LDS singles life has its ups and downs, just like any other life. Focusing too much on the negative can lead us to overestimate the proportion of challenges in our lives. We can think things are worse than they really are. We can even think life has little if any positive value. Many of us Latter-day Saints have sung, "Then wake up and do something more/ Then dream of your mansions above." How many of us truly live that message? Do we spend our time simply dreaming about the future we want? Do we while away the hours fretting about a past we cannot change? Or do we focus on taking action now, on what we can do in the present moment, to make our dreams reality? The world would have us believe happiness in life comes from having something: money, possessions, status, a significant other. But true happiness comes from living in the moment. That means bringing your all to doing the right things in the here and now, in the today. Stop dreaming about tomorrow or fretting about yesterday at the expense of living today. Regardless of your circumstances, you can be happy in the present moment. Capture a vision Living in the present moment may not appeal to you if your life is dull or unpleasant. Imagining an attractive future will always seem more comfortable. After all, you can imagine anything you want, and it’s really easy to escape there. Hey, Dolly Daydream! Try this much better use for your imagination. Instead of escaping the present unattractive moment, let's put that imagination to work changing the present moment. Let's figure out what you can do today to make today a better, more attractive place. There's a big difference between imagining a better future and creating a positive vision. If you use your imagination simply as an escape, your life will never change. Life changes only when you change. And you generally aren't any better for just dreaming. If you spend all your time dreaming instead of acting, you’re not getting any closer to making that dream reality. Dwelling in a comfortable tomorrow that never comes is a true waste of time. Change yourself Alternatively, you can use your imagination to discover avenues for change. You can create a vision of greatness for your life. And you can take action that lies within your control and unfolds that vision. After all, no one's world changes without action. And no one’s world changes without changes in themselves. It’s human nature to blame everyone else around you and say you’re not where you want to be or who you want to be because of him or her or them or anybody else but yourself. But no one who has that habit is ever happy. That’s because happiness requires you to own your life. Truly happy people aren’t blind to the challenges of mortality. They don’t wear rose-colored glasses and play Polly Anna all day. They simply look to better themselves instead of wishing everything around them were better. They seek to improve upon themselves so they can come off conqueror against their challenges. True happiness is giving your all to the right things in your life. You can’t give your all when you’re constantly looking for someone other than yourself to blame. That’s why happiness requires you to own your life. Accept that where you are and who you are result from choices you’ve made, and then move from that starting point towards the dream destination you desire. Remember your tender mercies Don’t forget to acknowledge the tender mercies all around you. They help you see you're not alone in your journey. The Creator of all things — and that all things includes you — will help you achieve your righteous desires. Each of His tender mercies proves that truth which is both instructive and personally reassuring. Being happy in the present moment, regardless of your circumstances, requires that you surrender your cares to the Lord and yourself to love. He Who calmed the winds and the waves invites
No matter what obstacles you face, He can and will help you achieve the blessings He wants you to have. The winds and the waves still obey Him. They always have, and they always will. While your journey may at times be uncomfortable, He can, does, and will help you to make it enjoyable.
Remembering His tender mercies reminds us He loves us and will never abandoned us. Remembering His strength gives us strength to trust all will be well in the end. And those memories provide courage to continue stepping forward in our lives. When you have that faith, you can truly be happy in the present moment. And that will bring more joy in your journey.
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It appears Sno-mageddon is alive and well. Normally when it snows here, it’s gone within a couple of days. Not this winter. Cold and colder temps attend every dumping of snow over previous layers of snow-turned-ice. For a while I thought we might be getting a break. I’ve been taking advantage of it while preparing to start a new semester. But today, Sno-mageddon struck again, furiously dumping inches of snow within minutes. The college soon cancelled classes. I’m somewhat disappointed. I certainly want my students safe. But with Monday being a holiday and now today being cancelled, we’ve just passed our first week of the semester without ever having class! Yet when I learned of the school closure, I didn’t shift into panic mode or even survival mode. I shifted into thrive mode by preparing to take what I’ve been given and shine gloriously with it. Not here to fail My experience today resembles LDS singles life. Just as I didn’t anticipate a freak blizzard eliminating class, many LDS singles have met unintended circumstances. We were preparing for a different experience when events beyond our control forced us in a new direction. Lost opportunities can yield heartache, disappointment, and concern about the future. Yet we can always choose our response. Many of us struggle to choose optimism. We yearn after hope but feel overwhelmed by despair. I’ve felt that many times in my life. How do you go on when everything around you seems to say you’ll never do anything but fail? You must awake to this realization: Not everything around you indicates you’ll fail. God certainly doesn’t believe that about you. He loves you. He believes in you. He sent you here to succeed and that gloriously. And He’s constantly pleading with you to believe in those truths. When you do, “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). More than surviving We can get so busy keeping up with life’s demands that we wonder if we’ll ever succeed in having a good life, let alone our best life. Mere survival appears increasingly like a noble virtue. But do you think God sent you here so you could merely survive? Or did He send you here to thrive? Thriving is more than surviving. Thriving is living life with zest and optimism. It’s living in the moment, extracting every ounce of joy that moment offers. It’s exuding confidence in the future that faith will not go unrewarded. I honestly don’t see how any Latter-day Saint — single or married — can experience that without partnering with the Lord for his or her life. That’s best done by seeking Him first. Yet many of us are seeking first the wrong life partner. We naturally want to belong, so when our culture pairs belonging with marriage, we look for someone who’ll help us belong. Plus we yearn for someone who can take away the loneliness, discouragement, and pain of being single. That someone is Christ. He taught, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 5:40). Instead of looking first for an eternal companion to alleviate our troubles, we should look first for the Lord Who can do that and more. Instead of seeking first that special someone to take to the temple, we should seek first to walk with the Lord in the temple. Weather any storm The Lord’s love provides the strength to weather any storm. Nephi understood this. Bound to his ship’s mast in a violent sea, his wrists and ankles became severely swollen. Yet he didn’t complain nor cease to look to the Lord. Nephi always had trouble, yet he partnered with the Lord. Can anyone honestly think his life was not his best life? The Lord can lift you to heights you could never imagine alone. Why settle for the companion you might have now when He can lead you to the companion you most need to have, the one you need for your best life? With the Lord at your side, you can trust all will eventually resolve for your good. That faith allows you to release everything preventing you from living life joyfully in this and every moment. Hope, optimism, and positive energy naturally result from living with the Lord as your first life partner. Don’t just survive. Thrive! Partner first with the Lord Who will help you to hear the whisperings of His Spirit more fully, see His tender mercies around you every day, and feel His love for you in powerful and undeniable ways. He can make more out of your life than you can without Him. He will bring you to your best life. And that will certainly provide you with more joy in your journey. This week I’m taking vacation so I can work. Work is piling up at my job, I’m neglecting activities needed for my own businesses, and even things in my personal life are slipping. I need some space to unearth myself. And my solution for getting it is taking a break from my usual commitments, clearing out the clutter, resetting my priorities, and starting anew. We all have times like this. Many marrieds in the Church think we singles have so much time on our hands because we don’t have families of our own. That’s obviously not true for single parents. They have constant double duty. But the lives of LDS singles who don’t have children can be just as busy, as my recent experience testifies. Last week I extolled our need to live in the moment to get all of the joy out of life. I did so with the full understanding that sometimes life happens, making it difficult to live in the moment. With so many good things pulling us in different directions, it’s easy to get swept away in the cares of right now. How can you have the presence of mind to live in the moment? Make a space I heard a speaker in sacrament meeting give a great answer to that question. She described the challenges of being a young mother who needed to attend to her children while also being able to engage regular scripture study. Obviously young children require a great deal of attention, so how do you find that balance? Her answer was to arise early enough before her little ones awake so she can focus on immersing herself in the scriptures before they cry for attention. In other words, she made a space in which she could live consciously without other interests tugging on her. Sometimes living with intent is hard. It’s really easy to allow the concerns of right now to sweep us away. And sometimes those concerns yell so loudly and incessantly it’s hard to find any joy in the moment. Yet we can’t get so busy with the everyday that we don’t fill our souls. We can’t stay happy in the moment unless we stop long enough for the Lord to feed us. And that requires us to make conscious choices to be fed and nourished. It's about the journey
forward . . . That’s how winning is done!” Living fully isn’t about reaching an ideal. It’s about struggling to reach that ideal. It’s not the destination. It’s the journey. Sometimes moving forward means standing still. When life seems to crowd in around us, we need to choose consciously to stop and clear the space we need to nourish ourselves. And every aspect of us needs nourishment. Our most important aspect to nourish is the spirit. Regular prayer and scripture study can work wonders. But we need to clear sufficient space and be conscious in our approach for them to be most effective. Just going through the motions won’t feed our souls. Likewise we need to nourish the heart. Quality time with family and friends as well as engaging regular opportunities for service make life meaningful and enjoyable. Again, going through the motions won’t nourish us. We also need to nourish the mind. Reading good books rounds our character and encourages us to emulate virtue. So can worthy cultural events. But in order to reap the benefit, we need to clear the space they need to exist. And we can’t forget to nourish the body. This means embracing healthy eating habits and regular exercise. But it also means having healthy financial habits and improving the skills needed for our career. Of course, how you choose to nourish yourself is your choice. Just make sure your choice is yours. Do what you do not because of how it will look to others but because of how it looks to you. Make the time to fill your soul. Life will always try to knock you down, but you can better weather the storm with the inner strength that comes from nourishing all the aspects of yourself.
Last week I extolled the virtue of exercising patience with leaders who mostly don’t understand our LDS singles experience. Patience is often a conscious choice, one not made out of habit. Patience helps us to live more in the moment. Living in the moment is where we find the true joy of living, regardless of our individual circumstances. Life doesn’t have to be everything we want it to be for us to enjoy it. That joy starts when we consciously choose to live in the moment. Living in the moment means being present in the now. Too often LDS singles aren’t present in the now. Rather they’re present in the future — a future when an eternal companion provides them with the rite of passage that brings acceptance within LDS subculture. But living in the future (and one which for many LDS singles never seems to come) forfeits the joy of living found only in the present moment. The joy of living now comes only by living in the now. And that’s true regardless of your circumstances. You need a choice, not a plan I remember a singles conference where one speaker talked about living in the moment. She encouraged intentional living. Living with intention can lead you to own your life. And I’m a big fan of owning your life. Then the speaker defined intentional to mean having a plan. The joy of living in the moment, she declared, comes from following a plan. I couldn’t disagree more. Due to our design as human beings to follow habits, I define intentional to mean choosing consciously. Living with intent means you choose in the moment to do what you do. Conscious choices in the moment refuse to let your habits simply play themselves out, allowing you to embrace life and all the true joy of living. You don’t need a plan for any of that to unfold for you. All you need is to use the one gift from God we all have — agency. You simply make a conscious choice. Make the happy life Happiness comes not from just doing the right things but from giving your all to the right things. That giving your all is a conscious choice. And when you choose that path with full awareness and intent to pursue it, the true joy of being alive can come to you. Life on autopilot offers comfort and a sense of stability, but true joy isn’t found in comfort and stability alone. True joy comes from consciously embracing the right things. I use that word embracing intentionally. You can’t just execute a routine of righteous activity and expect happiness to find you. The happy life doesn’t find you. You have to make it. That requires choosing the right things with intention. That means breaking out of the habit of routine living. And that means embracing the right things in your life. Choose to lift yourself Too often we LDS singles don’t. Eager for acceptance within a culture that prizes marriage and family as the door to belonging, we LDS singles often focus on the future to that eternal companion we all yearn to have. Yet your focus always determines your reality. Focusing on what you don’t have now always fills your reality with a heightened awareness of what you don’t have now. A life that feels lacking is never enjoyable. However, the same principles work in the other direction. Focusing on what you do have now fills your reality with gratitude. You begin to see how richly the Lord has blessed you. Life starts feeling plentiful. That focus on what you have now is key to living in the moment. Focusing on the present and not the future is a conscious choice that helps you live with intention. And the gift of agency from a loving Heavenly Father brings that choice within reach of us all. You don’t need a plan to live with intention. You need simply to focus on what you’re doing in the present moment. Then you can breathe with confidence. You can walk with boldness. You can let go of everything drawing your focus to the future and bring your focus to the present moment. When you make these choices consciously, you open yourself to a life you can savor regardless of your circumstances. Righteous intentional choices lift what you do to a new level because in so doing you give your all to the right things. And when you give your all to the right things, life in return gives back to you all the joy and satisfaction of a life well lived. You’ll always get what you give, so give your all to the right things and get the life that’s right in all ways for you.
Last week I wrote about our need to reformat and reboot ourselves. We need new habits will automatically guide us to act in ways that lead to the life we want without any need for us to think about it. But replacing our current habits with those new habits requires us to dig deeper within ourselves. What exactly does that mean? A five-step process If your life seems miserable and depressing, you can transform it into one filled with joy and satisfaction. That doesn’t necessarily mean getting married, although it could. And it doesn’t matter whatever happened to you in your past. You can transcend your challenges such that they no longer challenge you. Just follow five steps:
Let’s talk about each one of these steps in a bit more detail. Wake up First, you must examine the role that habits play in your life. After all, this is how you were designed to operate. Also, various cultural forces have influenced you as you created your habits. Once you understand that, you can begin to replace bad instructions with good ones — better ones based on the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Take a step back Once you understand how things work, you need to separate yourself from yourself. This means learning how to see yourself as much as possible just as someone completely unconnected to you would see you. Many people, single or married, do not have much self-awareness. Acquiring it requires you, among others things, to live in the moment, to question your assumptions, and to shake things up in your life. Assess the situation Separating yourself from yourself places you in a better position to assess your situation more objectively. That increases your probability of finding the real root cause of your problem. Another part of that assessment is knowing what you can change and what you cannot. You also need a good map that faithfully represents the terrain of LDS singles life, including the real rules to the dating game. Dig deep enough to get to the root Digging deep enough means getting to the core naked truth about your situation. That's not an easy task. Most people routinely avoid looking at the truth. And most people don’t have very fulfilling lives. If you want a life filled with joy and significance, then you need to accept the hard task of facing your truth. And you need to keep pursuing answers to your questions until you have them. Take out the tools you need and remove it At this point, the only thing left is to do the actual work of removal. That means getting the tools you need and using them. The most useful tool in your kit will probably be courage. It takes courage to face your truth and to see yourself in an unflattering light. It takes courage to run against the herd. But it's also well worth it. Only then can you become truly free from the pain and anguish of a disillusioned life. That freedom will empower you to embrace the true you that will shine in the darkness. You can live life consciously. You can become all you're meant to become. You can fulfill the mission you were meant to complete. Do something to change an unwanted life We're all different, so the proper application of these steps will vary from individual to individual. But we're all also the same, which means that no matter what specific steps each of us needs to take, those steps will follow the same pattern.
This is the essence of my book about LDS singles life. Of course, the book contains many more details, so you will want to get it when it becomes available. I have begun working with an editor who will help me bring the text into “final” form, so stay tuned for more news as this project develops. And of course we'll be discussing those details from the book and many connected items here in this blog. If you don’t have the life you want, you can make changes that will lead you to the life you want. You just need to have enough faith to take that first step into the darkness. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. And it’s not an oncoming train. It’s the other side of the mountain! |
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Howdy! I'm Lance, host of Joy in the Journey Radio. I've been blogging about LDS singles life since 2012, and since 2018 I've been producing a weekly Internet radio show and podcast to help LDS singles have more joy in their journey and bring all Latter-day Saints together. Let's engage a conversation that will increase the faith of LDS singles and bring singles and marrieds together in a true unity of the faith.
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