit more cheerful.

I don’t know that I could say I “rose above” my trial. It seems to me that in the course of rising above one’s trials, one begins to look at those trials in a different light: no longer viewed as completely awful ordeals, but instead as something difficult from which you learned and which you can now regard with gratitude. That’s the ultimate goal, I suppose. But I don’t think I’ve yet managed that. No, certainly not. Instead, I’ve endured. And that’s okay too. Some trials are such that they must simply be endured; but hopefully endured well—with faith and optimism.