Blessings

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reflecting recently.  Mostly about my mission and my post mission life.  Neither one turned out or has turned out exactly as I planned.  And it is so much better this way.  I remember how scared I was to leave on my mission.  I felt like I was giving up everything to go (yes, I can be melodramatic sometimes but that really is how I felt).  I had a lot of doors that were open to me when I left on my mission and I wasn't sure that they would still be open when I got home.  Everyone told me I would be soooo incredibly blessed for serving a mission, and sometimes I believed them and sometimes I rolled my eyes.

I didn't really begin to get an idea of what blessings I would be given until I was set apart as a missionary.  I was promised some wonderful things upon the completion of a mission.  I remember hearing those blessings and finally saying, "Okay, you can do this, just let go and trust in God."  So, I marched into the Provo Missionary Training Center, and thought all would be well.  It was hard.  Especially when I watched a heard things in letters from friends at home and wondered if those blessings I had been promised really would be there for me when I returned.

Since coming home I have felt so blessed.  Not everything has worked out exactly as I imagined, but thus far it has been so much better.  I've been faced, and am being faced with choices I never expected making and while things are intimidating, I know it will all work out.  If I learned anything on my mission, it was that God often puts us in hard situations to make us grow in ways we would have never imagined.  And that, often, is the biggest blessing of all.