These last several weeks my wife and I have been renovating next door in our duplex. We anticipate moving in later this week. That deadline, preceding a family reunion, has increased our intensity to ‘gitter done’ and at the beginning we felt we would have moved in more than a week ago. Now we wonder if it will happen next Saturday as now planned. Yesterday we received wonderful help from friends. Nevertheless we are definitely in a mode of ‘one step forward, three steps back’. We have done these projects before with normal setbacks.This seems much different.
In reading former journals I came across this from January 12, 2008: Were I to summarize (the previous days entry,1.11.8), I could come up with an equation of sorts… energy + vulnerability + faith + ‘knee work’= increased results. Add to that fasting and attending the Temple and the results can take on greater acceleration. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that the Lord is in any way obligated to lift a burden / cause a miracle in my life when I follow some sort of formula especially if I take on the heir of I’m paying the price, success is assured.
Rather, for my wife and I, we learn instead, to ‘Come What May and Love It’ I have found when I cheerfully move forward, stop grumbling at setbacks, He is there readily to give ideas on how to proceed. I’m learning (again) that the problem / setback, is the lesson to greater faith and learning from Him. It can often come through others who share perspective and their own ‘life’s lessons learned’ and often I need to leave the current setback with Him, understanding that trust in the Lord again means trusting His timetable.
At the end of each day I love this project. It’s fun, rewarding to see changes, ‘newness happening’… and to feel the Lord’s involvement, including through others. kdm
See an Apostle’s talk: Come What May and Love It… https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2008/10/come-what-may-and-love-it?lang=eng
