Before the End of the Year

On October 30th I was sitting in church, minding my own business. The lessons and talks were very well-prepared and I was thrilled to be in Sunday School and Relief Society, as I had spent a year and a half in Primary prior to Dean being born. I love primary and the simple Gospel truths taught there, but I have thoroughly enjoyed being in SS and RS for the past few weeks. One of the speakers related a story that hit me very hard. She talked about how she started to slack off in regards to her testimony after her children were born and spent most of her time happily watching Regis & Kathie Lee or other things rather than spending time pondering and studying the Gospel. At this point in time, I had watched all of Numbers, Bones, Lost, among other things because Dean refused to sleep anywhere than in our arms. He has since grown out of this (at least at night time and we are working on day time naps), but I spent a whole lot of my time watching TV shows because there was nothing else to do when holding a screaming baby 24 hours a day. Thankfully, John took a picture of him screaming just so we can remember what it was like. See:



Dean has made a huge turn around and has turned into such a sweet, gentle, cute, loving boy who rarely cries. I started to realize that I needed to find something else to do besides turn my brain to mush. I read The Help in 2.5 days and decided that I wanted to read more. I think it was the very next Sunday that I had the following experience based on the story related in the talk. I felt very strongly that I needed to re-read the Book of Mormon from start to finish before the end of the year. I figured that I haven't read it quickly since I was on my mission, which ended 5.5 years ago. I committed to this without having any clue of how many pages I needed to read in order to achieve this goal. I got home, figured out that I would need to read somewhere between 11-12 pages per day in order to achieve that goal. I just started reading in Jacob today and I cannot describe the difference this has made in my day-to-day life. I have found so many answers to problems and worries with Dean just by calming myself down through reading the Book of Mormon and allowing the Spirit to speak to me. I am excited to see how the rest of this experience turns out, but so far I am loving reading it so quickly. I feel much like Dean who used to scream without the ability to be consoled, but now he is a happy, smiling little guy.