Perspective

Dear Grace,

I don't have any pictures to post today, but I just wanted to write something I thought about yesterday while I was at church. I've been placed in a ward (with three other girls) that takes an hour to get to from my flat, but the area it's in is beautiful, and the ward had probably over 100 people attend yesterday. Our ward has some of the nicest people in it :) Seriously, right after sacrament meeting we had several people come up and welcome us to the ward! The bishop also told us that there were around 43 different nationalities in our ward alone! Pretty crazy.

Anyway, when we sat down in Sunday school, there was a lesson concerning our life here on Earth and its significance in the grand scheme of things. The woman asking questions about this was trying to understand why our life on Earth is so important when it's just a tiny spec on the whole line of our existence. I had never been able to think of a better analogy than the dot and line thing, but when I heard this discussion I immediately thought of my experience living here in London.

I had never found something that had so many parallels to compare Earth life to, but think about Earth and my semester abroad as a "trip." For one thing, when we learned about the chance we had to come on this trip, we were SO excited to go!

Secondly, we were warned about dangers and hardships we would face, and that there would be a price we had to pay in order to come.

Thirdly, before we came on this trip we knew how short of a time it would be when compared with the rest of our lives, but now that we're here and we're in it, the time seems so much longer.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, the reason this trip is so significant (even though it's just a grain of sand on the beach for us) is because it gives us the opportunity to learn a lot of new things about where we are as well as important things about ourselves and each other in a short amount of time.

It's teaching us how to love each other and work together. It's building confidence in ourselves and showing us what we can do. It's teaching us how to believe in ourselves and see what we can do when we're standing on our own two feet. It's giving us the freedom to explore and learn and play and be happy and confident to be who we are - to be true to ourselves and not judge one another; to stay close to our parents even though they're far away from us right now.

I'll write again soon, and next time I'll post pictures, I promise!