May 2nd

So yeah, wow, no. Holy - wow.

Okay.

So I am loved and here is how I know why.

Yesterday - (I forgot to mention this and I want to say it) I had a lady come in who took one look at my face and called me by my name, including my former last name. I didn't know who she was. She explained that she was a counselor at a Girls Camp one of the years I was up there, probably when I was a fifth-year/YCL. She said I had a big personality and she loved my family and that was how she knew me. She remembered me because of my big personality and then years later identified me just because of who I was and who I had shown myself to be.
Uh, that's pretty cool.

Secondly, today I got to work and looked at the two books I had brought to read and just really didn't feel like quite reading them and feeling kind of helpless on what to do instead. I wanted to create or do something a little more active. For a while I just settled but then my brother Wolfman came in.
Wolfman has come in a couple of times just to talk with me. He's fantastic to talk to. FANTASTIC to talk to because he really listens, asks questions, wants to know about my life, and I can talk about ANYTHING. I love him dearly. He is my favorite sibling hands down. Sometimes I try to get him to leave earlier because I get a couple fish-eyes from coworkers, but today we talked and talked, about the campaign, about life, about anything and everything. He was there for an hour maybe an hour and a half. I love my brother. He's leaving soon to Montana in a couple weeks where he'll stay for a couple months which then he'll come home, work and play for about four weeks before the availability date for his mission takes place, so he might get whisked away. I can't even think about it without crying or getting emotional.
I have shared the closest bond with my brother than any other human being I know. Honest to goodness I have. This is not good to write right now because I am at work and crying now, haha. But I love my brother dearly. He is seriously a treasure to me. He offered to go get me some food and ran to Walmart to get me popcorn chicken to tide me over before getting off work/dinner.

While he was gone, and I was waiting, I kid you not, I think one of the next calls I got was a gentleman I had met before who had teased me about my (real) name. He reminded me of the incident on the phone and just said that he had gotten a call from this number and was calling back. I offered to help when we didn't know what he was talking about, but then he just asked me how my day was. I told him the truth and told him my brother had come to visit me and it had made me very happy but that I was really sad for him to be leaving soon. This man did not just regard it as a normal courtesy to inform another human about random facts of their life to make conversation, but suddenly took a real caring to me. He talked to me about how it will get better when we get older, that we will be separated, but we will be able to see each other. Then he recommended some good books to cope and help missionaries cope with leaving and helped me look them up to find the names. He even recommended books to help with the passing of someone written by the same author. He really just talked to me and seemed to have no intention of cutting the conversation short just because of time and I felt really cared about and was kind of in awe. When I finally had to help a gentleman at the desk, he said he could let me go. The next person after that gentleman was Wolfman with food and we talked for nearly another thirty minutes.

I was just struck by my talk with this man on the phone that there are angels around us, that we need to focus on the spiritual realm and not there here and now. And above all else, I soon had the revelation, that even though maybe pioneer mothers had to send their sons off to never see them again to frontier land, fight in the military or any endeavor, even though so many people throughout history have had it so much harder than me (which I think about a lot) that my pain is still valid in the now. That it is still hard.
I am losing my brother. And I will be in pain because of it.

Today I also started talking to Wolfman about having a baby before he gets back. He, in a different previous conversation, said that he would think it crazy for us to be pregnant by the time he got back. But today, he said in his nonchalant way, that he'd "be down" if we were expecting by the time he got back. He said babies make everyone happier. To my own shock, I said "If you wanted us to get pregnant, I would do it." and I was shocked to say that I would seriously do it. If Wolfman had right then demanded we have a child when we got back, there was literally nothing that would've stopped me from planning on it. That's how much loyalty in my soul I feel I've pledged to him. Now I could probably rationalize and justify it after the moment, but in the moment, I felt so strongly that I literally would do anything Wolfman asked me because I trust and love him so much. I was shocked by the truth of that resonating in my soul.

Random advice I can't forget about husbands: Treat him like the person you want him to become.

Really fast, because I feel like they need to be written down:
My fondest memory of my brother is easy to recall. I was hiking with my family and determined to find us a good clear spot by the lake. So thinking that if I cleared some brush, I'd be able to come out into an opening and find us a good spot. I trudged through some terrible smelling mud, low low branches and a cloud of gnats or two with no luck. I was pretty miserable and kind of scared. When I turned around and went back, the only person that had stayed was Wolfman. My family had left to make it to the other side of the lake, but he had not. He sat on a bench and later, he touched my heart by saying that he had felt so scared for me down in a brush where he had no idea where I had gone that he said he had prayed for me.
He had prayed for me. For doing something stupid and stubborn that frankly, I emerged from the brush kind of feeling sheepish about, he had sat down, been frightened for my wellbeing and had prayed for me. I was so touched by his love and patience for me and what appeared to be my pretty poor decisions.
There was another thing he said today that really touched me and that was he wasn't a laugher, which is to say that he did not generally laugh at jokes. But he said that my jokes were so witty and so funny that he had never been able to help himself. That meant a lot. My brother and I share a very similar sense of humor because of growing up and joking together. We're really close that way.

So God has sent some angels my way and really helped me think about life and open up to it. I've been praying a lot for purpose, for signs, for just pushes in the right direction. I keep getting kind of the same thing -stay where you are. And it can be frustrating because I want to move and develop in obvious ways, I want to create and see creation. But God is telling me to stay where I am and continue being diligent in what I am doing already. So I obey. But he is sending me signals to testify of the meaning of life. I could be stuck doing this for the rest of my life and it wouldn't matter what I did so much as how I do it because it's the payoff that's important and not the actual work.
Apparently sometimes we learn by standing still and realizing what's most important to us.

I feel weirdly like I've grown today.

~Nymph

P.S. Also, I want to state some things because I had talked politics with Wolfman a little, and while I'm scared to post them on social media as i feel you are instantly judged and attacked a lot more often, I want to state them, because they feel powerful to me.

I believe in a God and a plan for the Earth.
Much of what is going on in the world is wickedness.
I believe ins self-defense.
Diversity can be celebrated, but it should not be worshipped.
The liberal agenda (atleast what I know of it from media) is self-serving and victimizing.
An employer should be allowed to discriminate.
We should teach values and not stigmas.
People are meant to work together.

It has literally never been a question in my mind whether God speaks to people on the Earth today. It was weird to even think that people thought he didn't.