Given to Wonder

If asked what my favorite hobby was, I would say daydreaming. I love to think about far-off places and run through fantastic scenarios normally found in some kind of blockbuster film. It is a pretty great way to kill time when you are bored or to help you fall asleep quickly. Occasionally, this tendency to allow my mind wander leads to the biggest questions of life, such as “What is the point of life?” and “Did I leave the iron on?” Okay, not so much the second question (I am very good about unplugging the iron when I am done!), but questions like the first one have plagued mankind for centuries, especially today. Life is pretty insane when you think about it, especially when you consider that you are only one of billions of people who live on the Earth today. It is no surprise that there are many people who wander about life without a particular direction, changing their heading wherever the wind blows them. What do they daydream about?

I don’t know the answer to that question, not exactly, but I do know that having some kind of anchor in life really helps put stuff into perspective. My own personal anchor is the best one, in my opinion. I choose to anchor my life around the teachings of Jesus Christ and what the LDS church teaches, namely that we are here to improve ourselves and that every single trial we go through, every pain we feel, is merely educational. It is really, really hard to see this during that particular trial, but we can always (but may not choose to) see how some tribulation helped us and made us better. I think that may be where the saying, “hindsight is 20/20” came from.

My invitation today is to get a little introspective. Think for a couple minutes about the hardest trial you have ever gone through and figure out how that trial made you a better person. What did you learn? How did your perspective on life change? My goal is for everyone to say, “Wow that really sucked, but at least I learned something from it.”

If you are curious as to how this perspective helped me through some crazy stuff in my life, check out my profile on mormon.org. Click the word “profile” or the white box with an orange border in the corner of my page. My story is near the bottom of the page 🙂 I will probably make a post about what I learned from that experience in the future, but there is the story.