Ben Carson pulled himself up from poverty and prejudice with the encouragement of his mother. He became a world-renowned brain surgeon after years of study and work. When Ben first began college, he struggled with chemistry being especially hard for him. As the chemistry final approached, he prayed.

"Finally I turned to God. 'I need help,' I prayed. 'Being a doctor is all I've ever wanted to do, and now it looks like I can't. And, Lord, I've always had the impression You wanted me to be a doctor. I've worked hard and focused my life that way, assuming that's what I was going to do. But if I fail chemistry I'm going to have to find something else to do. Please help me know what else I should do. Either help me understand what kind of work I ought to do, or else perform some kind of miracle and help me to pass this exam.'" (Ben studied for a few more hours and then fell asleep.)

"While I slept I had a strange dream, and when I awakened in the  morning, it remained as vivid as if it had actually happened. In the dream I was sitting in the chemistry lecture hall, the only person there.  The door opened, and a nebulous figure walked into the room, stopped at the board, and started working out chemistry problems.  I took notes of everything he wrote.  When I awakened, I recalled most of the problems, and I hurriedly wrote them down before they faded from memory."

"At last, heart pounding, I opened the booklet and read the first problem. Hurriedly I skimmed through the booklet, laughing silently, confirming what I suddenly knew.  The exam problems were identical to those written by the shadowy dream figure in my sleep. 'God, You pulled off a miracle,' I told Him as I left the classroom. 'And I make a promise to You that I'll never put You into that situation again.'" 

"I walked around campus for over an hour, elated, yet needing to be alone, wanting to figure out what had happened. The only explanation just blew me away.  The one answer was humbling in its simplicity.  For whatever reason, The God of the universe, the God who holds galaxies in His hands, had seen a reason to reach down to a campus room on Planet Earth and send a dream to a discouraged ghetto kid who wanted to become a doctor.  I gasped at the sure knowledge of what had happened.  I felt small and humble.  Finally I laughed out loud, remembering that the Bible records such events, though they were few--times where God gave specific answers and directions to His people.  God had done it for me in the twentieth century."

(Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story pgs. 77-80)

You may have heard about the commencement address given by tennis star Roger Federer at Dartmouth.  I read the entire script and I thought it was fantastic! He shared many great points including:

Do you dress like this every day at Dartmouth? The robe is hard to move in.  Keep in mind I've worn shorts almost every day for the last 35 years.

"Effortless" is a myth. I mean it. People would say my play was effortless.  Most of the time, they meant it as a compliment, but it used to frustrate me when they would say, "He barely broke a sweat!" Or "Is he even trying?" The truth is, I had to work very hard to make it look easy. Hopefully, like me, you learned that "effortless" is a myth.

I didn't get where I got on pure talent alone.  I got there by trying to outwork my opponents. I believed in myself, but belief in yourself has to be earned. Yes, talent matters.  I'm not going to stand here and tell you it doesn't. But talent has a broad definition. Most of the time, it's not about having a gift.  It's about having grit. In tennis, a great forehand with sick racquet head speed can be called a talent, but in tennis like in life, discipline is also a talent. And so is patience. Trusting yourself is a talent.  Embracing the process, loving the process, is a talent.  Managing your life, managing yourself, these can be talents too. Some people are born with them. Everybody has to work at them.

When you're playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world.  But when it's behind you, it's behind you. This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point, and the next one after that with intensity, clarity and focus.

The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes you're going to lose.  A point, a match, a season, a job, it's a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. and it's natural, when you're down, to doubt yourself, to feel sorry for yourself. But negative energy is wasted energy. 

You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments.  That to me is the sign of a champion. The best in the world are not the best because they win every point. It's because they know they'll lose again and again, and have learned how to deal with it. You accept it.  Cry it out if you need to then force a smile.  You move on.  Be relentless.  Adapt and grow.  Work harder.  Work smarter.  Remember: work smarter.

When I was just starting out, I knew that tennis could show me the world, but tennis could never be the world.

 

I can remember the day this picture was taken, many years ago.  Our son was playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament and he and his team were playing hard, as evidenced by the dirt on his uniform. When our son's emotions were intense, he would talk to his dad between games, and his dad knew how to listen.

 

One of the attributes that I most admire about my husband is his non-rushed, calm way of listening. He is a good sounding board.  He does not become so emotionally charged that he cannot reason or think clearly. He knows when to give people space. In this case, he would wait until our son was ready to talk, and then he would be available. He is a diffuser and a calming presence.

 

We know that Nephi, Laman and Lemuel literally took a journey through the wilderness, an eight-year-marathon that took them from Jerusalem to the shores of the Arabian Sea--and then beyond.  This journey, however, was also a metaphor of everyone's life experience.  It applies to all of us.

Here in mortality, we are cast into the wilderness, taking a wilderness journey, where, like Nephi's family, we experience the tremendous heat of trial, the tedium of the way, the wandering through a sometimes trackless desert, the hardship, the thirst.

We are place on a wilderness journey because the Lord is doing his work on us, because always the purpose of such a journey is to transform the travellers, burn out their impurities, strip them of the world, clarify their thinking, and sharpen their devotion that they may be candidates to dwell in the promised land.  The wilderness journey is the Lord's kindness to us, to make us fit for His kingdom.

Nephi's journey, which is a type of our journey in life, was joyously transformed because he did know the dealings of that God who had created him.  This core understanding changed the nature of his journey through the desert and later across the whirling, boiling sea because it changed his core, the very essence of who he was.

He did not face anything alone or without purpose. God walked by his side, led him to the more fertile parts of the wilderness.  He knew who stood by him when he climbed into the crags of the mountain tops looking for just the right wood to make a bow.  He had protective arms around him when the way was hard.  Even when he became depressed later in the promised land, and Laman and Lemuel sought his life, he was lifted up again by remembering, "I know in whom I have trusted."

He had been given strength because he could say with confidence: "My God hath been my support...He hath filled me with his love...He hath confounded my enemies...He hath heard my cry by day, and he hath given me knowledge by visions in the nighttime" (2 Nephi 4:20-24).

(Maurine Proctor, "It Wasn't Because Laman and Lemuel Had a Bad Attitude," https://latterdaysaintmag.com/article-1-7193/

 

A few lines from Elder Neal Maxwell:

Maintaining Church membership on our own terms is not true discipleship. 

Real disciples absorb the fiery darts of the adversary by holding aloft the quenching shield of faith with one hand, while holding to the iron rod with the other. There should be no mistaking; it will take both hands!

("Overcome...Even As I Also Overcame," April 1987)

 I attended an art show titled "Certain Women" in Provo yesterday.  Here were a few of my favorite pieces.

"Careful Mending of the World" by Paige Anderson (two pictures above) 

"I love to think of creation, in its many forms as repeated acts of healing repair.  It is a hopeful thought that though my efforts are meager when compared to the magnitude of the suffering I see, somehow, someway, my small acts of creation, are able to reverberate outward--contributing to a greater wholeness."

 

 

"Measure of Life" by Annette Everett (above).

"The woman who stands with the veil lifted is a protector and a guide.  A guardian angel? An ancestor?"

 

 

"Be" by Morgan Casey (above).

Measure me?

My Mother Eve.

The Mother of Humanity...

Her power passed down generationally.

Divinely anointed,

Irreplaceably appointed,

I am Her posterity.

How can one attempt to measure femininity?

Life is created in my BODY.

GENERATIONS are held in my BELLY.

WORLDS of before and after, my eyes SEE.

I am the portal,

the gatekeeper,

the in between.

Can mere words be used to define all of feminine divinity?

I am

Immeasurably

Incomprehensibly

Eternally

EVERYTHING

I need 

To BE.

 

"Lift Up Your Voice and With Us Sing" by Lisa DeLong (two pictures above).

"We now are separated from our divine home, yet we intuit that there is more than the hazy shadows we see in a darkened glass. We see patterns of the heavens above echoed in the earth below. We are hungry to know, to remember more."

Clayton Young is a professional runner who will be representing the United States in the Olympics this summer. I listened to him speak in a podcast this week and here are some of his wise words:

"Excellence is the result of boring and repetitive tasks over a long period of time. Excellences really is mundane because it focuses on the process instead of the outcome.  The excellent outcome is often the result of the mundane process, so the more you focus on the mundane process, the more excellent the outcome will be. When the mundane shifts form a checklist in your head to a checklist in your heart, that's when you really start to see a positive outcome."
 

This book was recommended by a friend. I was warned that the book was "deep" and "kind of out there," and some of it was, but Dr. Hilton helped me to appreciate the vastness of God's creations and the plan and order in which He created all things.

Inside our wheel-shaped galaxy there exists between 100 and 200 billion stars.  This figure is an estimate, for no astronomer has counted them or ever seen them all.  Many stand in the line of sight of a closer star, and many more are hidden behind veils of dust.  Even if we could see them all, it would take 4,500 years to count them at a rate of one per second, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.  This number is only the stars, how many more worlds and moons are there? Well could the number of Heavenly Father’s creations be described as “innumerable to man” (pgs. 40, 41).

The appreciation of our God and His Christ is greatly increased as we consider the vastness of His creations and the time it took Them to do it (pg. 43).