"Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for loving me enough to cut me down."

Forgive the insane amount of reflectiveness that these posts are being saturated with, but that's how my life is right now - extremely reflective. 

God always sends us what we need when we need it. I especially think that every time I go to Sunday School - the teacher is always prepared, the lesson is always applicable to what is going on in my life. Like today. We studied several scriptures from Jeremiah - Jeremiah 1:5; 1:17-19; 1:6-10; 20:9-10. A video was shown from the Mormon Channel, concerning a talk given by Elder D. Todd Christofferson in April 2011 entitled, "As Many as I Love, I Rebuke and Chasten." You can watch the video on YouTube here. A song was also shared, Blessings by Laura Story. The chorus goes as follows: 

What if Your blessings come through raindrops

What if Your healing comes through tears?

What if a thousand sleepless nights

Are what it takes to know You're near?

What if the trials of this life

Are Your mercies in disguise?

Once again, the whole song can be found on YouTube here. As part of the lesson, we were also asked to write some of the trials we are currently facing on the whiteboard. Some of them included work, school, preparing for finals, and boys. The weirdest thing happened to me during this lesson. 

I was comforted by the fact that I have trials.

What? Comforted by having trials? The past two weeks have been a challenge, especially this past week. This week has been extremely rough. As in "I-can-barely-function" rough. And devastating and heart-wrenching and miserable. And now here I am, being grateful and comforted by the fact that I have trials. If I stop and reflect though, Heaven's love has poured down on me. I am surrounded by incredible people - my partner, my home teachers, my roommates, my family, my "sisters," my coach, other friends. I ate ice cream and watched Frozen with my roommates. My dad wrote me an incredibly thoughtful and loving letter. My mom drove up to Orem to get my favorite cake from The Chocolate and did my grocery shopping. Countless acts of kindness and love, and it is overwhelming when I stop and think about it. And that leads right into the Relief Society lesson that we had next. 

Gratitude. How perfect it was to have both of those lessons today, and to have the lesson on gratitude come right after a lesson on trials. I think a lot of the lesson came from President Dieter F. Uchtdorf's General Conference talk in April 2014 - Grateful in Any Circumstances. A big emphasis was placed on always being grateful, especially during times of trial. I looked through my Pinterest board (Pinterest seems to be one of my biggest sources for pictures while blogging, doesn't it?) about gratitude and found a few things that stuck out to me.

from bloglovin.com

from community.babycenter.com

from get-thinspiration.tumblr.com

I think that no matter what, we can always find something to be grateful for. I love the second picture I posted because it looks at things we have in a whole different way and finds something to be grateful about. I'm going to make that my challenge this Thanksgiving - to take the things that I would never think about being grateful for and find something that I am grateful for. 

I am so grateful for my Father, that He is listening to me and watching over me, and is constantly taking care of me, even if it means doing things that will hurt me. A quote from the video I shared above says, "Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for loving me enough to cut me down." It's hard to trust that He knows what He is doing when it's painful, that there is something better coming that we need, but I'm working on it. And this week, I am going to work on having an attitude of gratitude and noticing my Heavenly Father's love for me. Happy Thanksgiving everyone :). 

from aphroditebackstage.tumblr.com