Faith Not to Be Healed

It's been a hard couple of weeks.

Stuff with my calling that is stressful and I don't know how to fix. Greg has been gone a lot for hurricane cleanup. Though she was once almost fully potty trained, Brynn has regressed so much that she's back to wearing a diaper full time because I can't even handle it anymore. So I feel like I've failed her, which is not true but is also not easy to stop obsessing about. Feeling sad about fertility and reproductive health stuff, which I have so little control over. IVF gave us a small illusion of control, but it was just that...sort of an illusion. A beautiful illusion that gave us Brynn so quickly, but still. Anyway. You know. This kind of stuff.

Yesterday was also the four year anniversary of having Austin and Daniel. I miss them. It was hard. It is all okay, but it was still just hard.

Yesterday Greg got home a little later from work (it's quarter close) and Brynn had literally been whining and screaming at me for an hour and a half. For some reason she refused to nap yesterday, and she didn't sleep good the night before either. Usually she's a great sleeper. So I was frustrated and tired and sad and Greg told me to go get in the car and have a snack. He bowed out of mutual that night (which I felt a little bad about) and then he finished giving Brynn her dinner, put her to bed, washed all the dishes, cleaned up all the toys, etc, etc. He is really the best.

And I got a cookies and cream milkshake from Chic fil A and sat in an empty parking lot doing nothing for an hour.

And as I sat there, I thought, Why does everything have to be so hard? Almost immediately, I told myself that my life is beautiful and is really not terribly hard at all considering what others in the world must go through. I also remembered that Hard is Good.

But still.

I didn't come to any lovely conclusions and I don't have any grand epiphanies to share. I've been focusing on the advice given in General Conference from, I think, Elder Hallstrom and praying for the faith NOT to be healed. It feels like a good portion of my adult life I've been praying for this, with all of the different things that come with polycystic ovarian syndrome. And maybe as time goes on, maybe I'll get better and better at it.

That's what I have for right now, and I think that's probably enough. It is what it is. If everything were always easy I guess life would be pretty boring. And it's funny how the gospel works. The more I pray for faith not to be healed, the more it brings a kind of healing, and probably the best kind of healing of all.