He Is There For Me

You know those days when you feel like your are drowning?  When you feel like life is so hard and that no one understands you and what you are going through.  Gratefully there is one person that you can turn to, and that is God! But sometimes you pray and you feel a little better, but life still feels stressful.   You still feel overwhelmed and are struggling to know the direction to take your life.  God doesn’t answer your prayer right away, and you feel hopeless and helpless   About a month ago I felt just like this.  I felt so weighed down about life.  My husband had been stressed about work and life,  he was having some health issues, his truck kept breaking down, our yard was (and still is) a mess because we don’t have the money to finish the landscaping we planned to have done on it, our toilet kept flooding, and our two year old was sick and was very fussy.  I kept praying that some miracle would happen to make life easier.  Then to my surprise, just when I wanted to shut my bedroom door, cry and eat a candy bar, my two year old walked over to me, hugged my leg and said, “You da bess mommy eva!”  I cried, I smiled and hugged him tight!  In that moment, I knew that those sweet little words were an answer to my prayer.  It was a gift from God letting me know how much He loves me, and that no matter how alone I felt, He is and always will be there for me.   I felt in that moment that everything would be okay because Christ was by my side helping my family through this struggling time.   We could give him our burden to be made light!

Life is hard.  Everyone has their challenges.  When I look back on all the challenges I have gone through I am a stronger woman, mother and wife because of them.  I feel that whether small or large we are always transitioning in and out of challenges in our lives.  Most trails we go through seem small, such as having sick kids, having to take all your children to the grocery store, sibling squabbles, you name it.  Others are huge trails that rock your world.  Daily, I feel, we are being challenged with trails to make us stronger people.  Life’s not easy, it wasn’t meant to be.  We are here on this earth to learn and to grow and to become more like our Father in Heaven.  Sometimes I look at people and think they have the perfect life, that they have money coming out their ears, a huge house, nice clothes, and nothing ever hard happens to them.  It’s a hard thing as a parent to not want for your family what you see others have.  You think that “those people” never have a problem ever in their life, but as we all know even those “picture perfect” people have challenges sometimes far greater than our own. They may be different than yours, but they have them.

This last week as I attended Women’s Conference at BYU one of the talks that touched me the most was a talk by Sister Linda K. Burton on this exact subject.   

Some of my favorite quotes from her talk were…

To me this meant that if we are going to progress physically, spiritually emotionally or mentally we have to struggle a little, but we have to ask ourselves “is this load helping my progression or stopping my progression?”.  Any load that we have when yoked with the Lord is bearable and he will help us be stronger and more forward.