Thursday, January 9, 2014

Service Opportunities and Lessons

There is a reason this blog is so late today.

On Sunday, a lady advised us that in the morning, we should begin our day with a prayer.  In the prayer, we should tell Heavenly Father that "I don't know what the day will bring, but whatever it is, I promise to do my best."

Over the last few days, I've been praying to do that.  Interestingly, the days have been rather exciting.  One of our neighbors got kind of sick, and I've had some opportunities to help her out. It's made it difficult to accomplish my personal goals, but I've still managed to do them mostly. Honestly, it is more important to help her out anyway. 

Then, as we complete the day, she told us that we should report to Heavenly Father how our day went, tell Him what we thought went well, and what we thought we could improve on. As we did that, she told us that He would let us know how we are doing.

As I've been trying to juggle helping my neighbor and her family with doing my own household chores, I've felt really tired at night, but content.  I've really been trying to do my best over the last week, but sometimes I've still made mistakes.

The other night, we got back from shopping and I was hungry and my knees were aching.  Right away, things starting going wrong.  The dog, who we'd left in her kennel had broken her waterdish that hooks to the kennel door.  I made myself dinner and while Grig was making his and I was making lemonade, I set down my dinner.  Kevin got into the coleslaw and started throwing it all over the carpet.  As I ran to stop him, I forgot to turn off the water and the lemonade started overflowing.  I wasted some of the flavoring and sugar.

In that moment, for an instant the frustration and energy was too much.  I began to throw my arms up in the air and spin around.  It only lasted about ten seconds, but I was a little embarrassed afterward for having lost my patience.  I didn't shout or scream, but my motions were large and angry.

I felt bad about that, and I still do.  Today has had its frustrations, but it's all going to work out okay because I'm doing my best.

As we do service opportunities, sometimes they may cause set-backs in our own schedules, but as we serve as our Savior would, the blessings that we receive and that we give others vastly outnumber the small inconveniences we might experience.

On a smaller note, I'm stoked because my planner pages are supposed to arrive today!  Then I can really get to scheduling!

Yay!
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