Expanding the Vison

This semester I am focusing on learning to believe.  I have chosen to believe that the Savior is waiting to teach me and now I am realizing that I have to learn how to believe that He is always there, that He loves me, and that I can trust Him. It is not an easy process. As difficult as it is to explain, it is even more complicated to understand. I don't always understand why I still feel anxiety about the future, if I believe He has a plan for me. Trials sometimes show me that my faith is much stronger in theory than in practice. Just the other night I could hardly sit still. I was worried, fearful, and at moments even angry because of a situation that I don't feel in control of and I am not sure how it is going to play out. I decided to pray because this has been working well for me lately. What I am starting to find is that prayer need be constant because the world around us is constant and so is the adversary. We shouldn't be troubled if we find ourselves praying fo...

I used to think of liberation as a freedom from physical bondage. I pictured shackles or prison walls with no windows. I pictured slaves released or captives broken out by the hero. Only recently I have started to consider the implications of liberation in the mind, in the heart, and of the physical body. Liberation of the spirit itself. How would this liberation come? Through the Savior of course. While I feel like I understood this and certainly accepted the declaration that Jesus Christ is my personal savior and the savior of the world as truth, I did not understand how it would happen for me. Part of the reason a person might be in some form of captivity is because they are unaware. Sometimes, I felt that becoming aware was the liberation but then I would fall back into old patterns. The key that opened further understanding for me was humility. I have spent years thinking about humility and trying to understand how I could be both submissive and incredibly strong. How could I co...

The end of my first semester is here and while I have learned so much I am also relearning lessons that I want to be through with. Organization has always been a weakness. Throughout my adult life I have gone through so much difficulty and regret as a result of not staying organized. I choose to write about this now because I can make this a turning point. The close of this semester will be the opening of a new one and with a new start I can be a new student and a new person. Business is about failing forward and getting up more times than you are knocked down. I recognize in myself this weakness that wants to be embarrassed of what  I lack and the embarrassment makes me feel like it is easier to ignore than to face head-on and try to fix it. I have to be the person who can find the weakness and fix it. I have to be strong enough to understand that I am weak and still believe in myself and my ability to overcome my weaknesses. The Lord says, if you come unto Him, He will show you...

I used to have a very different idea about jobs. I always thought that the kind of job I could get would somehow define me. I left a lot of jobs without giving two weeks of notice because I felt that I was better, inside. I didn't like my superiors and felt that I was more capable sometimes. I guess in some ways it is true, the type of job you can qualify for does resemble your discipline to some degree. Those who are willing to go to school are showing that discipline and their degrees are reflections of that. However, the job itself does not make me. Over the course of this semester we have read different stories of people who go from job to job and there seems to be no shame in that. That's how I saw it before. I felt like it was some kind of failure to move from one thing to the next. These different people instead do it because they are taking ownership of their lives and they are being responsible with how they use their time. I can see in their decisions that they are wo...

This week has been a real turning point for me. Things are starting to make more sense in my mind, but more importantly in my heart. I have feelings and dreams about what I am meant to accomplish in this lifetime but I have never seen the path that leads there. To sense the end but be at the beginning has left me with my inexperienced and only barely educated mind to try to imagine the means to that end. I know I am a creator in some sense, like my Father in Heaven. I know that what I am meant to create will bless the world but I always thought of that as something separate from what I would need to do to have a career. In my mind, I had to become really successful at something worldly so that I would have enough resources. I still don't quite understand what I will do in the future and how, but I know now that business can and should be service. I know that there is the way that the world thinks about business and there is the way that God intends for it to be, to build Zion. I kn...

I never thought of budgeting as something that I'd like to be a hallmark of my success. Lamely, I thought that budgeting was mostly for the poor. Don't rich people have so much money they don't have to worry about where it goes? Isn't that the meaning of financial freedom? No. Financial freedom comes after financial conditioning and training and now I see that starts with budgeting. Even though I have been less well to do than I'd like to be I still have not learned to budget. My form of budgeting has been to watch my account and try to spend less than I make. Recently my credit has gone up and so has my credit spending. Now I am pausing to reflect and focusing on paying them back down. I wish I had had a budget from the beginning and after seeing James A Ritchie's video on budgeting I am more excited about having one than ever. I read The Richest Man in Babylon and it opened my mind to possibilities that are limited to no one. I saw that saving and investin...

This week we read an interesting paper from Harvard Business school that talked about entrepreneurs and administrators. Suddenly I am unsure about where this Business Administration degree with an emphasis in Entrepreneurial Management will take me. I know that I will come to challenging ideas and situations along my path and I am prepared to remind myself that I am on the right track. Reading that paper though, did cause me to pause and reflect. In my patriarchal blessing it says that I will work in administrative roles with adults and children. I have always wondered what that meant as I have, for a long time, struggled to know what I am supposed to pursue. A couple ideas crossed my mind: 1) I made a mistake, this is not what I am supposed to be doing. (Upon thinking this I quickly reminded myself that I have already received a spiritual witness that I am in the right place.) 2. Well maybe I was only supposed to be put in this place so that I will read this article and know what admi...