14 Angels
I am being haunted by missionaries. Ok, so I say that with this huge grin on my face. I tell you, Heavenly Father is not going to let me off the hook for nothing and apparently He will use the missionaries in any way He can to keep me from giving up or running away.
I had made the decision last night that I was not going to go to church today. Although it was the one place I really needed to be after these past few days, it was also the last place I wanted to be (hello, willfulness!). I was tired, physically and emotionally, and still had some lingering "things" (for lack of a better word) from Friday night that just left me not really wanting to go commune, feel, rejoice, or otherwise. Sure, there were new missionaries to meet today, yet I could just find them later this week.
Note to self - quit challenging God, you never are going to win.
Sometime prior to 9:10 am, I was dreaming peacefully, happy, non-guilty. Then, my dream shifted to this huge house (ok, we all know how dreams are) yet there were tons of missionaries there, some kind of social thing. Elders and sisters everywhere, and among the crowd were all my missionaries - all 14 of them that I write to every week. The 14 that I promised over this past year that I would not run away.
As I was mingling among everyone, it was my intention to avoid every one of those 14, because I knew why they were there…somehow they all knew I was going to skip church today. I was doing excellent keeping track of where everyone was and not being seen and then realized I had Elder Erickson right on my tail (probably because he would be the one to make the most impact on me). I managed to keep some distance, yet I turned around and ended up making eye contact and I was like, “crud, I’m screwed.”
Then, someone brings me a name tag. It wasn’t a missionary name tag, more like something you would see at a vendor show. It had some writing on the front and back. The sister missionary that handed it to me just said “I was told to give this to you.” I looked at, it had my name hand written on the front and then flipped it over and it was a list of all of all my sister missionaries names. As if that wasn’t enough it was written in Sisters Scott and Suds handwriting (these were the two God sent this summer to pull me from the edge of the cliff. Also the two who were always "borrowing my phone" just to take selfie's to make me laugh).
That is when I woke up going “really???, are they serious???”. I then remembered how many times I keep telling them all I won’t give up, I won't go away, I will keep fighting and I will stay close to God. I knew better than to just roll over and go back to sleep. I have a feeling that if I did, there would be the 14 of them standing together like a wall going, "Um, we don't think so." I just shook my head, got up, got dressed and went to church. A little late, yet I went.
Now, I don't know why it was so important for me to be there today that God sent the whole army after me. There really was not anything in the talks or lessons that struck me as "had you not been here, you would have not heard this life-changing information." Then again, God works in mysterious ways. It is possible that I needed to be there today for someone else. I don't think I did or said anything out of the ordinary, I was just myself (which is anything but ordinary).
That is just how I go with it. I am just myself and I let God direct the rest. I'm a pretty simple person. I'm no huge master of the scriptures or anything like that. All I really know with certainty is that we should love one another and judge not. Even when I was a missionary, that was about the extent of my testimony. Getting back to heaven is a pretty simple process - read your scriptures, say your prayers, go to church, love one another, and judge not. We sometimes make it so much harder.
Mondays are p-day (personal day) in the mission and the day when they are free until evening to do things like laundry, writing letters home - oh wait, I mean email home. In my day, it was handwriting letters. They get about two hours to log into their missionary mail accounts (they can't go surfing the web or anything like that) and hear from family, friends, and crazy people like me. All 14 have a letter waiting for them with my thoughts on their showing up in my dreams just to get me to go to church.
Yes, I gave them a lot of grief and at the end just simply said, thank you.
I had made the decision last night that I was not going to go to church today. Although it was the one place I really needed to be after these past few days, it was also the last place I wanted to be (hello, willfulness!). I was tired, physically and emotionally, and still had some lingering "things" (for lack of a better word) from Friday night that just left me not really wanting to go commune, feel, rejoice, or otherwise. Sure, there were new missionaries to meet today, yet I could just find them later this week.
Note to self - quit challenging God, you never are going to win.
Sometime prior to 9:10 am, I was dreaming peacefully, happy, non-guilty. Then, my dream shifted to this huge house (ok, we all know how dreams are) yet there were tons of missionaries there, some kind of social thing. Elders and sisters everywhere, and among the crowd were all my missionaries - all 14 of them that I write to every week. The 14 that I promised over this past year that I would not run away.
As I was mingling among everyone, it was my intention to avoid every one of those 14, because I knew why they were there…somehow they all knew I was going to skip church today. I was doing excellent keeping track of where everyone was and not being seen and then realized I had Elder Erickson right on my tail (probably because he would be the one to make the most impact on me). I managed to keep some distance, yet I turned around and ended up making eye contact and I was like, “crud, I’m screwed.”
That is when I woke up going “really???, are they serious???”. I then remembered how many times I keep telling them all I won’t give up, I won't go away, I will keep fighting and I will stay close to God. I knew better than to just roll over and go back to sleep. I have a feeling that if I did, there would be the 14 of them standing together like a wall going, "Um, we don't think so." I just shook my head, got up, got dressed and went to church. A little late, yet I went.
That is just how I go with it. I am just myself and I let God direct the rest. I'm a pretty simple person. I'm no huge master of the scriptures or anything like that. All I really know with certainty is that we should love one another and judge not. Even when I was a missionary, that was about the extent of my testimony. Getting back to heaven is a pretty simple process - read your scriptures, say your prayers, go to church, love one another, and judge not. We sometimes make it so much harder.
Mondays are p-day (personal day) in the mission and the day when they are free until evening to do things like laundry, writing letters home - oh wait, I mean email home. In my day, it was handwriting letters. They get about two hours to log into their missionary mail accounts (they can't go surfing the web or anything like that) and hear from family, friends, and crazy people like me. All 14 have a letter waiting for them with my thoughts on their showing up in my dreams just to get me to go to church.
Yes, I gave them a lot of grief and at the end just simply said, thank you.