Happy Valentine's Day

AKA Singles' Awareness Day

This has been my first Valentine's day in seven years not to have a "valentine". Not really sure how I feel about it. It's not like I was ever a huge fan of the holiday, I just always happened to have a boyfriend when they day rolled around. I was actually looking forward to today though, I pre-made the decision to revel in it and be my own valentine and go out and clean my car or shop or something. When I woke up this morning, however, I had a sore throat, and it was more or less a blizzard outside so that knocked out about half of my plans. On top of that it turned out to be a pretty emotional day, with my own issues and those with my parents. Well I finally decided to pick myself up and do some of my homework which included reading selections from Margaret Fuller's The Great Lawsuit. It's early American women's rights literature, a lot to soak in. Anyway so I was reading it when this statement slapped me in the face:

"If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls after a while into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up... Union is only possible to those who are units."

How true this statement is. The past few weeks I have really done a lot of praying and trying to figure out what it is the Lord wants for me/from me right now, and this statement really does sum up a lot of what I have found He wants me to do. I need to be on my own for a while, learning and growing, "renovating" if you will. I know I used to be a whole and complete person, a "unit" but somewhere in the past couple years at BYU I kind of became complacent, it's ridiculously easy to do at BYU, believe it or not. Last night I completely finished a journal for the first time. I started it 02-13-06 and finished it last night, 02-13-09-- three years. The beginning of that journal records me at my worst, the middle records me at my best, and the end records me at some sort of plateau, in a rut, trying to make my way back to where I was in the middle, if not higher. Man I used to be on fire! Even just last spring I had such a great relationship with the Lord and such a huge desire to serve. Last spring I got a phone call asking me to take a girl to the hospital and I sprinted all the way across campus to get to her and stayed at the hospital all night with her. This semester, I was put "on call" to take a roommate to the hospital if it were necessary, and I...didn't find myself quite as willing; I know I would have done it, but I would not have been happy about it. I don't know what happened to me! Or how I let it happen! But I've got to fix it.

Here is comin', a better version of me.

GAH! I can't get the italics to go away! I just wanted them for that one quotation!! Sorry, it's really bugging me!!!