"My life feels like a book left out on the porch, and the wind blows the pages faster and faster, turning always toward a new chapter faster than I can stop and read it." I have to admit that lately I have been feeling this way about a few things: When did my little girl get old enough to go to kindergartern? When did my baby decide she should try to walk? Did we really live in our last home two years? Looking back makes me realize just how fast my life moves by. During difficult times I sometimes feel like time stands still, but then in retrospect even the trials often appear like small blinks in my timeline (not that they're insignificant, it's just amazing how quickly they appear to go by in my memories). This is something I need to remember - that hard times do not last forever and that in the story of my life they will hopefully be only small moments.
Elder Perry had a beautiful talk a few conferences ago and he began it by saying, "Those of us who have been around a while...have recognized certain patterns in life’s test. There are cycles of good and bad times, ups and downs, periods of joy and sadness, and times of plenty as well as scarcity. When our lives turn in an unanticipated and undesirable direction, sometimes we experience stress and anxiety. One of the challenges of this mortal experience is to not allow the stresses and strains of life to get the better of us—to endure the varied seasons of life while remaining positive, even optimistic. Perhaps when difficulties and challenges strike, we should have these hopeful words of Robert Browning etched in our minds: “The best is yet to be” (“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” in Charles W. Eliot, ed., The Harvard Classics, 50 vols. [1909–10], 42:1103). We can’t predict all the struggles and storms in life, not even the ones just around the next corner, but as persons of faith and hope, we know beyond the shadow of any doubt that the gospel of Jesus Christ is true and the best is yet to come."
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