The old lady, who was fully dressed, with her hair fashionably coifed and makeup perfectly applied, she was legally blind and moved to a nursing home today. Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary.
After several hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready.
As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, the director of the nursing home provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on her window.
“Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room …. just wait.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged, it’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it.
It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice – I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away … just for this time in my life.”
Life is like having 2 bank accounts – one you withdraw from what you’ve put in; the other one you keep depositing happy memories.
With the new LDS church's policy on same sex marriage children's having to wait to be baptized when 18, we can choose to let hatred and disgust be the emotions that leads us in our lives or we can choose to be happy that there are bigger reasons at hand behind this new policy. That much bigger reason being God. He loves ALL of His children, and he knows what is best for all of us. This that might add a little more insight as well.
"I understand the struggle many are having with the news articles regarding the LDS Church's policy of not admitting children of gay parents until the children reach 18, but I think people are responding from their own biases versus an understanding of child psychology.
As I commented on another post, folks are really missing the point. Ask a child psychologist about the cognitive dissonance inflicted on a child that goes to church hearing about eternal families and seeing pictures of heterosexual families in their church classes and then going home to parents that can't fit that mold. This has NOTHING to do with children not being worthy of God's love and everything to do with not placing vulnerable children in a position to judge their parents or feel that their families are less valuable. Children don't develop the neurological ability to manage ambiguity until their late teenage years. Look at Kohlberg's theories on moral development. Or any number of other studies. Such conflict between value systems in the home and in church create intense emotional challenges for children.
As the ward missionary leader in my ward and as a former family therapist, we have similarly backed away in our church from teaching children in families where the child's religious belief would create conflict at home and the family itself would be conflicted - for a variety of reasons. And at no point is there any judgment of the worth of the family or the worthiness of the child. In fact, there is a clear recognition that God loves them as they are and will not demand the impossible of these children.
This is not bigotry, but a simple recognition of the emotional need of a child to be aligned with their parents until they are old enough to manage the ambiguity of conflicting belief systems.
Take a deep breath. It is about doing the right thing for the child. -Jim Mortensen"
Pray for your own answers and comforting peace on this topic, and choose to be happy. I know that we may not always have all the pieces to this puzzle of a life, but realize that there is a much bigger plan happening that we simply can't see.
xoxo,
Patricia T.
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