Life has been particularly hard for me lately. Not that I don’t normally experience difficult struggles, and on the contrary, actually, as life, for me, has never without it’s struggles for me, with some varying level of chronic depression ever present every day of my life… This year, however, has been especially challenging in new ways that I had not yet experienced before this year. Combine this season of adversity in my life with everything else utterly disheartening and despairing that’s going on in the world right now, and life has felt especially heavy more times this year than I thought I could ever bare. As such, I have decided to return keeping a digital diary, one where I can document the good things in my life and then preserve these personal experiences of mine and be able to return to them again, and again, that I may be able to be uplifted, encouraged, my heart and spirit strengthened and filled with hope each time I come back here to read and be reminded of the tender mercies that I am given daily from my Father in heaven.
This blog, then, shall serve as my personal journal, a digital time capsule of thoughts, memories, life events, spiritual pondering, etc, preserved through the mediums of the written word, and digitally captured images These moments frozen in time will remain a reminder to me that life is not always only hard and unbearable, and that, if I earnestly look, I will eventually find the otherwise unnoticed tender mercies that my Father in heaven and His Son, Jesus Christ, bless me with on a daily basis… I need to learn how to notice these tender mercies, these evidences of my Father’s love, and the love that my Savior Jesus Christ has for me, too, sooner that I have in the past, and to remember them more often, especially when life is feeling particularly difficult and burdensome, too heavy to bear… I need to see and remember all that is good and right and beautiful in my own life and in the world around me… Everything that is normally hidden in plain sight, and which I have not yet trained my eyes to notice and see… I need to have hope in an ever increasingly darkening world. Life is hard enough already as it is, and now the world we live in seems to just drain the soul, itself, just by seeing so much darkness that is filling this world, and at the pace that it is doing so… It’s no wonder that the scriptures say that one day cause the hearts of the children of God to “fail them”… I honestly don’t know how I could ever survive mentally and emotionally and spiritually without something to help give me hope…
But I believe in having hope, and that there is probable reason t have hope, and to continually seek that which breathes life into our souls by edifying our hearts that there is still reason to hope…
There are still so many things that are good in this life, even now in our time in history. I have seen so many of them… So many things that are right and wholesome and pure in this world… So many things that are beautiful… So many things that are so profoundly beautiful and eternally untouchable…
So here I will write, and here I will document, and here I will return often, that I may be able to remember all that is good and right and beautiful in this life, especially in those times when life or the world feels particularly dark and dreary and disheartening and I can’t see anything else beyond the fogs of hopelessness and despair that blind my mind’s eye… This shall be my reminder that life is good, even when it’s hard… even when it’s so incredibly, unbelievably hard…
…it is still so, so good.
Come what may in this life, and I will then return to this record of tender mercies that my Father in heaven has given me, and I will remember that which is good and right and beautiful… and all will be well with my soul.
