Young Women's Value Cards

A few days ago, I came across this post at BCC while searching for inspiration for decorating my young women's classroom. I loved the idea, but of course I wanted to put my own spin on it with a different design and quotes. So, I hopped on Canva, and this is what I came up with. 

I'm not sure what I'm going to use these for, but it was fun to explore my feelings about the young women values and learn a little bit of church history along the way. 

Faith

Jane Manning James was one of the first African Americans to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You can read more about Sister James here. 

Elaine Bradley is the drummer for the Neon Trees, a pop rock band based in Utah. You can watch her I'm A Mormon video here. 

Divine Nature 

Eliza R. Snow was the 2nd General Relief Society President of the church, but she's probably best known for her poetry. The first LDS young women's organization was created while Sister Snow served as Relief Society President.

Rosemary Wixom is the current Primary General President and a former member of the Young Women general board. She's given some of my favorite General Conference talks. 

Individual Worth 

Neill F. Marriott is currently the 2nd counselor in the Young Women General Presidency. Sister Marriott joined the church at the age of 22, and she has an awesome Southern accent that's a delight to hear at Conference. 

Chieko Okazaki, a Hawaiian sister of Japanese descent, was the first non-Caucasian woman to serve in an LDS general presidency, and she's one of my heroes. 

Knowledge 

Malala Yousafzai is one of two non-Mormons I chose to quote on these cards, and is also the youngest. Malala is an 18-year-old Pakastani blogger who was shot in the head for blogging about life under the Taliban's rule and promoting education for girls. She's continued her advocacy despite threats against her life, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. 

Mary N. Cook is a former counselor in the Young Women General Presidency. She was married at the age of 37 and has served with her husband in his callings as a full-time missionary, mission president, and Asia area presidency. You can find a brief biography and a list of her excellent talks here. 

Choice and Accountability 

Barbara B. Smith was the 10th Relief Society General President of the church. She has a fairly lengthy bio on the Church's official website. 

Bonnie Oscarson is the current Young Women General President. Her official bio includes the wonderful line "She doesn't regret any of the sleep she missed while teaching seminary." That's one dedicated lady. 

Good Works 

Who better to represent the value of Good Works than Mother Teresa? It's recently been announced that Mother Teresa will be canonized as a saint in the Catholic church in September 2016. 

Silvia Allred was born and raised in El Salvador, served a mission in Central America, and then attended college in the United States. She has served as a member of the Young Women general board and was a counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency. 

Integrity 

Elmina Taylor was the very first president of the Church's young women organization. She was introduced to the church while working as a schoolteacher as a young woman.

Al Fox is a one of the most well-known Mormon bloggers and writers. She was baptized in 2009, and you can read her conversion story in her own words here. 

Virtue 

Sheri Dew is a former counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency and the CEO of Deseret Book Company. She's also been involved in humanitarian work, sending children's books to impoverished countries.

Ruth May Fox was an early member of the LDS church in England. She later moved to Utah and was an active suffragist. She served as the 3rd General President of the church's Young Women organization, and, of course, wrote the popular hymn "Carry On." You can learn more about Sister Fox in this episode of the podcast Legacy.  

Please feel free to download, use, and share these! 

All credit for the idea belongs to Tracy at BCC.  

Great pearls of wisdom

For the past 2 1/2 years, I've kept a running list of important life lessons as a note on my iPhone. All of them are things I've learned over time, through trial and error. (Read: I messed up a lot before I figured them out.) Here are some of my favorites. The last two are the best!

Pay extra for cheese dip. 
Don't pay extra for guacamole. 

This is important stuff. Cheese dip matters. The only good guacamole is free (or homemade) guacamole.

It's okay to ask for help. Even when it's inconvenient. Really. 
Don't be embarrassed.

Thanks to the missionary who basically followed me around saying this for 3 months, it finally sank in. It's okay to let others see me in the midst of a trial. It's okay to admit that I can't do everything by myself. That doesn't mean I have to tell everyone on Facebook what I'm going through (thank goodness), but I can live with it when someone sees me struggle.

Get to know the stranger who holds his umbrella over you. 

One of the best experiences I've ever had was getting caught in a rainstorm and having a freshman boy run up and insist on following me across town with his umbrella. I didn't want to let him, but the Spirit gave me a nudge. I still got soaked, but it was awesome.

It's never a bad idea to become best friends with someone you'll probably never see again after 6 months. Those are some of the best friendships you'll ever have. 

Three years of crying every sixth Thursday morning... that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. This isn't just true for missionaries, though. Life is full of transitions, but you can gain a lot from knowing someone for two weeks or six months. Sometimes you need to let go of those friendships as circumstances change, but you can take what you learned from that person forever. It's worth it.

Befriend the person whose eyes light up when you mention baking brownies. 

Sometimes you need to be reminded that the simple act of giving away baked goods is enough to make the world a better place.

If you give everything you have serving other people, your every need will be met. You are cared for in even the smallest of ways. 

I've seen this principle work in my life so. many. times. One of my favorites was finding a pack of tampons in the bottom of my temple bag the night I spent the last of my money to drive a stranger to the hospital. That's just one example of many, not all of them financial. It can be a struggle against the natural man to give the very last of what I have to someone else, but the blessings of doing so are too great to turn away.

Don't let whether you're going to church this week be a question. Just go. 

It took me  f o r e v e r  to figure this out. Even when I was super active and involved with all my callings in college, I missed church way more than I personally thought was acceptable. I knew I needed to be more consistent, but I didn't know how. At some point in my last two semesters, the switch finally got flipped. 

I stopped getting up on Sunday morning and making a decision about whether I was going to attend church. There's no longer any decision to be made; going to church on Sunday is as automatic as checking my phone when I wake up. #workinprogress Now I only miss sacrament meeting if I'm legitimately too sick to drive. No other reason. And it's great.

The Holy Ghost doesn't always give you promptings you understand. Follow them anyway. 

"But WHY!?!?!?!?!?!!!!" - my response to any given prompting 

"Oh. Thanks." - 5 minutes later

Sometimes it's okay to break earthly rules when you're following the Spirit. 

(This explanation is super Mormon specific.) There's a difference between policies and principles. The rules and policies of the church are put in place for good reason, and following them is smart. However, policies are written by human beings trying to follow principles given by God, and when it comes down to it, the principles are what really matter.

One example: Anyone who knew me well in Morgantown knows I was a fan of the missionaries' white handbook. (Newsflash, lists of rules make me happy.) OBEDIENCE MATTERS. But there were a couple of elders who I wrote to after they left with no regrets. I was prompted to keep in touch with those specific people, and I saw blessings in each of our lives from occasionally (like once every six months) sending uplifting letters. I didn't distract them from the work and maybe even helped, so... principle > policy. The policy of not writing to missionaries living in your mission is good and important, but sometimes the principle of loving your neighbor and bearing one another's burdens trumps it. 

These last two are my favorites!

Don't let pain go to waste. 

Mortal life is full of all different kinds of pain. It's unavoidable. So, this is my mantra. Every pain I endure has the power to teach me something - either something I should do differently, or some way I can help others. Some of the worst pains of my life have helped me to relieve the hearts of others who see no path back to their Heavenly Father. I've learned to embrace pain because of what I've seen it enable me to do.

Likewise,

Don't let the Savior's pain go to waste. 

The atonement is real; it's not just a hashtag. I strive to follow the Savior to the best of my ability, but sometimes I fall short. Okay, I often fall short of even doing it anywhere near "to the best of my ability." Instead of beating myself up about that, I've learned to keep in mind that this is why the Atonement happened. I won't waste the Savior's pain by either giving up or trying to redeem myself. Either of the ends of that spectrum are wrong and failing to acknowledge what Christ has done for me.

If you didn't catch the sarcasm in the title of this post, you must be new. Welcome!

When everyday moments become #wheelchairprobs

I love me a good greeting card.

I give cards to the missionaries for every occasion I can think of... 

Good-bye cards when they get transferred far away,

Housewarming cards when they get transferred across town,

Baby shower cards when they find out they're training,

Graduation or retirement cards when they go home, 

Birthday cards for click days and baptism anniversaries,

Silly glitter-filled cards when I decide they need to laugh more.

Elder Fidel strikes back.

I'm a card person. (Also, a glitter person. No apologies.)

Finding the perfect card for a missionary isn't easy, though.

It would be a whole lot easier if Hallmark made a "humor" line of their ministry appreciation cards. 

Here's how the process of finding a great missionary card usually goes: 

• Enter greeting card store 
• Smile apologetically to frazzled employee who knows what a wheelchair can do in a gift shop
• Read ALL the cards in the appropriate section 
• If any of them have a unicorn on them, buy them on the spot 

• Discard anything depicting cigarettes, butts, or drinking (unless it's a 21st click-day card!) 
• Almost back into a grandma picking out a wedding card
• Discard anything that's overly sappy (I want to make them cry with my words... and glitter) 
• Having discarded them all, read them all again 
• Pick out the 4-5 funniest "clean" cards 
• Glare at them for not being perfect #thestruggleisreal 
• Remind myself that they're only going to glance at this thing for 30 seconds
• Knock over a display, or at least a few cards 
• Make accidental eye contact with that same frazzled employee
• Grab a card at random, pay for it as quickly as possible, and flee the scene

This is how I got myself kicked out of a Hallmark store. (Disclaimer: Not today.) The bull in a china shop is really a wheelchair in a gift shop, y'all. 

True story.

words.

Ever since I was a little girl, I've loved to write. 

I'd fill up notebook after notebook - probably hundreds - with stories and lists. 

As I got older, I gradually moved on to blogging. (Mostly on Tumblr... don't judge!) Fiction isn't as much fun for me as it used to be. I'd rather channel my love of writing into talking about the struggles (and joys) of living with chronic illness and disability, as well as bearing testimony of my Savior. 

More recently, even the joy of blogging has faded. Things that have happened in my life have been too personal to share with all my friends, let alone hundreds of strangers on the internet. 

Lately, most of my writing has been in the form of emails to my friends who are serving as Mormon missionaries. (The only people who still communicate with emails, right?) It's not exactly an art, but it's all I've felt like doing. 

I've been feeling weirdly guilty about neglecting my blogs. Blogging has been such an awesome force in my life. Through blogging, I connected with people who share my faith while I was living in a place where nobody around me did. I've met some awesome friends through my blogs, and I've seen other people discover the gospel and be baptized after reading believers' blogs. 

The problem isn't that I have nothing to say. The problem is that the things I care deeply about seem too heavy to be written: progressive and debilitating chronic illnesses, domestic and child abuse within the church (both my particular church and Christianity at large), political issues related to being disabled, foster care and adoption... all important topics. 

I believe in being real. I've never been one to gloss things over. (We're not counting my mantra of "I'm okay!" when I'm clearly not, because, well, I may be in horrible pain, but I'm okay.) Acknowledging the not-so-pretty things in life is important because it's only when we face our demons that we're able to fight them. 

My goal in writing, and life in general, is to glorify God. My patriarchal blessing says I'm able to use my gift of communication to relieve the hearts of others who are struggling in life and help them see the path back to their Father in Heaven. I take that ability and responsibility seriously, and I want to always use all possible mediums to do just that. I'm no missionary and I don't want to preach, but I do want to make sure that the things I say, do, and write fulfill a higher purpose. 

I know there are ways to approach those heavy topics in ways that enlighten, benefit, and uplift. I've seen others do it, and I admire them. Allowing your misery to become your ministry is a powerful thing and my greatest goal. Until I figure it out for myself, though, I'm content to stay quiet. 

Less of me, more of Him. 

Note to Self {The Day That Changed it All}

Dear Heather,

Your dad said it best. "It feels like this is all a bad dream, doesn't it?"

When you went to the orthopedic doctor for the first time today, you thought it was because one of your legs was shorter than the other. Your pediatrician sent you there because you've been having trouble walking, more than you should be, even with CMT. The new doctor suspected that it might be scoliosis, and had an x-ray of your spine done right there in the office. You went back to your exam room with your parents to wait for the x-ray to be read, and you could hear the doctors discussing it down the hall. The first hint that something was about to go wrong came while your dad was playing with a latex glove.

"Look at that spine!"
"Forget the spine! Look at those hips!"

Back to the x-ray table you went.

The rest of the appointment is a blur. You might remember the details now, but 12 years from now, you won't.

Today you were scheduled for your first major surgery, just a few weeks from now. You'll need at least three surgeries, the doctor said -- one for each displaced hip, and one for your spine. After those surgeries, you'll be able to walk without pain again. Maybe you'll even be able to run, for the first time in your life.

That isn't exactly how it's going to happen. What seems scary now is only scratching the surface of what the next few years will be like. You know this is a big deal, but your fears are about pain and the risks of anesthesia and starting middle school just weeks after hip surgery. The possibility of having to miss school is near the top of your list of concerns.

Things are going to get worse. So much worse. Your life is going to be forever changed, against your will, while you lie unconscious and unaware. You're going to grieve. You'll experience terror, denial, rage, and sorrow. You'll lash out at physical therapists, blame your parents, grow to hate God, and even consider suicide at the tender age of eleven. (I know, you think you're all grown up.)

What I wish you could know, throughout these next months and years of grief, is that after things have gotten as bad as they could possibly get, they're going to get better.

For years, you've stood by the fence during recess and watched other children play. You've dreamed of being able to run, and you imagine it feels like flying. You'll never know what it's like to run... but, thanks to the wheelchair you fear so much, someday you will feel like you're flying. That wheelchair will feel like shackles at first, but eventually, you'll come to see it as your wings.

Your childhood ended today. I'm sorry for that. But someday, years from now, you're going to find out that your life did not. It's only just beginning. And in eight long, painful years, you'll get a second chance to embrace it.

Thank you for hanging on through the storm. Thank you for surviving, one day at a time, and for retaining the essence of who you are. It's going to feel like a bad dream for a long time, but the best is yet to come.

Love,
Heather