When You Can't Sleep...

I decided, this week, to voluntarily give up my entire Friday night.  I don't mean just a namby-pamby couple of hours, though.  I mean ALL of it.  And the first several hours of my Saturday morning.  I decided to stay up.  All night.  No, really, all night.  As in I-didn't-get-home-until-7:30AM all night.  What possessed me to give up this precious commodity, do you ask?  What inspired me to renounce my rest and forgo my forty winks?  I'm glad you asked...

This

 

 

 

Rock the U is a dance marathon that is a charity on behalf of cancer research at the Huntsman Cancer Institute.  There has been some controversy over the funds raised being less than what is actually spent on the event, but the proceeds directly benefit the Huntsman, which is a way for us as students to make the University donate money, in a way, to the research, so I'm okay with it.  :)  And it provides a good, safe venue to have discussions about cancer, which I appreciated.   

Why did I feel the need to participate?  Well, cancer has been an important part of my life.  My grandmother died of cancer.  Three of my teachers in high school had cancer, two of them died while I was a student.  I have had friends with lymphoma and others with melanoma.  Cancer sucks, I've been around it enough to know.  I don't know that we'll ever find a "cure" for cancer, as it is your own body that you are fighting, but I support the research that has given hope and healing to so many people.  And it's dancing!  All night!  I love dancing! :)

A seeming non-sequitur, one of my favorite quotes from a book called Dune is the following about the main character:

Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. 

The Book.  I promise this will make sense if you read the next line ->

So, after 11 hours of dancing with just a few breaks, I've learned a few things:

1. Dancing hurts.  A lot.  Like...a lot a lot...I feel like I just finished one of the most intense full-body workouts ever.  Ow.

We call this step "twerking."  Don't look it up.  Please.

2. I love dancing.  I already knew this, but it was reaffirmed.

We call it: "The Wobble"

3. A lot of people are affected by cancer, even at my age.  That's a remarkable thing, if you think about it.
4. Dancing for hours and hours with other people gives you a certain level of acceptance of them.  If you want to dance with yourself, that's okay.  If you want to run around the room like an airplane, that's okay too.  If you want to dance with others, that's fine.  We're not here to judge you, just to share with you.
5. The level of human endurance when the music is so loud to drown out thought is actually incredible.  I had no stimulants besides a little bit of chocolate, and not the good stuff.  I woke up at 10:00 AM that day and didn't sleep until 7:30 the following morning.  Your body is capable of amazing things and you are able to control it in amazing ways if you are determined to do so.
6. People can do great things for others that they've never met.  This is important and very human.
7. Cancer can do many things, but it is also very limited.  One of my good friends who died from cancer asked to have on his funeral program an excerpt from a poem by Robert L. Lynn called "Cancer is So Limited:

It cannot cripple love.

It cannot shatter hope.

It cannot corrode faith.

It cannot eat away peace.

It cannot destroy confidence.

It cannot kill friendship.

It cannot shut out memories.

It cannot silence courage.

It cannot invade the soul.

It cannot reduce eternal life.

It cannot quench the spirit.

It cannot cancel Resurrection. 

I think that this is the beauty of Rock the U.  We celebrate where there is usually sorrow.  We celebrate life and the fact that we can celebrate.  We raise money and awareness for the pain, but celebrate those who have passed on.  I loved the event.  I probably won't have a chance to do it again, but appreciated it while it lasted.

Years that come and go

This will be a very reflective post for me.  It's fairly religious and describes some of my beliefs and motivations in my religion.  If you want to skip this one, that's okay too :).  I'll be posting a couple of posts this weekend, likely, as I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things right now. 

It's late for this week, but it's because I needed to devote more time to it than I had this last Sunday. 

This last week I celebrated four years since leaving and two years since returning from serving a full time LDS mission in and around Mexico City.  To say that the experience was transformative would be an understatement.  My mission meant absolutely everything to me.

For those of you reading that are less aware of what a mission means, let me explain.  Young members of the LDS church can elect to leave their normal lives behind for a period ranging from 18 months to two years to devote full time ministerial service to the church.  We pay our own way.  We are not in employ of the church.  The LDS church uses a lay ministry and missionaries are no different.  The assignment is made by the leaders of the church.  We believe that the assignment is made by revelation of God to them and is specific for the person in question.

I was assigned to the area in and around Mexico City, known as the Mexico Mexico City South Mission (yes, two Mexicos without a comma; no, I don't understand it).  This became my home for two years of my life.  I paused college and personal life to do so.  I refused to date seriously in high school so that nothing would be a distraction for me when I left (though, honestly, I am weird enough that it wasn't hard to pull off for lack of interested parties :P).  I threw myself into missionary work with a fervor, and it was very, very, very hard for me.  I left on St. Patrick's day, my favorite holiday.  Donning my best emerald green tie I drove to the Missionary Training Center in Provo.  My days consisted of class or exercise or eating basically all day every day but Sunday, which consisted largely of church meetings all day.  I had (probably have is a more accurate conjugation) a fairly steady streak of stubbornness and pride and I don't think I was the easiest person in the world with whom to get along.  I didn't make friends easily in the MTC, and never really did make friends easily throughout my mission.  At first it was because I was self-absorbed and self-righteous, then it was because I had so little understanding for people that wanted to bend rules, and then simply because I had a reputation for being a punk. 

I don't have the list of mission companions with whom I keep constant contact.  I think most of the missionaries tolerated me out of necessity more than anything.  I engendered nicknames like "Élder Sudburro" (appending the term donkey to my last name) because of policies that I implemented and enforced about reimbursements as a financial secretary that slowed the process down significantly (donkeys are slow :P).  I know missionaries that sincerely warned my companions that I would be a nightmare before they were assigned to be with me.  Frankly, this was not the aspect of my mission that I really liked (If you were one of the missionaries with whom I served, I'm sincerely sorry for any pain I caused you). 

Secondly I had a reputation for being a jerk about rules.  Rules that I bent to try to be "extra good."  I got up at 6:00 with my companion every morning and we went running.  We weren't really supposed to be up before 6:30 AM and were supposed to get 8 hours of sleep, but it was the only way I could see us getting what we needed to do done on time.  We were supposed to do a half hour of exercise every morning, shower, dress, and eat breakfast before 8:00 AM every morning.  This was hard for me to accomplish when the water boiler had to be started every morning manually and there was only one good bathroom available.  Hence the getting up at 6:00.  What followed was a fairly precise regimen.  An hour of studying alone.  An hour to two hours of studying with my companion.  Another hour of studying the Spanish and English languages.  Leave to look for people that wanted to be taught the gospel.  Teach the gospel.  Lunch at 2:00PM, keep going until 9:00PM.  Plan for the next day.  Be in bed by 10:30.  Repeat the following day.  This largely happened every day for two years.  It's hard to describe why I was such a stickler to many people.  I believed that exact obedience to the mission rules would bring miracles in my life and the lives of those that I taught.  I wanted desperately to bring those miracles to bear, and got frustrated when anybody seemed like they were getting in my way of doing that, even if that person was myself.  I wanted to do all in my power to bring the blessings of God to the lives of those that I served.  It's a weird thing, maybe, but it was important to me at the time.  I wanted to be almost military-like in my following orders.  This gained me a bad reputation quickly.  I learned to try to explain why I wanted to do what I did, but I don't think many ever really understood.

By the time I learned to communicate better, to teach my companions why I felt it was important, I had one of the worst reputations in my mission.  As wonderful as I feel missions are, they are still populated with mostly late teenagers and early twenty-year-olds.  We are as immature as that sounds.  Reputations are seldom healed.  I felt like (and still do feel like) I was, at least for a time, the most hated and feared elder in the mission. 

So why, might you ask, did I love my mission?  Because my mission wasn't about any of this, it was about my relationship to God and His gospel as I believe it.  It was about bringing the Love of God into the lives of those with whom I interacted on a daily basis (too late I understood that this meant the other missionaries too).  It was about "mourn[ing] with those that mourn, comfort[ing] those who stand in need of comfort."  It was about seeing and being part of incredible miracles.  We don't talk about them much, because any act of God is for the lives of the people directly affected and we consider these experiences sacred and so not broadly shared.  Suffice it to say that I took part in miraculous healings, saw miraculous protections occur, and saw miraculous changes happen in the lives and hearts of those that I taught, including myself.  Miracles were part of my daily walk.  I truly feel to call that time of my life "blessed."  I would not trade it for all the world and would do it again, hatred and all, in a heartbeat.

My mission, what I did there, why I did it, and how I did it, are the reasons I am the person that I am today.  It's the reason I can't bear to let my hair grow any semblance of long, even two years after getting back.  It's the reason I decided to take a position as a resident advisor of a house while agreeing to minimal compensation.  It's the reason I am devoted to my church service still.  It's the reason I'm devoted to service in general.  It is me. 

Why did I serve a mission?  Because, dear reader, I feel in my heart that a young man named Joseph Smith really did see God the Father and Jesus Christ in a grove of trees one day after praying to them.  I feel in my heart that he was called as their Prophet.  I feel in my heart that there has been an unbroken succession of Prophets for God the Father and Jesus Christ since that day and that those Prophets lead this church.  I sincerely believe all of this.  I believe that Jesus was the Christ, meaning the anointed one.  He was the one anointed (chosen in a special way) to come and suffer for every one of us, feeling everything that we feel, suffering everything we do, and paying any penalty we're asked to.  I believe that faith, repentance, baptism, confirmation, and endurance to the end are the path to eternal life.  I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS church) is the church and kingdom of God on the earth today.  I believe in real, miraculous power in Priesthood.  I believe in angels that still come down, in Gifts, in the Holy Ghost, in things that cannot yet be measured in any way.

I am a scientist.  Physical things demand physical proof.  So too do spiritual things demand spiritual proof.  I have proved them time and again.  I know the truth of these things from personal experience, God bearing witness of it.

I'm sorry that this post was long and not really that funny, but I wanted to help you, dearest reader, understand a little bit more of this part of my life.  It is, I believe, the biggest part of who I am.  I hope you have learned a little from the chain I wear. :)

Week of Early Months in the Year Wherein I Do Not Go to School (we should really come up with a shorter, peppier name for this)

Thank you for all of you wonderful people who have actually read my blog!  I'm amazed that you were willing to send me so many warm wishes!  I honestly feared nobody would ever really read it :P.  Now on to the post.

Today, as I was writing my blog, I felt that I had a meme for everything, so this is my life in memes.

I just feel like I don't want to go to school this week...I think it's something in the air up here.  I've talked with others here and it seems to be a common feeling.  It's just weird.  It's "spring" and I just feel like I need a "break."  I think I will call it..."spring break."  I know that this may be a novel concept for some of you from other universities...

The character is rage comics again.  BYU has no spring break, FYI.

So what will I be doing this week?

Yup.

Honestly, though, I've been needing a break.  Those of you who have read my other posts know it's been a long road these last few weeks.  On top of that I've had a few rejections from medical schools the last few days.  What have I been telling myself?

The Keep Calm series

Yup, that's about it.  That is my life in memes right now.  I'll get through okay. :)  I have a lot of work to do this week, both class and work work.


To those of you on spring break, I wish you all the best!  I can't wait to hear about your exciting endeavors!  To those of you without a spring break, I hope your life gets better! ;)

On Friendships

Well, this might be a bit repetitive as I just posted on love, but I'm willing to risk it. I also know that I'm breaking my own rule about more than one post a week, but I wanted say this.  The last week in February was one of the most stressful I've had. I had three midterms, one of which went extremely poorly; I found out about two rejections from medical schools; I forgot an assignment in one of my classes was due because I was studying so hard for another class; and I got a cold to top it all off. This was combined with two dinners and a board meeting on top of my regular Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday meeting schedules. I was emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically taxed to just about the limits of my endurance. There were days that I wanted to cry. All the time I needed to give emotional and spiritual support to the elders (~20 year old men) in my quorum (church group of men) for whom I'm president (you know what a president is ;) ), my housemates, and my friends with similar test loads. I was exhausted.

In this state of exhaustion, I was blessed with dear friends who saw me exhausted an reached out to help. One of my housemates who HATES talking about feelings came and asked me if I was okay and gave me a hug. I recognize that sacrifice. Another housemate that made me cookies, gave me a hug, gave me dates from Saudi Arabia, and a note about her appreciation for me as an RA. A home teachee (someone in my church over whom I watch and to whom I give support) writing me a note telling me how much she appreciated me and what I do, and she didn't even know what was going on. A number of very kind texts from people that care for me. An infinite number of tender mercies by angels both earthly and heavenly. I cried because of the love of God I felt more times this last Sunday than I care to count or admit, both at the pulpit speaking and in many other settings. I just wanted to say thank you to all of you. I wanted to tell everyone who sent a good thought or action my way, mentioned here or not, recognized by me or not, thank you, really. 

It meant the world to me this last week. I wish I could express how much I love you and am grateful for you.  Please never stop being the amazing, wonderful, incredible "friendships" and humans that you are.  I am so so so so grateful.

Love

February just ended, and I feel that I needed to put an obligatory post about my view on love. :)

Something came to my mind the other day, and I've taken it as sort of a mission statement: "My mission in life is to serve Love, to feel Love, and to become Love."  Let me explain.  This comes from the biblical injunction "God is Love."  I like this phrasing because it helps me put emphasis on what I feel pure religion is.  I feel that our purpose in this life is to serve God in Love by serving others with our whole hearts and loving them, to feel love as we form relationships and bonds that are meant to last forever, and to become as God is, in perfect love.

As for love itself, it is much more than attraction.  It is an accepting.  To truly love someone you must accept them.  That does not mean that you have to agree with everything they do.  That does not mean that you don't want better things for them.  It means that, even if they never change, you can still support and sustain them to the best of your ability.  I feel that this is true in both a romantic and a friendship relationship.  If you master it, you can love somebody even before you get to know them.

Now a word about relationships:

This month will be two years since I returned from serving an LDS mission.  I am not married.  I am not engaged.  I am not dating anyone with any degree of seriousness.  If you are LDS and from Utah, you may think that I am a menace to society.  Maybe I am...

(I like memes...don't judge...this is from a series called rage comics)

Please know that I wish with all my heart to start a family.  For those of you that are not LDS, let me explain.  We believe that the family is central to our happiness. We believe that a man and woman are to grow and progress together and "neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord." I believe that the greatest joy in life is to be found in a family relationship.  I desire sincerely to have a wife and children.  I recognize that it is one of the most challenging things in the world to support a family.  I hold no illusions that it will be rainbows and butterflies.  Nevertheless I dream of a marriage of true love with my wife.  I dream of facing every challenge together.

An important message from the Legend of Zelda...Kind of...

 Jeffrey R. Holland, a leader in my church, said the following, which I believe fully:

“One of the great purposes of true love is to help each other. … We can endure almost anything if we have someone at our side who truly loves us, who is easing the burden and lightening the load...

“love is a fragile thing, and some elements in life can try to break it. Much damage can be done if we are not in tender hands, caring hands. To give ourselves totally to another person, as we do in marriage, is the most trusting step we take in any human relationship. It is a real act of faith—faith all of us must be willing to exercise. If we do it right, we end up sharing everything—all our hopes, all our fears, all our dreams, all our weaknesses, and all our joys—with another person...

“True love blooms when we care more about another person than we care about ourselves. That is Christ’s great atoning example for us, and it ought to be more evident in the kindness we show, the respect we give, and the selflessness and courtesy we employ in our personal relationships.”

This is the kind of relationship I desire to have, the kind of love I desire to give and to receive.  I hope to, one day, find somebody who helps me to reach this goal.  I understand that neither she nor I will be perfect, but we can help each other to grow and to progress.  

I admit that I have fears about relationships.  I fear that I ask too much of a spouse.  Between my involvement in medicine and my church and other service, things that define the basics of who I am, my life will be hectic and my spouse will have her hands full.  I can only promise all my love, and I admit that I'm not sure that's enough for many people.  I'm afraid sometimes that I'm so weird that nobody will really understand me.  You can ask any of my housemates, I'm an odd duck...I hope to find someone.

Two people who understand each other...even in their weird way.  http://xkcd.com/433/

I have been unlucky in love.  I have had very few relationships.  I did not date seriously in high school (which means to me that I never dated just one person) because I believe that dating is meant to be preparation for marriage, which I was not prepared to consider until after I served an LDS mission.  When I got back I went looking for love but still haven't found it fully.  A series of very unhealthy relationships left me very broken and not myself.  I have had some people that have helped me heal in ways innumerable.  My RA staff has been a blessing to me, listening, not judging, and helping me process and get back to who I really am.  My ward has been a great support, even though they never really knew what was happening.  My housemates, both last year and this year.  My family, of course.  The few other friends who listened to rants and tears and frustrations and fears.  I am still not completely healed, nor do I think I will be until I find someone to whom I can open fully again, but I have healed more than I can say.  I am more grateful than I can say.

Which leads me out of relationships into the need for love.  Everyone needs love.  We need it desperately.  We need someone who we can trust.  We need someone who we know will accept us, weaknesses and all.  We need someone that is willing to trust us even though they know us.  We need to give love, as that heals our hearts from the darkness in this world.  We need Love.

True Love with thaw a frozen heart.