Good Evening brothers and sisters. I’m so happy to be with you tonight. My name is Jennifer Collins and I live coastside with my family in the Half Moon Bay Ward. We have moved back after 12 years of being gone from the area and the only downside is I wanted to see familiar faces in the crowd. So, I’m just going to have to imagine that part.
As 2021 closed I kept feeling like it was a year that really didn’t feel like a year. I don’t know if that makes sense to you but for me, it was made up of a lot of highs and lows. More than any other January in my life, I really did reflect on what I learned as I wanted to build on these life lessons. There is no specific order of importance but these life lessons were the ones that stood out the most to me to be able to share with you tonight.
Lesson #1 Embrace change.
As I graduated high school and left for college and as I left college for my work life here in San Francisco, my Mom wrote me twice in a card for both occasions the phrase,“change brings growth”.
We were born to change! We are born as infants and grow to toddlers, then to children and on to magnificent teenagers, to young adults and onward. We are a tall family. At one point someone told us we looked like a circus act coming out of our car! We keep a height stick to measure the growth of our kids. It's marked with slashes of pen and pencil indicating heights and dates. When I see how small our children once were, it's hard for me to imagine them being that way again. Our bodies, our spirits and our minds are designed to change and grow. Think back to what you were like just 2 years ago…right before this global pandemic. What were you like then? I am sure every teenager has grown a couple of inches. Your braces might be off now. You might work or you started a new sport. Or you might have changed friend groups or like us, you may have moved somewhere new and change is around every corner. Change can bring about anxiety and fear for some. Especially if we haven't chosen the change we wanted to make in our lives. Things that can be out of our control like a medical diagnosis, a family member who decides to step away from the church, divorce, losing a job, accidents, and a pandemic..Heavenly Father sent us to earth to help us become more like him, which I can only imagine means we need a tremendous amount of growth. And change brings growth. This is his world. He knows us and oftentimes he knows we need to change course. I have found that in the midst of change you can’t see what the final effect it will have on you. Hindsight seems 20/20. Change requires faith on our behalf. Submitting to change requires us to become humble. This past year I have tried to soften my heart. In my lowest moment I felt there was a significant lack of trust on my end with God. After a succession of experiences, I felt very alone and so disappointed in my relationship with God. And I just didn't know what to do anymore. I didn't want to embrace this change. I did not want to leave God in a time I needed him the most. I wanted my heart to magically and quickly dispel the wounds I experienced. Elder Uchdorf in our last conference session said “Most of the changes in our spiritual lives happen gradually. We can navigate our way through the trials of this life and find our way back to Heavenly Father”. I looked for Him each day. I made myself pray. . This leads to my next life lesson.
Lesson #2 Be patient with yourself spiritually, physically, mentally, and intellectually.
Ezekial 36:26 says so beautifully “a new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh”
My husband Clay has reminded me throughout this year to be patient with myself when it comes to my heart. It has softened from that stony place and there are definitely some hard places left but I can live with that. We are beings of duality by nature. We come to earth to find joy but also to be tested and tried. Heavenly Father has an infinite amount of patience with us. Elder Uchtdorf stated in a 2010 conference talk: patience means active waiting and enduring. It means staying with something and doing all we can-working, hoping, exercising faith, bearing hardship, even the hearts of our desires are delayed. Our Savior was born to mend us and bind us to him. It takes awhile to build back a broken heart. Jesus Christ says in Matthew 11:29 & 30; Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Be patient in your spiritual growth. It takes time. As my heart was mending, my daughter Lucy experienced heartbreak last April. I have noticed that Heavenly Father will plant someone right in front of me to help and serve to mend my own heart.
Be patient with your physical growth and abilities, skills take time and practice to meet your personal goals. Set goals for yourself and not goals based on what someone else is doing! Look up and not around. I have had 2 friends who have fought for their lives physically from disease and a horrific car accident recently. Both lived. Both have very long roads of physical recovery that will require immense patience.
Be patient with your emotional growth. Emotional resilience and approaching your mental health is more like laying a paved path down one step at a time. The church has recently created an Emotional Resilience course. The Lord knows we need these tools in our life to succeed because he knows all things. Emotional resilience is the ability to adapt to emotional challenges with courage and faith centered in Jesus Christ. Helping yourself and others be the best they can. And reaching out for additional help. My thoughts after reading that went straight to our current missionaries in the world right now. Many have been assigned, reassigned, sent home and back out, that’s a lot of emotional expense right there. One of the extra classes missionaries can sign up for in the MTC is an emotional resilience class. Our youth need to learn and grow emotionally now to be more prepared as for what the world has become. It is good to do hard things in our youth.
Be patient in your intellectual pursuits. Knowledge is line upon line. Don’t worry where your starting point is. Be patient in how you learn things…is it through hearing? Or Seeing? Or Doing? We all have different learning personalities. Ask someone you trust if they can help you see how you learn best and go from there.
Lesson # 3 Don’t compare yourself with others
I had a quote up for years in Colorado by Theodore Roosevelt that said Comparison is the thief of joy. We bought our first house in 2011 in Colorado. It was a planned community. It was the easiest place I had ever lived. My kids walked to school, my home had more space in it for a mess of legos and found out what a Chik fil a was…but the air smelled of hot grass and there was no water…beach, lakes, rivers in sight. Colorado will get snow from September to May. And I quickly found out I had no idea how to live in it. One evening I sat with our Bishop after a primary meeting and stated…I don’t know what I’m doing here. . .There was ice on the roads that night. Not snow…crusty ice and black ice and the power was out. He had lived there for years and grew up in Idaho. He knew which way to leave the church building and had me follow him a back way home to avoid icy hills on our freeway. I’ll never forget how he waved out the window goodbye to me and I felt like at that moment it was a lesson in how our Savior can lead us along until we know our way and can navigate unknown conditions. Proverbs 3 verse 5 and 6 says , ““Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths”. Once we realized what the Lord wanted us to do, we left the easiest place we ever lived and bought and remodeled a ranch home to the studs under the rocky mountains. Within weeks we had some very challenging life and family situations. My journey as a wife and mother didn’t look like anyone else I could see or even know. I often had to remind myself - comparison is the thief of joy. If I had looked around to compare, I wouldn’t have found the beauty in God’s individual plan for our family. Last year, we decided to move back to the bay area after 12 years of being gone. Again, we left a town and home that on the outside was ideal for families. Joy is found in life when you can stay on the path where you can learn the most and not worry what the world displays as success.
I have a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is his church. We are his hands. We have so much more to learn. In the name of Jesus Christ Amen.
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