I feel like I am stuck in a weird place. Change has never been easy for me and waiting for change is even harder. In exactly a week I will be across the country in Washington, D.C. about to embark on a new adventure. All summer I have been waiting for this and now I find myself full of mixed emotions. This year is a year of change and it comes whether we are ready or not.
I recently walked in BYU's graduation ceremony and it was a strange feeling. Since we are five years old we are in school. We move from elementary school to middle school, from high school to college. We look at the future and we see more semesters of classes and life is constant. We understand that we keep going to school until one day it ends. The distant future becomes today. There is no more school to rely on. The future is hazy and uncertain.
Why this is unsettling is easy to understand but in the back of my mind I question why it unsettles me so. Instead of seeing a maze of uncertainty before me I should see a myriad of opportunity. I know that worrying about the future is ridiculous. Heavenly Father has always taken care of me and He is not about to abandon me now. On my mission I came to notice a pattern. Whenever I would get comfortable in an area or with a companion something would change. A transfer would lead to a new companion or a new area, a beloved progressing investigator would drop us, or some other challenge would occur to end the feelings of comfort or complacency. I refer to this concept as the taffy principle. Just as taffy is stretched and pulled so too are we. Just as we begin to develop elasticity and feel comfortable with in our stretching the candy maker pulls us in another direction. Although this process can be painful it is necessary in the creation of taffy. The stretching is also necessary to us in our physical and spiritual development. Apparently I need a lot of stretching right now. As painful as it is I know that it is necessary for the development of my character.
