circle vs. mountain

Nov 7, 2018

Life is such a beautiful mess. Seriously, every single day is a mix of peace and gratitude and frustration and pain and wonder and laughter. Every day. My friend, Lawson, wrote an analogy this week about life being a circle instead of the mountain climb we so often picture it as. He is serving a mission for our church right now and his thoughts have helped this week to face the sameness with more hope and determination. He said,

I realized a mission isn’t like this mountain, where it climbs and climbs and then there’s the top, and it’s over. It’s like a circle. You do the same things day in and day out. You teach the same lessons, say the same things, and promise the same blessings. You plead for the same charity, you experience the same heart wrenching disappointment, and you feel the same exhaustion. And most of all, you feel the same love, day in and day out. Every night going before God and telling him of all the things you did wrong that day, all the times you weren’t the best missionary possible. And you know and feel those failures, yet you feel the guilt and shame and regret washed away. You quite literally feel the power of Christ’s atonement, every single night. And that gives you strength to get up the next morning and tell people they can have the same thing! that they can feel the same peace, know the same love, and receive the same strength. It really is a message of joy, and good tidings. And it’s the greatest, scariest, most stressful, most joyful thing in the world to be entrusted with delivering that message.

I feel like every day I face the same frustrations and experience the same beautiful moments. And sometimes I just want it to be done. My spontaneous soul is ready for something different. Something far more interesting and exiting than the sameness. Or even something just different. I don’t want to do the sameness anymore. I want to reach the top of my mountain and be done. Be done with the laundry and meals and bills and sadness and upset children and math lessons and teaching classes and answering emails and dislocating joints and pain and tiredness. Just be done. I think, “surely I have climbed this mountain long enough. Surely there is something else, anything else.”

Somehow Lawson’s words touched my heart helped me remember that in the sameness, I am growing. I am making a difference. I am becoming who God created me to be. There is power in this sameness.

So, I will keep washing those clothes and making those grocery lists and teaching these precious souls God has entrusted to me and dealing with the pain and learning to love better and more fully.

Becoming me.