Reverb day 4 - How will you celebrate YOU

How are you going to celebrate your self this festive season?

I had never thought about this question until this morning, but I think a huge part of celebrating myself will be in celebrating Christmas - that Christ was born. My faith in Jesus Christ is so essential to who I am that being bold about this faith, being grateful for the gift God gave us of His Son and making it central to my family's festivities celebrates who I am.

In much the same way, the time spent with family celebrates myself... as they help make me who I am and are such and integral part of my heart <3 It wouldn't be myself not to spend time with family. On the other hand though, I do want to make the effort that it is a lot more of a relaxed time than I have felt in the past... in the last two years I really did a lot of stressing at Christmas time and all the get-togethers with so many groups felt like a lot of work with 1 or 2 kids to be mindful of - this year I want to be much more focused on gratitude and how much I love and appreciate each family member and enjoy spending time with them.

I realise this might sound soppy to you all, but it is authentic.

I have goals that I'm working toward for the next few years, and it is important to look to and plan for the future... but I also want to make an effort to look back and acknowledge how far I've come in the past year or so. I guess that part of using this process to 'celebrate myself' will also be to acknowledge the difficult things that I've had to overcome... not to dwell over them in a negative way, but to see how I overcame those things and that they have helped me grow.

I'm really enjoying this #reverb12 challenge. Some of the questions have been tricky to answer and some - like this one - are things I had never really thought about until reading the question. We're only on day 4 - you might enjoy it too! You don't have to blog, but can just write in your journal or even just think about the answer without recording it at all. See the button to your right :-D

Growing with an eternal perspective

There is a quote that gives me faith that I can keep growing and change who I am in to who I should be and want to be.

Isn't it awesome? I decided the butterfly is a good symbol of what this quote says. Even if you think you're a caterpillar, you can become a butterfly!

As I was thinking more about my last blog post, I remembered a conversation I had once with a friend, Lee Worden. We had been to the temple (I think it was one of the first times she'd been there) and she was driving me home. She expressed her concern that, having found the gospel later in her adult life, she would never catch up to us who had been learning about it throughout our lives. I said something like, "You have eternity to catch up." She liked that. I miss you Lee!

As I thought about this experience, I realised that this principle doesn't only apply to people who are baptised and join the church later in their lives. It applies tTro all of us. When we start comparing ourselves to other people and feel like we may never be as good as them we should remember - we have eternity to catch up! I really like something that Elder Neil L. Andersen said about this - "Wherever you now find yourself on the road of discipleship, you are on the right road, the road toward eternal life."

Lightbulb! So, if you're on the road to discipleship, you don't have to feel somehow less than people who have travelled further along it - just keep on trekking! Elder Jeffrey R. Holland also said, "[The Lord's] concern is for the faith at which you finally arrive, not the hour of the day in which you got there."

I'm really grateful to have had time over the past week to really think about the things that are important to me... the people that really matter, the attributes I want to develop, and the things that I want to spend my time on - they've all been on my mind. I dare say I'll tell you more about them soon.  :-)